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.
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