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5# The World Must Move Faster to Conserve Tropical Rainforests
Biodiversity, 2013
The World Must Move Faster to Conserve Tropical Rainforests
The Economist is a weekly newspaper focusing on international politics and business news and opinion, based in the United Kingdom.
The summer dry-season, now drawing to an end, is when the Amazon rainforest gets cut and burned. The smoke this causes can often be seen from space. But not this year. Brazil ‘s deforestation rate has dropped astoundingly fast. In 2004 some 2.8m hectares (10,700 square miles) of the Amazon were razed; last year [2009] only around 750,000 hectares were.
This progress is not isolated. Many of the world’s biggest clearer of trees have started to hug them. Over the past decade, the UN [United Nations] records, nearly 8m hectares of forest a year were allowed to re-grow or were planted anew. This was mostly in richer places, such as North America and in Europe, where dwindling rural populations have taken the pressure off forestland. But a couple of big poorer countries, notably China , have launched huge tree-planting schemes in a bid to prevent deforestation-related environmental disasters. Even in tropical countries, where most deforestation takes place, Brazil is not alone in becoming more reluctant to chop down trees.
The progress made in recent years shows that mankind is not doomed to strip the planet of its forest cover. But the transition from tree-chopper to tree-huger is not happening fast enough. Over the past decade, according to UN figures, around 13m hectares of forestland—an area the size of England—was converted each year to other uses, mostly agriculture. If the world is to keep the protective covering that helps it breathe, waters its crops, keeps it cool and nurtures its biodiversity , it is going to have to move fast.
Clearing forests may enrich those who are doing it, but over the long run it impoverishes the planet as a whole.
A Bad Old Habit
For at least 10,000 years, since the ice last retreated and forests took back the earth, people have destroyed them. In medieval Europe an exploding population and hard-working monks put paid to [that is, destroyed] perhaps half its temperate oak and beech woods—mostly, as is usually the case, to clear space for crops. Some 100m hectares of America’s forests went in the 19th century, in an arboreal slaughter similarly reinforced by a belief in the godliness of thus “improving” the land. That spirit survives. It is no coincidence that George Bush junior, one of America’s more god-fearing presidents, relaxed by clearing brush.
In most rich countries the pressure on forests has eased; but in many tropical ones—home to around half the remaining forest, including the planet’s green rainforest girdle—the demand for land is increasing as populations rise. In Congo, which has more rainforest than any country except Brazil, the clearance is mostly driven by smallholders, whose number is about to double. Rising global demand for food and bio fuels adds even more to the heat. So will climate change . That may already be happening in Canada, where recent warm winters have unleashed a plague of bark beetles, and in Australia, whose forests have been devastated by drought and forest fires .
Clearing forests may enrich those who are doing it, but over the long run it impoverishes the planet as a whole. Rainforests are an important prop to continental water-cycles. Losing the Amazon rainforest could reduce rainfall across the Americas, with potentially dire consequences for farmers as far away as Texas. By regulating run-off, trees help guarantee water-supplies and prevent natural disasters, like landslides and floods. Losing the rainforest would mean losing millions of species; forests contain 80% of terrestrial biodiversity. And for those concerned about the probable effects of climate change, forests contain twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, in plant-matter and the soils they cover, and when they are razed and their soils disturbed most is emitted. If the Amazon went up in smoke—a scenario which a bit more clearance and a bit more warming makes conceivable—it would spew out more than a decade’s worth of fossil-fuel emissions .
Raddy, Steady, Grow Economic development both causes deforestation and slows it. In the early stages of development people destroy forests for a meager living. Globalization is speeding up the process by boosting the demand for agricultural goods produced in tropical countries. At the same time, as people in emerging countries become more prosperous, they start thinking about issues beyond their family’s welfare; their governments begin to pass and slowly enforce laws to conserve the environment. Trade can also allow the greener concerns of rich-world consumers to influence developing-world producers.
The transition from clearing to protecting, however, is occurring too slowly. The main international effort to speed it up is an idea known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which pays people in developing countries to leave trees standing. This is not an outlandish concept. It is increasingly common for governments and companies to pay for forest and other ecosystem services. To protect its watershed, New York pays farmers in the Catskills not to develop their land. REDD schemes aspire to do this on a much larger scale. The only notable success of the Copenhagen climate-change conference last year was a commitment to pursue them. Half a dozen rich countries, including Norway, America and Britain, have promised $4.5 billion for starters.
The difficulties are immense. REDD projects will be effective only in places where the government sort-of works, and the tropical countries with the most important forests include some of the world’s worst-run places. Even in countries with functioning states, some of the money is bound to be stolen. Yet with sufficient attention to monitoring, verification and, crucially, making sure the cash goes to the people who can actually protect the forest, REDD could work. That will cost much more than has so far been pledged. The most obvious source of extra cash is the carbon market, or preferably a carbon tax. Since saving forests is often the cheapest way to tackle carbon emissions, funding it this way makes sense.
With global climate-change negotiations foundering, the prospects of raising cash for REDD that way look poor. But the money must be found from somewhere. Without a serious effort to solve this problem, the risk from climate change will be vastly increased and the planet will lose one of its most valuable, and most beautiful, assets. That would be a tragedy.
Further Readings
Books
• Joshua Bishop The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Business and Enterprise , New York: Routledge, 2012.
• Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity , New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Cristina Heisenberg The Wolf’s Tooth: Keystone Predators, Strophic Cascades, and Biodiversity , Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011.
