| Forests Vs. Food?
|
| Tuesday, 08 February 2011 18:37 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|  The story of the world's forests is usually a depressing one. Tropical rain forests are under pressure in South America, Asia and Africa, threatening habitat for countless species and adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But while the headlines can be scary, the reality is that the world may be close to turning a corner on deforestation—a change that could pay off for wildlife and the climate. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there were 4.032 billion hectares of forest standing in the world in 2010. That's down slightly from 2000, but the good news is that the rate of overall forest loss has slowed considerably, dropping from 8.3 million hectares lost a year in the 1990s to 5.2 million hectares a year, thanks in part to significant reforestation taking place throughout much of Asia. A graphic from the forest site Mongabay.com shows where the trees are:
2011 could be the year the world finally stops losing the fight against deforestation. On February 2 the U.N. launched the International Year of Forests, beginning a series of events meant to raise awareness about the vital importance of forests and generate support for sustainable forestry practices. At December's U.N. climate summit in the Mexican city of Cancun, governments took the first concrete steps towards creating a system for avoided deforestation, or REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), which would allow companies and countries to claim carbon credits for maintaining trees. But at the same time, record high food prices could reverse all of that progress, if farmers around the world choose to clear forest to make room for more crops. “In my view, 2011 is going to be the critical year,” says Frances Seymour, the director-general of the Center for International Forestry Research. “This is the year we'll find out whether we'll be successful or not.”
First the good news. Most environmentalists believe that REDD offers the best way to generate the billions in finding needed to finally halt deforestation in the tropics, where forests and jungles support a wealth of biodiversity. Right now, a forest only has monetary value when it's been cleared for farming and sold for logging. Simple economic pressures explain why we've already lost so much forest in the world's poorest countries. But REDD changes that equation. By measuring and creating a market for the billions of tons of carbon contained within trees, REDD could make it economically worthwhile to keep forests standings, by letting tropical countries essentially sell the carbon but keep the trees. Greed could save forests, instead of destroying them.
But for REDD to ever work at scale beyond a few small pilot projects, it would need to be tied to an international climate deal. For most of 2010, in the wake of the Copenhagen summit's collapse and Congress's failure to pass a carbon cap, that seemed impossible. Because a carbon market is needed support avoided deforestation, no climate deal, no REDD. Yet at the end of 2010 diplomats in Cancun managed to pull together the beginnings of a global climate agreement that crucially included a framework for REDD funding. That success has paved the way for funders like the Norwegian government, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to begin setting up REDD pilot projects in Brazil and most recently Indonesia, which has long suffered some of the worst deforestation in the world. At the UN Forest Forum in New York last week, Rwanda even pledged to restore its degraded landscapes from border-to-border—with the help of REDD funding. “If REDD can really get going in Indonesia, that could be a game changer,” says Seymour.
Still, all this progress could be lost if forests end up pitted against food. According to the FAO, global food prices in February were higher than they have even been before—breaking a record that was only set in January. With demand from the developing world—especially for meat, which requires significant amounts of grain—likely to keep growing, and bad weather in major farming nations keeping yields down, food prices aren't likely to fall any time soon. At the same time, the decades of steady improvement that has allowed farmers to get more food out of ever acre has plateaued. If the world is going to get more food, it's going to need to farm more land—and that's often when forests start getting clear cut. “We're looking at a perfect storm,” says Seymour. “Farming could be a major driver in forest loss.”
