Khalifa Ramadan leads a volunteer mission with agronomist friends to conserve the forest cover of western Libya, threatened by years of drought, deforestation, and rapid urbanization. Every week, he gathers a dozen agronomists and horticulturists to launch awareness campaigns and plant young plants in areas where savage logging, urban encroachment, and drought have destroyed everything.
He founded the association “Friends of the Tree” to seek solutions to this phenomenon, which threatens the forests of the Libyan west coast. The institutional and security chaos following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 weakened the state’s regulatory bodies and relegated environmental protection to the background.
In the Garabulli area, the agricultural police have put a stop to criminal acts of logging and have recovered more than 8,000 hectares for the benefit of the Ministry of Agriculture. In addition to deforestation, drought poses another serious threat to Libya, with a drop in the water table around Tripoli. Khalifa Ramadan believes that the protection of vegetation cover is paramount and that there is a need to instill a culture of tree preservation and encourage people to plant to stabilize the soil, temper the climate, clean the air, and attract rain.