UBCO Student Plans to Foster Sustainability Efforts in sub-Sahara Africa, One Tree at A Time

One UBCO student will help change the landscape in sub-Sahara Africa with his grand ideas and award-winning thesis. Tolulope Daramola is an international student earning his science PhD at UBC's Okanagan campus.

Daramola's goal is to explore various options to restore degraded lands in sub-Saharan Africa, modelling some of the practices in North American and their applications in the Africa region.

The sub-Sahara, south of the Sahara Desert, is an environmentally diverse region. It accounts for about 25 per cent of the world's remaining rainforest. However, this forest is shrinking because of the growing population and unsustainable use of the forest resources. Consequently, such heavy strains on the land is leading to severe degradation.

Through the ironic yet genius initiative called the Great Green Wall, Daramola's home country of Nigeria and 17 other African nations have collaborated to plant a wall of trees across sub-Saharan Africa.

The massive project comprises planting trees across 14.8 million square kilometres at the southern edge of the Sahara desert. As a means to prevent desertification and increase the amount of oxygen emitted into the atmosphere, the Great Green Wall is expected to have an abundance of positive outcomes for sub-Sahara Africa.

“We need to find better ways to manage the forest sustainably and double efforts to restore the forest that has been lost,” said Daramola. Pushing for sustainable direction in Nigeria and abroad was the motivation that propelled his master's thesis, which was on assessing impacts of nitrogen fertilization of Washington State forests on growth yields.

Photo Credit: UBCO Contributed.

His work was recently recognized by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), and his thesis was awarded the 2014 Student Award for Excellence in Forest Sciences at IUFRO’s World Forestry Congress in Salt Lake City in October.

Daramola would like to build on the success of his Master's work towards his PhD research. Through integrating socio-economic and ecological interactions of forest ecosystems managements in order to push towards sustainable development, Daramola plans to develop a matrix management model that will connect the important components of sustainability in forest management in sub-Sahara Africa.

“Our current forest management system has proven ineffective, because of the inherent gap between science-policy interface and local knowledge and needs,” commented Daramola. Such policies do not address fundamental issues associated with forest loss. Before any policy can be effective, it has to place people at the central of it objectives.”

“Tolulope has defined an interesting and timely research project, which could make a very real difference on the ground,” said Daramola’s supervisor, Associate Professor, Kevin Hanna. “Given the looming impacts of climate change and the implications for regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, this is the kind of work we will need more of.”

Once his PhD is complete, Daramola plans to return to Africa, using his knowledge to benefit those in Nigeria and surrounding countries.

“My goal is to carry out a research that is applicable on the ground, something new and unique, something that will solve problems and address some of the contemporary issues that is undermining development in Africa,” added Daramola