Deforestation isn't an automatic consequence of high food prices though. Instead of cutting down virgin forest, farmers can look to expand farming to degraded land. Over the longer term, better investment in agricultural research—which has lagged in recent years—can lead to better yields and higher efficiency, reducing the need for more land. And agroforestry can actually combine trees and farming, to the benefit of both. In Africa a growing number of farmers are actually intercropping trees with their farmland, which can cheaply boost nutrients in their soil—certain species of trees actually fix nitrogen, reducing the need for fertilizer—and provide a ready supply of firewood. “Everyone has something to gain from this,” says Dennis Garrity, the director-general of the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre. “People just have to realize this can be done.” That's the sort of creative thinking that will be needed to make 2011 the year deforestation really ends.(By Bryan Walsh)
Source: Ecocentric
Some rights for the image is reserved under Creative Commons license
|
|
|
|  Whilst the latest news on Malaysian deforestation is bad, it must be recognised that palm oil can be a positive force for the countries where it is grown, writes Adam Harrison of the World Wildlife Fund.
One of the biggest drivers of forest loss in Malaysia and Indonesia is palm oil.
More than 80% of the world's most widely used vegetable oil comes from those two countries and it is estimated that more than half of what is grown in the region is planted on former tropical forests.
Loss of these forests is not only a threat to species like the tiger, elephant, rhino and orang-utan, but deforestation is also responsible for 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions and impacts heavily on communities that rely on the forest for a living.
However, whilst the latest news from the region is bad, it must be recognised that palm oil can be a positive force for the countries where it is grown and the people living there – but only if it is grown sustainably.
WWF set up the "Round table on Sustainable Palm Oil" (RSPO) in 2004 with a wide range of organisations involved in the global palm oil industry and it has progressed to developing standards for sustainable palm oil which include banning the clearance of land which is important for wildlife, the environment and local people.
Since 2008 the volume of certified sustainable palm oil has grown to over three million tonnes – almost eight per cent of the entire world's palm oil – which is in itself a remarkable achievement.
Consumers of palm oil including UK companies and multinationals alike need to commit to only buying RSPO-certified palm oil and show growers in places like Malaysia that the link between palm oil and deforestation can be broken.
This is even more important as we are now seeing the expansion of palm oil into 'new frontiers', such as the forests of central Africa and the Amazon. (By Adam Harrison, Senior Policy Officer: Food and Agriculture, WWF Scotland)
Source: The Telegraph
Some rights for the image is reserved under Creative Commons license
|
|
|  (Reuters) - World efforts to slow deforestation should do more to address underlying causes such as rising demand for crops or biofuels, widening from a U.N. focus on using trees to fight climate change, a study said Monday.
It said a series of projects to protect forests had had limited success in recent decades -- U.N. figures show that 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forest were lost every year from 2000-09, an area equivalent to the size of Greece.
The report by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) suggested that the current U.N.-led efforts to protect forests had too narrow a focus on promoting trees as stores of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
"Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact of forests on sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any new international efforts whose goal is to conserve forests and slow climate change," said Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO panel and is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities. Trees soak up carbon as they grow but release it when they burn or decay.
The IUFRO study said a key problem was that deforestation, from the Amazon to the Congo, was often caused by economic pressures far away. A popular global brand of cookies, for instance, uses palm oil grown on deforested land in Indonesia.
COMPLEXITY
IUFRO urged policies of "embracing complexity" to help protect forests, including educating consumers, rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all mechanism such as carbon storage.
It called for better efforts, for instance, to aid indigenous peoples, whose livelihoods depend on healthy forests.
Among promising measures were amendments to the U.S. Lacey Act, which makes it illegal to import wood known to come from stolen timber. Brazil, for instance, has enacted procedures to tackle deforestation in the Amazon, it said.
The IUFRO report will be issued at U.N. talks in New York this week marking the start of the U.N.'s International Year of Forests.
Almost 200 nations agreed at a meeting in Cancun, Mexico, last month to step up efforts to protect forests with a plan that aims to put a price on the carbon stored in trees, while helping indigenous peoples and promoting sustainable use.
Authors of the IUFRO study said that the U.N. plan, known as REDD+, was promising. "Our worry is that this won't be enough," Benjamin Cashore, a forestry expert at Yale University and an IUFRO author, told Reuters.
He said that governments often simplistically placed too much faith in the lastest idea, like carbon markets.
