–UK: 1) They lost their battle to save a row of trees, 2) Woodland logging wins prize,
–EU: 3) Critical issues and policy options related to deforestation,
–Portugal: 4) Cork-oak cultivation creates refuge, 5) Cork-oak culture,
–Sweden: 6) Bark beetle are swarming in Southern Sweden
–Ghana: 7) Two-day gathering of loggers and enviros
–Kenya: 8) Ban on importing chainsaws and timber equipment, 9) Mijikenda Kaya forests earns US World heritage status,

UK:

1) Campaigners have lost their battle to save a row of trees on the edge of a nature corridor by the River Frome in Stapleton. More than 100 people complained to Bristol City Council against plans to fell trees in Grove Wood, next to Blackberry Hill. New landowner Lord Houshang Jafari bought the plot in November and since then has carried out a number of works to the wood, which protesters say was home to otters and kingfishers and a favourite haunt for many local residents. They fear plans are afoot to develop the land into residential accommodation, although Mr Jafari has always denied this is the plan. Now controversial plans to cut down sycamore, ash, lime, beech, cherry and elm trees have been given the go-ahead. Up to 250 residents protested last night against the city council’s approval of the scheme, after the authority confirmed last week that it would not be placing a preservation order on the trees. Officers said the existing trees were causing a nuisance to cyclists and pedestrians and risked damaging the wall which divided the woods from the road. Local resident Sue Drake said: “These trees require pruning to ensure they are not a hazard to passing traffic and pedestrians. “But the council’s decision to allow these trees to be clear-felled does not take account of the huge value of these trees for the landscape in a Conservation Area.” Richard Minchin, who regularly jogs through Grove Wood, said: “The council seems to have looked for every possible reason to allow the felling of these trees, but they have no real proof that the trees are causing any damage. “The only thing that is now certain is that a beautiful line of trees will be lost forever.” http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=145365&command=displayContent&sourceNode
=145191&contentPK=21037923&folderPk=83726&pNodeId=144922

2) A woodland which is aiming high has notched one of the most prestigious prizes in forestry for a North York Moors estate. The Hawnby Estate has been declared winner of this year’s John Boddy Rose Bowl, awarded by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and judged by the Forestry Commission and The Royal Forestry Society. Agent John Richardson will receive the prize at the Forestry Pavilion at the Great Yorkshire Show today. Nestling in stunning countryside, the estate manages 2,000-acres of mixed-woodland around the village of Hawnby, near Helmsley, and runs a thriving timber business. But amidst the verdant landscape is one of the most important collections of ancient woodland in northern England. Judges were impressed by the major efforts being made to restore many of these areas, which support rare butterflies and seven species of bat. Conifers are gradually being felled, encouraging species like ash and oak to regenerate, and allowing sunlight to nourish flowers and plants. But in the Gowerdale part of the estate a high rise solution has been required to restore its precious mix of habitats. Steep and sensitive terrain made it impossible to use heavy machinery, so a winch system was used to extract 500 tonnes of timber. The technique, which employs a system of pulleys and cables stretched out between an anchor boom on the hillside and a point further down, is often employed in western Scotland, with trees lifted from the ground and “ski-lifted” to a stacking point, before heading to the saw mill. These ancient woodland sites will have had woodland cover for at least 400 years, with some having been more or less continuously wooded since trees became established after the last ice age. It is an irreplaceable asset that needs sensitive management.” http://www.maltonmercury.co.uk/news/Hawnby-is-top-of-the.4266351.jp

EU:

3) The European Commission’s DG Environment has launched a public consultation to gather opinions on a number of critical issues and policy options related to deforestation around the world. The results of the consultation will feed into the international climate negotiations for a post-2012 climate regime. Forests are crucial reservoirs of biological diversity, but are under threat around world, particularly in tropical and boreal regions, from deforestation and forest degradation. Their disappearance undermines the fight against climate change and accelerates the loss of biodiversity. Deforestation therefore needs to be integrated into any future agreement on fighting climate change. The results of the consultation will be used to inform the development of EU policy in this area, the options for which will be presented in a Communication from the Commission at the end of 2008. The results of recent public consultations, addressing issues directly related to tropical deforestation (e.g. “Living with climate change in Europe”, “Call for evidence on the Economics of Biodiversity Loss”, “Additional Options to Combat Illegal Logging”, “Halting the Loss of Biodiversity by 2010 and beyond”) will also be taken into account in the analysis and follow-up actions. Interested individuals and organisations are invited to submit their views by 22 August using the following web address: http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/ipm/forms/dispatch?form=deforestation

Portugal:

