Do the Maltese hate trees, as some assert, or is it political and governmental incompetence that has left this country with one of the lowest proportions of forest cover anywhere in Europe?
Trees are part of the living system. They propagate and grow and have a role in the ecological balance. They provide desperately needed shade in the summer months. They enhance the aesthetics of a place and can even screen an unsightly urban development.
A recently-published report, written by leading ecology experts Louis Cassar and Elisabeth Conrad, served to underline what environmental lobbies have been stating for years. Successive governments have failed to encourage or implement afforestation efforts for large-scale ecological restoration projects.
The report underlines that, despite a series of afforestation initiatives over the years, extending Malta’s wooded area coverage in a coordinated and systematic manner has not been given the priority it deserves. Nor has there been any serious attempt at creating self-sustaining, self-generating long-term eco-systems through ecological restoration projects.
The indigenous trees of the Maltese islands have almost disappeared. Many have a polluted gene pool. Some have been pushed to grow in isolated and remote places to survive in their last stronghold.
The Cassar/Conrad report outlines a strategy for both afforestation and ecological restoration projects within rural and urban areas in a bid to improve the country’s natural environment. The Maltese islands need afforestation projects for ecological, aesthetic, economic, social and recreational reasons.
To be successful, the approach has to be holistic, not fragmented, and committed to the achievement of a long-term plan. This can only be attained through a national biodiversity strategy that would form an intrinsic part of a national sustainable development strategy, which Malta desperately needs.
The report calls for increased recreational spaces, especially in urban areas, extending and buffering existing green areas and increasing the provision of “associated ecosystem services”. It is to be hoped that areas that have previously been identified for afforestation – for example, the areas surrounding Addolorata Cemetery and Ħal Far – will finally be revived and planted with trees. In the north of the island those areas considered wooded should be further augmented and brought forward for completion.
There is considerable scope for more widespread tree-planting everywhere one looks on the island. Abandoned agricultural land, which is often a mess and an invitation for dumping, should also form one of the focuses of a renewed and sustained tree-planting strategy across Malta and Gozo.
A holistic strategy, based on a multi-phased outline plan, would need to involve a wide range of stakeholders from the public, the private and non-governmental sectors. Above all, it would require the political will and commitment to drive it forward.
Ministers responsible for this aspect of Malta’s development have, in the past, been driven by the imperative to be seen to be doing something merely by increasing the number of trees planted. They should be guided instead not by the quick political fix but by an adherence to the Convention of Biological Diversity, to which Malta has signed up, and the adoption of a coordinated plan on the lines proposed by the Cassar/Conrad report.