CONSERVATOR of the Forestry Department, Marilyn Headley, has said that Jamaica should move to increase its forest cover and work toward a zero per cent deforestation rate.

Speaking at the JIS weekly Think Tank recently, Headley mentioned that Jamaica was not at the bottom of the list in terms of its rate of deforestation, but conceded that the country is losing forest cover nonetheless.

She pointed out that a study to examine the changes in land usage between 1989 and 1998 showed that the change in forest cover over the period amounted to one per cent.

“Therefore, the average rate of deforestation or the rate at which we lose trees each year is approximately 0.1 per cent. We are not the worst of the lot,” Headley assured.

She said that the recent flooding and in particular, last year’s flood disaster in Portland was exacerbated by the removal of forest cover. She said much of Portland was declared forest reserves in the 1940s, but that these were eventually cleared and put to alternative use.

“Portland is an unstable environment as the soil is very movable and you would have sheet erosion where a whole lot of shale would move off to one side,” she added.

The conservator explained that with the removal of trees, there was nothing to hold the water when it rains, as there were no roots to facilitate its percolation to the groundwater where it eventually comes up in the rivers or springs. She added that flooding caused a lot of soil to be in our water, which gave it a brown appearance.

Headley said that the Forestry Department would be seeking to encourage reforestation by increasing its supply of seedlings to ensure that persons who are interested in planting trees are able to do so.

One of the goals of the five-year National Forestry Management Plan developed in 2002 was to mobilise communities to preserve trees in their areas and to provide investment incentive packages to corporate Jamaica to establish and maintain plantation forests.

“We are now in the process of putting that together,” Headley said, adding that by year-end resources should be available in a Forest Fund that Cabinet had approved in February of this year.

Resources from a United States-based Tropical Forestry Conservation Fund would be made available through a debt for nature swap and used for forestry conservation, she noted.

She pointed out that 30 per cent or more than 300,000 hectares of Jamaica is classified as forests, nine per cent of which is natural forest cover; the rest ,she said, was secondary forest established for timber and other uses.

Headley, however, cautioned that it was illegal to cut down trees in protected areas without permission and a licence from the forestry department. A breach of this measure could attract a fine of between $200,000 and $500,000 or on to two years imprisonment.