By Michael Kanaabi Dollar
The National Forestry Authority which is the government agency mandated by law to manage and preserve Uganda’s Central Forest reserves is on course to hitting it’s medium term target of 15% national forest cover against the country’s total land area by 2025.
This was revealed in an exclusive interview NFA’s Public Relations Officer Juliet Mubi had with this Publication recently.
She says, “ Our target as set out in the National Development plan 3 and NRM manifesto implementation plan for the 2021-2026 term office is to grow the country’s forest cover to at least 15% of total land area. We are currently at about 13.4% and we are certain by 2025 which have it the target if not surpassed it.”
The total area NFA had planted in hectares cumulatively stands at 159,752 hectares out of 257475 hectares as of the close of 2022 with the newly planted forests still too young to be detected by satellite given it’s one of the key tools they use to quantify their activities Mubi clarified.
Other Activites
Beyond planting of trees in the CFRs, NFA has also been carrying out a number of other activities which include boundary opening and re-opening and so far so by the end of the 2022-2023 financial year a total of 455 kilometres had been covered.
“The process of boundary reopening is still ongoing and remains a priority for us given the total boundary size of CFRs standa at 9755 Kilometres for the 506 CFRs directly under our control” says NFA Spokes person Juliet Mubi.
This opening restores the integrity of forest resources, reduces border conflict with neighbors to these forests and eases the implementation of our conservation activities besides deterring land grabbers she notes.
Integrating forest Communities
To encourage communities surrounding the Central Forest Reserves under NFA management to participate in conservation and support NFA’s roles instead of destroying and exploiting these forests, NFA has collaborated with these communities and set up 76 community forest management groups so far surrounding the forests under it’s management.
“ We collaborate with these communities to sustainably manage the forest resources in their localities together by first signing collaborative community management agreements with them.
As part of this arrangement, these communities support NFA by keeping off intruders in the forests through patrols, alerting us incase of any encroachers, replanting the forests under contract and supervision from us among other activities.”
On our side we support them to engage in other sustainable income generating activities with in the forest eco system so they don’t have to destroy the forests, Mubi says.
“Craft making, setting up eco tourism sites, zip lining activities and bee keeping are some of the activities we support them to engage in as they help us watch over the plantations.”
Beyond that NFA is implementing a number of other projects with partners like Investing in Forests and Protected Areas for Climate Smart Development (IFPACD)supported by World Bank. This particular one is aimed at improving management operations of government managed CFRs and runs till 2026.
Reforestation and establishment of forests in refugee settlement areas with UNHCR to address the needs of refugees who depend a lot on natural resources for fire wood and clearing of land for agriculture among other activities.
NFA is also involved in promoting of bamboo growing as a source of energy, income and other needs with fast growing species that mature in 3 years being adopted. This one runs till 2029 with some of NFA’s forests dedicating part of their land to bamboo growing in Mityana, Mukono, West Nile, Kabale among other places. This one is being done in partnership with the International Network for Bamboo and Ratan (INBAR).
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