Remainforest

Nepstad et al think an end to deforestation in the Amazon is possible.

Norway: one billion points

Deforestation

Marina Silva goes, "definitively defeated". A prince chips in.

Mauricio Torres says

The idea that the caboclo way of life is environmentally destructive is not supported by my research. Communities have often been there for generations, living sustainably. To deny their achievements is a convenient lie - one that allows large companies and their government vassals to justify land grabs.

Clunking great metaphors for the global economy

A police chief memorably bought a sleek yellow Lamborghini, only to find he was too portly to fit in the driver's seat. "We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

-- from Nauru seeks to regain lost fortunes.

Congolese are constantly pointing out that their country should be one of the richest in the world. It has huge mineral wealth, including the world's biggest reserves of cobalt and tantalum, a rare metal used in the circuitry of mobile phones and laptops. It also has rich seams of copper, diamonds, gold, manganese, uranium and zinc. And much of the country is covered with virtually intact tropical forests, thick with valuable hardwoods.

-- from Mutual convenience, an article in The Economist's series on China's quest for resources.

Eating the forest

Garimpeiros work from daybreak to sundown and sleep in hammocks on site. Even though they live with the hope of striking it rich, the reality is that their lives are spent in what is almost bonded labour. The workmen are entitled to only a 30% share of the gold found at the mine. The rest goes to the owner of the motor, usually a businessman living in a city miles away.

One typical mine being operated by a handful of men was producing just 15g (half an ounce) of gold a day - almost £200 - leaving less than £10 a day each for the workers.

While in other circumstances this could be an acceptable wage, the garimpeiros never leave the rainforest, face endemic malaria and settle disputes by the law of the gun. Their wages are all spent on food, drink and prostitutes.

-- from Illegal, polluting and dangerous: the gold rush in French Guiana by Alex Bellos

Burn baby, burn

Yadvinder Malhi and his colleagues have published an overview paper, Climate Change, Deforestation, and the Fate of the Amazon, drawing on work from their valuable conference earlier this year (which I mentioned in my third caveat here).

Some of the introductory faclets are likely to be familiar: Amazonia hosts about a quarter of the world’s terrestrial species. Some may be less so. For example, Amazonia accounts for about 15% of global terrestrial photosynthesis, and its forests been a significant and continuous part of earth system functioning since the Cretaceous.

Predicted temperature changes more than a little dramatic:

In recent decades the rate of warming in Amazonia has been about 0.25 °C per decade. Under mid-range GHG emission scenarios, temperatures are projected to rise 3.3 °C (range 1.8–5.1 oC) this century, slightly more in the interior in the dry season, or by up to 8 °C if significant forest dieback affects regional biophysical properties. At the end of the last glacial period, Amazonia warmed at only ~0.1 °C per century.

But there are scraps that suggest that not all is necessarily unmitigated gloom. For example:

There is mounting evidence …that intact Amazonian forests are more resilient (though not invulnerable) to climatic drying than is currently represented in vegetation-climate models...The probability of significantly enhanced drought under mid-range greenhouse gas emissions scenarios ranges from > 60% in the southeast to <20% in the west.

The authors sketch a climate reslience plan, which includes:

1. Keep the total extent of deforestation safely below possible climatic threshold values (about 30–40% cleared), in a matrix that includes large protected areas with limited fragmentation, and managed landscapes (…).
2. Control fire use through both education and regulation, probably for net economic benefit (…).
3. Maintain broad species migration corridors in ecotonal areas that are most likely to show early signals of climate impacts (…).
4. Conserve river corridors to act as humid refugia and migration corridors for terrestrial ecosystems, sedimentation buffers, and as refugia for aquatic systems (…).
5. Keep the core northwest Amazon largely intact as a biological refuge that hosts the highest biodiversity and is the least vulnerable to climatic drying (…).

They ask whether such a plan is feasible. ‘Recent developments suggest the good governance is achievable’...[but]...in particular, new financial incentives are needed to act as a countervailing force to the economic pressures for deforestation.’

A 'troubling imbalance'

The first State of the Carbon Cycle Report finds that the North American continent’s carbon budget is "increasingly overwhelmed by human-caused emissions". A press release says:

carbon sinks may be reaching their limit as forests mature and climate conditions change. And some may literally go up in smoke if wildfires become more frequent, as some climate simulations predict. Planting forests and adopting carbon-conserving practices such as no-till agriculture may increase carbon sinks somewhat, but this would not come close to compensating for carbon emissions, which continue to accelerate.

See also Fire as the dominant driver of central Canadian boreal forest carbon balance by Ben Bond-Lamberty et al (Nature 450). The arctic tundra and boreal forest are the first and second largest carbon stores among terrestrial biomes.

[P.S.: I should have been paying closer attention: Andy Revkin blogged SOCCR yesterday here - but he doesn't pick up the key issue of carbon cycle feedback.]

Biofuels and afforestation

In all cases, forestation of an equivalent area of land would sequester two to nine times more carbon over a 30-year period than the emissions avoided by the use of the biofuel. Taking this opportunity cost into account, the emissions cost of liquid biofuels exceeds that of fossil fuels.

-- from Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests? by Renton Righelato and Dominick V. Spracklen (Science, 17 August 2007).

Forest follies

In an article on Chinadialogue, Xinzhou Song of GreenBeijing.net describes some of the dangers of monocropping:

In the late 1950s, problems arose with the [man-made] Feibo forest reserve in Sichuan, which consisted of Burma Pines. The forest floor was covered with a thick layer of pine needles, which produced no compost and supported no organisms in the soil. Animals and other plants found it hard to survive in such an environment, leaving the forest floor dry and prone to regular forest fires. The soil was also eroded by rain.

Another forest, this time in Heilongjiang and consisting of larches, fell victim to an infestation of pine caterpillars in 2002. A railway operated by the Qiqihar Railway Bureau ran through the forest, and on June 1, several kilometres of the track were covered by a layer of caterpillars two to three inches thick. Passing trains mashed the larvae into a pulp that covered the tracks and stopped the trains...

...Of the more than 400,000 Chinese pines planted in Qingjian County, northern Shaanxi, only about 100 trees remain. The locals call them the “bandits of the hills”. In 2000, the city of Wuhai in Inner Mongolia decided to plant cypresses on 270 square metres of sand dunes. The result? The cypress trees died, and the sand dunes, which had been confined to one area, started to spread.

Homem do furo

...friends and family are gone. Everyone else you have ever known has vanished. Forever. The loneliness seems unimaginable. But this is reality for one solitary native Brazilian Indian living on a small island of Amazon rainforest amid a sea of cattle ranches and soya plantations.

Virtually nothing is known about him, except that he seems to be the last survivor of his group or people. He has been nicknamed the Man of the Hole because he digs holes a metre wide and 3 metres deep inside little houses that he builds from palm leaves. No one quite knows why he does this. Could they be bolt holes? He also builds huge holes lined with spikes in the nearby forest to trap large animals.

-- from New Scientist (also here).