TANZANIA is working to restore 5.2m hectares of land to forest cover across the country by 2030, top conservation officials say.

Prof. Dos Santos Silayo, the Tanzania Forest Services (TFS) agency conservation commissioner, made this observation when addressing delegates at the inception workshop for the AFR100 project here yesterday.

The conference is focused on supporting AFR100 by engaging with small-scale forest and farm producer organizations, where the conservator thanked Germany and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for their financial and technical support.

He said the project is estimated to cost over 12bn/-, as part of efforts to tackle deforestation and combat climate change, where 55 African countries need to plant 1.8m hectares of trees for each country on average, to achieve the African forest landscape restoration initiative (AFR100).

He said that restoring 100m hectares of degraded land by 2030 is the focus of this ambitious project billed at $17.8m altogether, noting that Tanzania is among countries actively involved in this initiative.

An estimated 48m hectares of land in the Mainland is covered by forest or bush, making up 55 percent of the 88.6m hectares, whereas Zanzibar has around 106,500 hectares of bush or forest, at 40 percent of its land area, he said.

Conserving forests faces challenges like encroachment for farm expansion, livestock grazing, mining, settlement and cutting of trees for furniture or charcoal.

Benard Urassa, the Regional Administration and Local Governments permanent secretary in the President’s Office (PO-RALG), affirmed that 3.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) is sourced from forests.

This does not benefit forests or other sectors that rely on forest resources or the value of forest cover in mitigating climate change, even as officials say that 469,000 hectares of forest cover is lost annually to firewood and charcoal production, adding 43m tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Geoffrey Makanga, the FAO environment and natural resource management officer, said that global forest loss is a growing concern, as around 10.3m hectares of forest are lost worldwide each year.

 Since 1990, the world has lost over 80m hectares of primary forests, with farm expansion cited as the leading cause of deforestation. Large-scale commercial agriculture, particularly cattle ranching and the cultivation of soybeans and oil palm accounted for 40 percent of tropical deforestation between 2000 and 2010.