ghana climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment

eserves include areas in the Forest-Savanna transition and Guinea and Sudan savanna zones. Hansen et al. (2009)argue that definitions of forest have been applied inconsistently and that substantial areas outside forest reservesremain classified as forest but have been in agriculture for some time and should be classified as “other land withtree cover.” The practical implication of these difficulties is that current deforestation in the HFZ may be overestimated,which has implications for estimating the baseline under REDD+ and the potential reductions incarbon emissions (Hansen et al., 2009). A further consideration is that degradation probably contributes more tocarbon depletion than deforestation (Hansen et al., 2009).Regardless of actual deforestation rates, forest habitat is clearly increasingly fragmented in all zones in Ghana(Figure 6.3). Nearly all of the forests of West Africa have sustained some form of logging or commercial timberutilization (Wagner and Cobbinah 1993), and it is important to distinguish between logging and deforestation. Weview deforestation as the removal of forest cover and the conversion into another land use such as agriculture.Slash and burn agriculture, often cited as a primary cause of deforestation, lies somewhere in between degradationand deforestation. At low levels of intensity with a relatively long interval or fallow period between slashing, thiscommon form of smallholder agriculture could be called forest degradation where primary forest is convertedinto secondary forests with depletion of some species. As the fallow period becomes shortened and land iscropped almost annually, true deforestation occurs. But even this definitional distinction is too simplistic a viewof deforestation in Ghana, which is a complex phenomenon with historical as well as contemporary threads(Wagner and Cobbinah 1993; Wardell, Reenberg et al. 2003; Asante 2005; Hansen, Lund et al. 2009).A land-use land cover analysis emphasizes the loss of land cover types, especially classes of forest, and associatedextent of land degradation in Ghana (Idinoba et al. 2010). In 1972 55.6 percent and 44.0 percent of the northernsavanna zones were covered by savanna woodland (>25 trees/ha) and open, cultivated savanna (6-25 trees/ha),respectively. By 2000, 33.6 percent of the northern savanna zones had been degraded to widely open, cultivatedsavanna (