Brazil's forgotten state: oil and agribusiness threaten Amapá forests – in pictures | Environment. We are destroying rainforests so quickly they may be gone in 100 years | John Vidal | Global Development Professionals Network. If you want to see the world’s climate changing, fly over a tropical country. Thirty years ago, a wide belt of rainforest circled the earth, covering much of Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa. Today, it is being rapidly replaced by great swathes of palm oil trees and rubber plantations, land cleared for cattle grazing, soya farming, expanding cities, dams and logging. People have been deforesting the tropics for thousands of years for timber and farming, but now, nothing less than the physical transformation of the Earth is taking place.
Every year about 18m hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly 1bn hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has gone. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century, and the latest satellite analysis shows that in the last 15 years new hotspots have emerged from Cambodia to Liberia. At current rates, they will vanish altogether in 100 years. So, what to do? Brazil: Clash of cultures over Amazon dams. Project Profile: Advancing Sustainable Landscapes in the Andean Amazon (ASLAA) The project was designed to counteract several of the major threats to biodiversity and livelihoods in the Andean-Amazon region.
The Rainforest Alliance and its partners in the region identified the principal threats to biodiversity in these landscapes as habitat degradation and loss due to wholesale deforestation or land-use conversion; gold mining is a further threat unique to the Peruvian landscape, affecting the Tambopata Reserve and its surrounding buffer zone. The drivers or root causes of these threats can be grouped into three areas: a) limited institutional capacity by local governments and communities for natural resource management; b) limited participation in and access to programs by local groups for resource management and sustainable production chains; and c) weak organizational capacity and market linkages of local producers and operators to grow local economic opportunities.
Community member shows brazil nut product. Photo credit: Mohsin Kazmi Location Project Objectives. Corporate growth still driving deforestation, CDP shows. Image copyright Getty Images Although progress is being made, up to US $906bn of company turnover is still tied to global deforestation, an assessment has concluded. A study by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) suggests almost a quarter of company revenues depend on deforestation-linked commodities.
These commodities are cattle products, soy, palm oil and timber products. The findings are based on disclosure requests to 365 investors worth US $22 trillion (£17 trillion). "We found this year that a substantial share of corporate income depends upon commodities that are linked to deforestation risk," explained Katie McCoy, CDP's head of forests. "When we carried out our analysis, we found that - on average - about a quarter of companies' revenue are dependent on commodities that have been linked to deforestation. " She said there was a clear message for companies to take the issue of deforestation in their supply chain very seriously. "Finally, we are asking companies to work sectorally. The Lungs of the Earth. Basuki’s men are resting for a moment in the shade of a wooden shed. There are some hammocks, a gas burner for making coffee and an open air shower.
A few metres away, pots are lined up. They hold the seedlings of trees. "This is our plant nursery," explains Basuki. "The fires come back every year, especially from September onwards, in the dry season. Basuki spends most of the year in the jungle of Central Kalimantan, coordinating the interventions against the fires and various reforestation projects. Indonesia in flames Source: Global Fire Data From September to October 2015, Indonesia was the scene of one of the most disastrous fires in recent years. The most authoritative theories blame the fires on individuals interested in the acquisition of new lands – including some companies that produce palm oil – and on farmers who use the fire to prepare lands for cultivation. Almost all fires detected in Indonesia are caused by mankind to prepare the lands for farming. Rare Photos of Brazilian Tribe Spur Pleas to Protect It. Spectacular new images of an uncontacted indigenous village in Brazil are stirring pleas from tribal leaders and rights advocates for government intervention to protect the settlement from illegal gold prospectors.
The aerial photographs show villagers gathered in the center of a traditional, circular structure inside the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, a sprawling reserve of rivers and upland forest situated astride the border with Venezuela. The images were taken in mid-September by officials from Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio—known by its acronym, FUNAI—on a surveillance flight over the reserve in the run-up to a joint operation with army troops and police agents to clear out thousands of wildcat gold miners.
The same Yanomani Indians had been observed at a village in another location on a reconnaissance flight four years ago. But that communal dwelling was later abandoned, and officials feared for the fate of the group until the most recent sighting. Forests: Stabilizing Climate and Supporting Development. With the Paris Agreement entering into force last week, negotiators at this year’s UN climate meeting (COP22) in Morocco are getting to work on the specific rules and guidance that will translate Paris commitments into action. Achieving the Agreement goals will require a strong focus on protecting, restoring, and sustainably managing all types of forests. Deforestation, forest degradation, and land use change account for around 12% of all greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, so it’s clear that forests will play a critical role in helping countries meet their nationally determined contributions to fight climate change.
The World Bank Group supports work with countries to meet these targets and address the impacts of climate change through its forest programs. Through the program, 20,000 farmers will be trained on standards for sustainable production and processing of coffee beans over two years. Peru's Rotten Wood. Peru's vast and ancient rainforests are vital to the global response to climate change, home to an astonishing diversity of plants and animals and integral to the way to life of indigenous peoples.