He said many past schemes had failed to brake deforestation, such as boycotts of some timber in the 1980s by rich consumers, or an international tropical timber agreement that sought to unite producers and consumers. (By Alister Doyle; With extra reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore)
Source: Reuters
© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
|
|
|  Policymakers should not ignore activities outside the forestry sector in efforts to reduce global deforestation, argues a new report published by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO).
The assessment, Embracing complexity: Meting the challenges of international forest governance, says previous efforts to curtail forest loss have "too often" ignored local needs and failed to address the underlying drivers of deforestation, including poor governance and international demand for commodities. It argues that the proposed reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) mechanism may too flounder if it fails to incorporate lessons from previous forest conservation and sustainable development initiatives.
"Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact on forests of sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any new international efforts whose goal is to conserve forests and slow climate change," said Jeremy Rayner, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan Graduate School of Public Policy and chair of the IUFRO panel that produced the new assessment.
"REDD has gone further than past global forest strategies in engaging agriculture and other key sectors. Nevertheless, there is still a long ways to go," added co-author Constance McDermott of Oxford University. "Unless all sectors work together to address the impact of global consumption, including growing demand for food and biofuels, and problems of land scarcity, REDD will fail to arrest environmental degradation and will heighten poverty."
The report says REDD is most likely to succeed if it avoids "top-down" efforts to protect forests and instead considers the national and local context of the factors that drive deforestation, including land tenure laws, community-participation in land-use planning processes, and demand for food and energy. It argues argues that REDD discussions should put more emphasis on engaging the wide range of stakeholders whose activities impact, and are impacted by, forests.
"Instead of generating ‘grand plans’ based on the simplification of complex problems on a global scale, we might be better advised to listen and learn from existing efforts, both public and private, across multiple scales and multiple sectors," said McDermott in a statement.
“We are not saying we need to abandon a global approach to forest governance, but we do need to establish the appropriate roles,” added Rayner. “The REDD process, for example, might provide a great way to raise money for sustainable forest management and other forest programs, but much of the details and operational aspects would be undertaken at the regional and national levels.”
Embracing complexity: Meting the challenges of international forest governance
Source: Mongabay
|
|
|  Indonesia's Minister of Forestry granted nearly 3 million hectares of plantation forestry concessions the day before the country's president was due to sign a decree establishing a two-year moratorium on new logging licenses, reports a new analysis by Greenomics, an Indonesian environmental group.
Greenomics says minister Zulkifli Hasan signed away 2.9 million hectares of forest land to 44 companies on December 31, 2010. Most of the concessions are on secondary forest lands, although some primary forest was also involved, according to Greenomics. Roughly 1.2 million hectares of natural forest was granted in Papua (Indonesian New Guinea), while 1.03 million hectares was located in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).
"Of the 1.2 million hectares [in Papua], 883,500 will be granted to 3 companies for the development of plantations to supply the pulp industry," said Greenomics Indonesia Executive Director Elfian Effendi in a statement. "This means that the natural forest in these concessions will be felled to provide raw material for the pulp industry."
Greenomics says forestry plantation licenses were also granted in Maluku, East Nusa Tenggara, West Nusa Tenggara, West Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, North Sulawesi, West Sumatra, South Sumatra, Jambi, Gorontalo and Bangka Belitung.
"The new Minister of Forestry Decree was signed on 31 December 2010. So, it is reasonable to assume that it was intended to save the 44 companies from having to comply with the moratorium regulations." said Elfian.
Indonesia has yet to approve the moratorium, which was due to take effect January 1, 2011 under the billion dollar forest conservation partnership signed last May with Norway. The moratorium is apparently being held up due to conflicting language between at least three different versions of the decree.
The Indonesian president's climate change office did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Source: Mongabay
Some rights for the image is reserved under Creative Commons license
|
| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 26 January 2011 18:57 ) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Page 2 of 85 |
