Export of timber products threatens the plan to grow 15 billion trees by the year 2032.
But the Kenya Forestry Research Institute report to the National Assembly is only one expose of a huge challenge to reforestation.
Kefri reported to the Departmental Committee On Environment, Forest and Mining that Kenya lost 6 million eucalyptus trees between January and June this year.
The trees were processed into about 60,000 tonnes of veneers for export to China and India.
A local daily newspaper reported that the destroyed trees could cover 11,720 acres of land.
The acreage is about half the Nairobi National Park, or the equivalent of five Karura Forests.
The documentation, however, does not show how much forestland land has been destroyed since 2022, or between June and now.
The official plan to grow 15 billion trees by 2032 is a great initiative, even patriotic.
The initiative was launched in 2022 to help restore the national forest cover to 30 per cent.
The current cover stands at 8.8 per cent—1.2 per cent lower than the target the Constitution sets.
Targets have always been set, with unfulfilled expectations:
The Million Operation Gavisha reforestation plan of 1977 did not achieve much by way of boosting national forest cover.
Trees Campaign of 2006 and the Green Kenya Initiative of 2010 had implementation challenges in a country where forest lands have a magnetic effect on ‘private developers’. Forests and trees, too, have an enticing effect on timber merchants.
Timber poachers are as lethal as wildlife trophy hunters.
The Accelerated National Tree Growing Campaign of 2022 has eight years to its 15 billion-tree mark.
But will it succeed where others failed?
The Ministry of Environment, climate change adaptationists and advocates of clean energy, need to see through the obvious hurdles.
Indeed, it is possible to plant and grow so many trees over a decade, but is there a concern about how many are wantonly cut without a policed restoration plan? Or how many are planted but wither for lack of nurture?
It’s environmental naivety to plant tree seedlings at the tail-end of the rainy season and then hope the tender plants will survive.
Yet that is the practice: ceremonial planting and then letting nature take care of the vulnerable seedlings.
Nature is hostile to lazy human interventions that come with official grandeur.
Thousands of seedlings are planted, and then the site is deserted after cameras roll.
Seedlings, like babies, need responsible attention.
Attempts to grow tree seedlings in schools with lazy leadership also fail because pupils lack innovative orientation on environmentalism.
But the greatest threats to boosting national tree cover remains timber poachers, charcoal burners and firewood suppliers, especially for domestic and institutional use.
The demand for fuel wood in public institutions is huge, which makes it an issue of great interest to advocates of green energy.
Boarding public institutions, including schools, colleges, hospitals and prisons use firewood for cooking.
The 140 penal institutions – 134 facilities for adult inmates, three for minors, two borstal facilities and one correctional training centre – all use firewood for cooking.
It means for every meal in these institutions, trees are killed to fuel food.
Thousands of public boarding schools and colleges use fuelwood to fi re boilers.
A major public boarding school in Homa Bay county reports using five 16-tonne truckloads of logwoods every month, which is one every week.
This means thousands of acres of tree land are destroyed daily for schools to feed students.
Yet there is a cheaper, safer and greener alternative to fuelwood. Most of these firewood-dependent institutions are assured about 10 hours of sunlight daily.
Investing in solar energy for lighting and cooking in these institutions, for example, will save the lives of many vulnerable trees, while also cutting the cost of expensive and erratic electrification.
Of course, Kenya Power and its shareholders
will rest huge investment in green energy, but the
environment will be safe with planned solarisation.