Improving Ethiopia’s Land Restoration Projects

Ethiopia has suffered some of the worst land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa. The major source of Ethiopia’s deteriorating landscape is rapid population increase that has contributed to deforestation, soil erosion, and wide-scale agriculture. Land degradation in Ethiopia has severely reduced the productive capacity of the land an its economic value. It has been estimated that Ethiopia loses $4.3B worth of productivity annually due to the declining biocapacity of its land. However, efforts have been underway for decades now to restore the land and protect vulnerable communities. Over the last 10 years, Ethiopia has spent $1.2B per year in land rehabilitation projects focused on reducing soil erosion and runoff throughout the country. Recently the International Center of Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) has examined the impact of Ethiopia’s ecological efforts.

Researchers at CIAT have noted Ethiopia’s efforts as being beneficial for the natural ecosystems but remain critical that each ecosystem requires different solutions. Ethiopia has been primarily focused on agricultural conservation and stone structures to protect the soil and thus resulting in higher crop yields. It has been discovered that these techniques used separately have little effect on land restoration leading to the conclusion that agricultural conservation and intervening stone structures need to be used together to substantially improve the land. The Ethiopian Strategic Investment Framework has been dedicated to using these methods in tandem while millions of trees have also been planted by communities over the last several decades. Various efforts have cut soil loss and runoff in half in some cases, but they have failed to closely monitor their efforts which results in lack of information when enacting new initiatives to restore other ecosystems.

            Despite improvement in decreased runoff in restored landscapes, Ethiopia’s water runoff on a national scale has worsened over the years. A useful measure in determining the level of a landscape’s degradation is to determine the amount runoff that is occurring. If more runoff is occurring in one landscape over another, this means that soil in one landscape has a lower ability to store water than the other. Conclusively, the landscape with more runoff has a higher need for vegetation and should take priority. Ethiopia has shown significant commitment to restoring its landscape but the environmental and economic benefits could be even greater.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191030132656.htm