• Paul R. Epstein ET AL. Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It , Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
• Paul Gepts ET AL. Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Gene S. Helfman Fish Conservation: A Guide to Understanding and Restoring Global Aquatic Biodiversity and Fishery Resources , Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007.
• Jeffrey S. Levin ton Marine Biology: Function, Biodiversity, Ecology , New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Anne E. Magurran and Brian J. McGill Biological Diversity: Frontiers in Measurement and Assessment , New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Shahid Naeem et AL. Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Human Well being: An Ecological and Economic Perspective , New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Kevin J. O’Brien An Ethics of Biodiversity: Christianity, Ecology, and the Variety of Life , Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010.
• Richard Pearson and American Museum of Natural History Driven to Extinction: The Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity , New York: Sterling, 2011.
• Greg Pyres Biodiversity of Rain Forests , Salt Lake City, UT: Benchmark Books, 2010.
• Peter Sale Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist’s View of the Crisis We Face , Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
• John A. Talent Earth and Life: Global Biodiversity, Extinction Intervals and Bio geographic Perturbations Through Time , New York: Springer, 2012.
• Mitch Tobin Endangered: Biodiversity on the Brink , Minneapolis, MN: Fulcrum Press, 2010.
• United Nations The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity in National and International Policy Making (TEED) , New York: United Nations, 2011.
Periodicals and Internet Sources
• Paul Aloise and Victoria Chen g “Keystone Species Extinction Overview,” World’s Biggest Problems , July 2007. WWW.arlingtoninstitute.org.
• Anthony D. Barnosky et AL. “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature , March 2, 2011. WWW.nature.com.
• Richard Black “Businesses ‘Profit from Investing in Nature,'” BBC News, July 12, 2010. wow.BBC.co.UK.
• The Economist “Beastly Tales: The Latest Estimates on Endangered Species,” June 16, 2011. www.economist.com.
• Environment News Service “Biodiversity Losses Accelerate as Ecosystems Approach Tipping Points,” May 11, 2010. www.ens-newswire.com.
• Christopher D.G. Harley “Climate Change, Keystone Predation, and Biodiversity Loss,” Science , November 25, 2011. www.sciencemag.org.
• Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hub bell “Species-Area Relationships Always Overestimate Extinction Rates from Habitat Loss,” Nature , May 19, 2011. www.nature.com.
• Erica R. Henry “Five Species Likely to Become Extinct in the Next 40 Years,” Smithsonian Magazine , August 2010. www.Smithsonian.com.
• The Huffing ton Post “Endangered Species Which Need Our Help in 2012,” December 30, 2011. www.Huntington.com.
• Amina Khan “Global Species Extinction Isn’t Quite So Dire, Study Finds,” Lois Angele Times , May 21, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com.
• Anna Lappé “The Battle for Biodiversity: Monsanto and Farmers Clash,” The Atlantic , March 28, 2011. www.theatlantic.com.
• Nature Climate Change “Biodiversity on the Brink,” August 26, 2011. www.nature.com.
• The New York Times “How Healthy Are Our Fisheries?” April 20, 2011. www.anytime.com.
• Northwestern University “Biodiversity: Limit One, Save Many,” January 31, 2011. www.northwestern.educ.
• Mike Orcutt “What’s the Catch? Researchers Wrangle Over How to Measure Commercial Fishing’s Impact on Ocean Biodiversity,” Scientific American , December 21, 2010. www.scientificamerican.com.
• Martin Patience “China Wakes Up to Biodiversity Threat,” BBC News, October 15, 2010. www.bbc.co.uk.
• Peter Roth berg “Barnie’s Rainforest Destruction Habit Revealed,” The Nation , June 13, 2011. www.thenation.com.
• Rudy Ruitenberg “Climate Change Models May Underestimate Extinction, Study Shows,” Business week , January 4, 2012. www.businessweek.com.
• Quirin Schiermeier “Biodiversity’s Ills Not All Down to Climate Change,” Nature , March 21, 2011. www.nature.com.
• Science Daily “Marine Biodiversity Loss Due to Global Warming and Predation, Study Predicts,” November 28, 2011. www.science daily.com.
• Science Daily “New Method for Measuring Biodiversity Makes It Easier to Identify Key Species,” February 18, 2008. www.science daily.com.
• Science Daily “Ongoing Global Biodiversity Loss Unstoppable with Protected Areas Alone,” July 28, 2011. www.science daily.com.
• Graham Smith “Coral Species May Be Extinct Within 50 Years, Warn Scientists as They Reveal Most Endangered,” Daily Mail , January 11, 2011. www.daily mail.co.uk.
• Pete Sports “How Long Does It Take Species to Go Extinct? Longer Than Previously Thought,” Christian Science Monitor , May 18, 2011. www.cs monitor.com.
• Jennifer Vie gas “Big Question for 2012: What Animals Could Go Extinct?” Discovery News, December 15, 2011. http://news.discovery.com.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2013 Green haven Press, a part of Gale, C engage Learning.
Source Citation
“The World Must Move Faster to Conserve Tropical Rainforests.” Biodiversity. Ed. Debra A. Miller. Detroit: Green-haven Press, 2013. Current Controversies. R pt. from “The World’s Lungs: There Is Hope for Forests, But Mankind Needs to Move Faster if They Are to Be Saved.” The Economist (23 Sept. 2010). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 13 Apr. 2015
