In future any unlicensed cutting, disturbing, damaging or destroying named Trees of the Year can result in imprisonment or heavy fines.
So says the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in launching this year’s Arbor Week.
Faced as we are with huge water and food security problems in which forests and trees play pivotal roles, the dwindling of these resources can have major impacts.
In about 1800 some 7% of the globe was under crops, ten years ago it was 40% as more and more forests made way for slash and burn farming and the commercial utilisation of timber for a variety of applications.
The earth has never recorded such population numbers as in the 21st century and there is no integration of these numbers of people with food production planning, except in China.
Hundreds of thousands of animals, insects and birds perished as their habitat vanished under them in what was not simply a passing, natural phase, but a lasting legacy.
Forests also soak up carbon emissions, offsetting human emissions and adding to the problems of climate change.
Rainforests recycle rainwater and affect their own climate by drawing up water from the soil and releasing it into the atmosphere, feeding rain clouds.
Rainfall cycle
Evaporation from the oceans provides the ultimate water source, but continental interiors are kept moist by recycling rainfall across the land. Loss of forests means weakening of the rainfall cycle.
Just after the first democratic elections in South Africa huge predations of hectares of ancient stands of Yellow Wood, Stinkwood, Kiaat and other priceless indigenous trees in former Bantustan jurisdictions were simply chopped out and sold at huge, quick profits to furniture manufacturers or exporters, the theft only discovered months or years later.
The scale on which this occurred pointed to well-oiled criminal syndicates with deep purses, like the rhino horn, abalone, cycad, prawn, crayfish, wild animal and bird smugglers who operate in South Africa.
Interestingly some years ago the Mtubatuba Municipality felled a giant Yellow Wood tree ‘by accident’. The hugely valuable, illegally felled tree lay for weeks where it had fallen.
One morning it was simply not there, never to be heard of again!
Forests still cover some 29% of earth’s surface, but swathes the size of Panama are lost each year to deforestation and would vanish within 89 years at the present rate of exploitation.
Governments in Africa and South America are sympathetic to the needs and demands of people to provide for their families by cutting down ostensibly uninhabited forested areas to raise crops.
These authorities by and large are pretty indifferent to the wildlife, of which scores of as yet unclassified birds, reptiles and insects inhabit the forest environment.
Whether local municipalities will actually prosecute anyone for cutting down a Powder-puff tree, remains to be seen.
