Afforestation as an Option to Reduce Desertification in Salah al-Din Governorate Challenges and Solutions
Authors: Hadi Mikhlif Muhammad  
Published: March 2024

Afforestation is one of the most important factors that contribute to combating desertification. It is the first link in destroying or building the ecosystem. The presence of trees is able to enhance the biological capacity of the land. Reduce dust storms. And the determinant in the climate changes that worry the world. Therefore, the enactment of laws that prevent unauthorized cutting of trees, and the holding of conferences and seminars on a global scale began with the necessity of rapid action in the face of the great shortage in numbers of trees. Countries began to establish campaigns to plant millions of trees annually.

   And in implementation of the requirements of the United Nations Convention on Desertification, to which Iraq joined in the year 2009, the National Action Program was established in Iraq to draw up the ten-year strategic plan 2008-2018, and it showed great seriousness in finding ways to reduce desertification, as well as to fulfill its obligations towards international environmental agreements. The program concluded that: 92% of the area of Iraq is threatened by desertification, which is considered a warning bell that calls for effective and rapid action to curb this environmental problem.

Salah al-Din governorate, like the rest of Iraq, suffers from the spread of desertification in a large way, as it is among the central governorates north of the capital, Baghdad. It is astronomically located at 43.35 longitude and 34.27 latitude. Its population is about 1,500,000 according to the 2014 census, and its area is approximately 11,000,000 dunums. This is due to the joining of some areas from the neighboring governorates administratively, and sometimes their exit as well. The arable area is 6,085,932 dunums. As for the lands that are desertified and threatened with desertification, they amount to 5,372,334 dunums, and there is a significant deterioration in the natural pastures, which have an area of 1,782,239 acres.

Therefore, this study was to find out the number of trees that should be planted by knowing the area of lands threatened with desertification in the governorate. It was estimated according to the minimum number of trees in each dunum, which was agreed upon by a scientist. It was 58,000,000 trees. When starting to draw up a plan to plant this number of trees, there were three problems. Major, which is that it needs allocations of up to 800 billion and large numbers of human resources. If a million trees are planted, which is what all of Iraq aspires to plant in the field of desertification, we need 58 years to reach the goal. This is if the project was adopted by the government sector

Therefore, there was an option to involve the landowners in the afforestation program, where the state imposes the planting of a certain number of trees annually on each agricultural holding within the areas threatened with desertification, provided that the state supplies the seedlings free of charge with an irrigation system. When studying it, it was found that there are about 40,000 artesian wells distributed throughout the region, and if only 500 trees are planted for each well, it means that we can plant 20 million trees without large financial allocations. The government sector adopted the implementation of planting the same number of trees

This requires developing a program to implement this project with the participation of all ministries and agencies in order to reach a mechanism for implementing this study, and among its procedures is to stop all administrative transactions for the farmer unless the owner of the holding is committed to implementing the planting of the required number of trees.