Anthropogenic impacts on forest regeneration: Challenges and the way forward

Today, world´s forests have lost about one-third of its total areas since the beginning of civilization. The losses of world forests are alarming and have created serious challenges to the human life which include global warming. The loss of forest has been resulted in large degraded areas in many countries and is estimated reach 1 million ha. There are six anthropogenic activities that lead to the loss of forests worldwide namely poor land use policies, inadequate legislation, insecure property rights, agriculture and logging, limited capacity to enforce forest protection, and local and global demand for food and commodities. However, the agriculture and logging are the main causes of forest degradation which in turn decrease the forest productivity especially secondary forest. Regenerations are the act of renewing tree cover by establishing young trees promptly after previous stand has been removed. As an effort to maintain the forest benefits, the regeneration of new plant is recognized as an option to offset the loss of forests worldwide. It is reported that degraded land recovered to a new forest by natural regeneration (93%) and forest plantation (7%) which indicates the lack of effective management of forest regeneration. The forest destruction to date becomes a serious issue and human intervention is required to enhance the establishment of natural regeneration to rehabilitate world degraded forest.