Benin's Minister of Planning and Development, Abdoulaye Bio Tchané (photo), announced that about 1.25 million hectares of land will be restored by 2030. This represents half of the degraded land during the 2000-2010 reference period. He revealed this on Feb. 27 during the national workshop on land and agroforestry landscapes management. The government also plans to limit to 5% the loss of non-degraded land (forests and savannahs), to preserve terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with a 12% net improvement in vegetation cover.

“To achieve this goal, the government of Benin is committed to strengthening the ongoing measures and efforts to reduce by 21% to 5% the conversion of forests and natural savannahs into other forms of land use such as agricultural land and houses, and to increase the forests by 5% through reforestation and new plantations,” explained the Minister in a statement reported by the Chinese News Agency Xinhua.

According to Bio Tchané, these measures are urgent, because the risk is inevitable.

“Between 2000 and 2010, Land cover statistics revealed that 2.2 million hectares of land equivalent to 19% of the national territory has been degraded, which corresponds to an average annual degradation rate of 220,000 hectares. More alarmingly, from 1990 to 2010, Benin lost about 21% of its forest cover. As for wetlands, they have shrunk by about 230,000 ha in a decade, this means a loss by 11% of their area. The annual cost of this degradation is estimated at $490 million or CFA245 billion, 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At this rate of degradation, we can indeed be concerned about achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2023, unless we make the sustainable management of our land more effective,” he concluded.