They are supposedly protected by government regulation and international law. Yet every year tens of thousands of trees are being chopped down and exported illegally around the world. We have been to investigate the corruption that lies behind this rotten trade. By Bob Abeshouse and Luis Del Valle Protecting the Amazonian rainforest is critical to combatting global warming. The tropical forest mitigates the effects of fossil fuel emissions and helps regulate climate patterns by absorbing massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
Last year, the rainforest absorbed less carbon dioxide than Latin America produced from fossil fuels for the first time in history. What is happening in Peru is a big part of the problem. But the industry remains rife with corruption today. 'Logging mafias' Source: Al Jazeera. Stopping deforestation will not end tropical species losses. Mexican village uses fireflies to halt deforestation by local logging industry | World news. In the village of Nanacamilpa, tiny fireflies are helping save the towering pine and fir trees on the outskirts of the megalopolis of Mexico City. Thousands of them light up a magical spectacle at dusk in the old-growth forests on reserves such as the Piedra Canteada park, about 45 miles (75km) east of Mexico’s sprawling capital city.
Piedra Canteada in Tlaxcala state isn’t a government-run park, but a rural cooperative that has managed to emerge from poverty and dependence on logging with the help of the fireflies. For years, economic forces, including low prices for farm produce, forced rural communities like Piedra Canteada to cut down trees and sell the logs. Then, in 1990, community leader Genaro Rueda Lopez got the idea that the forest could bring tourism revenue from campers. Business was slow for years. “The amount of fireflies you see is impressive,” said Carlos Landa, a Mexico City native who visited Piedra Canteada this week. But the fireflies are now the main source of income. Chefs See an Olympic Opportunity for Rainforest Preservation.
There are thousands of fruits, vegetables, and fish in the Amazon, but most of the world only knows a few dozen of them. Rainforest to Table is a fledgling movement that aims to change that, enlisting top chefs from Latin America to work with indigenous tribes to learn about and promote foods from the rain forest in a very appealing way: by cooking them—and then giving back to these communities. “This is a new tool in the toolbox when we think about conservation,” says Michael Jenkins of Forest Trends, a nonprofit conservation group, in a promotional video. Forest Trends, along with Canopy Bridge and āmaZ restaurant in Peru, launched the Rainforest to Table movement last November. And its efforts may shine brighter under the spotlight of the summer Olympics starting in Rio this week. Brazilian chef Paulo Machado has a lot of energy. Campo Grande is in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, a grasslands region in central-west Brazil. The way to get there?
Tasso Azevedo: Hopeful lessons from the battle to save rainforests. Bolivia: Weaving along the Desaguadero. For geography teacher and adventurer Fearghal O’Nuallain, it took local knowledge and an acceptance of the unknown to make it along Bolivia’s 200-mile river in one piece A gust of wind burnished the surface of the Rio Desaguadero. Moments earlier the water had been glass calm. Now hailstones stung my sunburned forearms. I leaned in the direction of the sudden wind in an attempt to stop my balsa, a traditional boat made from reeds, from capsizing for the second time that day. The squall persisted for three minutes. ‘Get the SD cards,’ Tem shouted. I paddled back to Tem with the film footage stuffed in my pants and helped him into his boat. The origin of our misadventure could be traced back to London.
Climbing the Bolivian Altiplano to reach the top of the watershed between the Titicaca and Amazon basins (Image: Fearghal O’Nuallain/Studiocanoe.com) Upon arrival in La Paz we began searching for suitable craft. Doing business in Bolivia is not always straightforward. Life ON THE ALTIPLANO. Amazon: The final frontier? | | Al Jazeera. Last year, American anthropologists Robert Walker and Kim Hill - of the University of Missouri and Arizona State University respectively - took it upon themselves to write an editorial for the weekly journal Science, entitled "Protecting isolated tribes". The tribes in question, according to Walker and Hill, are "about 50 isolated indigenous societies across lowland South America … with limited to no contact with the outside world". According to the prominent human rights group Survival International, there are more than 100 so-called "uncontacted" tribes living in voluntary isolation in the world, the vast majority of them in the South American Amazon.
Walker and Hill's strategy for "protecting" these groups is one of "controlled contact", in which governments initiate well-organised and sustained contact with the tribes and gradually integrate them into the official domestic fold, where their rights can allegedly be better protected. 'Another genocide' Civilising missions Toxic panorama. 'Three centuries' to catalogue all Amazon tree species. The tribe standing up to illegal Amazon loggers in Brazil. Amazon could face intense wildfire season this year, Nasa warns | Environment.
Conditions created by the strong El Niño event that warmed up Pacific waters in 2015 and early 2016 altered rainfall patterns around the world. In the Amazon basin, that meant reduced rainfall during the wet season, plunging some parts of the region into severe drought. According to NASA, the Amazon is the driest it’s been at the start of the dry season since 2002 — and that probably means the rainforest is in for a particularly nasty wildfire season, according to Doug Morton, an Earth scientist with the U.S. agency and a co-creator of the Amazon fire forecast, which uses climate observations and active fire detections by NASA satellites to predict fire season severity.
“Severe drought conditions at the start of the dry season have set the stage for extreme fire risk in 2016 across the southern Amazon,” Morton said in a statement. The Brazilian states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso, and Pará are reportedly at the highest risk.