4) “Because the native cork-oak woodlands around the western Mediterranean were never completely cleared, they still have some of the richest biological diversity in the Mediterranean,” says Jose Tavares, Portugal program manager for the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). More than 100 songbird species breed in the montados, he says, including the brilliant, hummingbird-like bee-eaters; hawfinches and chaffinches, with their seed-cracker bills; and big, azure-winged magpies, little rock buntings, and cirl buntings. More than 160 other birds occur here, including many species that overwinter, such as lapwings and golden plovers; millions of wood pigeons and doves, from all across Eurasia; booted eagles and short-toed eagles, honey buzzards and black kites. A handful of very rare species find refuge here, too. Iberian mixed oak forests support the majority of Europe’s Bonelli’s eagles (now numbering fewer than 1,000 pairs), the last 180 breeding pairs of Spanish imperial eagles, and fewer than 100 Iberian lynx. Cork-oak forests across the Mediterranean, in Algeria and Tunisia, harbor some of the world’s last Barbary deer. Laws of one kind or another have protected Portuguese cork oaks since the year 1259. As a result, montado still covers 1.7 million acres here, mostly in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. But it would be a dangerous mistake to assume that abundance today assures the montados’ safety in years to come, conservationists say. The slow-growing cork oaks are the “gold of Portugal,” a tirador told me. They’ve been preserved because they provide an invaluable source of income for the farmers who own them. But 70 percent of cork revenues come from the wine industry; flooring, insulation, and cork’s myriad other uses barely pay their way. And now, increasingly, the wine industry is turning to alternatives to cork. The change is happening at a full gallop, experts say. Synthetic and screw-top stoppers are no longer embarrassing hallmarks of plonk. They’re commonplace on mid-range wines these days. http://audubonmagazine.org/features0701/habitat.html

Eleven years have passed since the last harvest—the customary 10, plus an extra on account of drought—and the silvery charcoal oaks are swollen with cork so thick and dense it splits to accommodate its own girth. A crew of 33 has been working since early June on this 5,000-acre estate. The men have a month down, a month to go. Coming upon them out here on the sunny hillside, among the low, open-crowned oaks and the aromatic rockroses, far from farm building and blacktop, the little troop seems a natural part of the landscape. They flow from tree to tree, working them over the way a flock of songbirds does. Tiradores—cork strippers—work two to a tree, swinging their small axes from the elbow hard and fast with a rhythmic, cork-muffled thwack, thwack, thwack. A good tirador cuts precisely through the outer bark and no deeper, slicing a narrow door-size rectangle into the broad side of the tree. For the final few cuts, the tirador chops and pries, chops and pries, twisting under the waxy bark in a squeaky-shoe counterpoint to the cut. Thwack-squeak, thwack-squeak. He discards the axe, grabs the turned-up corner with two hands, heaves back, and the plank slowly rips away from the trunk with a long, reluctant, scratchy groan. When all the bark lies below the tree in stiff curls, the men shoulder their axes and the eucalyptus-pole ladder and move on after the rest of the flock. Exposed, a newly fleeced cork-oak trunk is a startling yellow-orange, with the grainless texture of a slab of gyros on a spit, only wonderfully cool and moist. This paler color will redden in a day or two; the inner bark will seal itself and take on an opaque, stuccoed look, as if finely plastered in paprika. As the years pass the bark will thicken and darken once again, to reddish mahogany, to chestnut, and back to silvery-charcoal gray. All is quiet in the tiradores’ wake. A honey-yellow butterfly makes the first move, ascending from a rockrose like petals taking flight. There’s twittering from the crown of a tree. Small birds flit invisibly among the oak leaves. A nuthatch is a common sight in the montados, as these ancient Portuguese cork-oak savannas are called. And common is precisely the point, says Domingos Leitão, an ornithologist with the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds. “Birds that are declining or rare elsewhere in Europe are still common here in the cork-oak montados of southern Portugal,” he says. “Common and abundant.” http://audubonmagazine.org/features0701/habitat.html

Sweden:

6) The dangerous bark beetle is swarming in Southern Sweden earlier than normally, Nordic Forest Owners Association reported. There is also a great risk of a second generation swarming later in the summer. Because of the warm summer the beetle population swarmed early. The drought made spruce more vulnerable to attacks. Mats Sandgren, CEO of Södra Skog, says that the beetle population is very large. The weather has weakened the defence capacity of spruce and trees suffer from stress. More than three million cubic metres of wood may be hit only within Södra’s own region and the total may be as high as 6 million cubic metres. Forest owners try to combat the bark beetle by removing attacked trees and by setting traps treated with feromones to attract swarming insects. http://wood.lesprom.com/news/34735/

Ghana:

7) A stakeholders forum on Forest Management Planning opened yesterday at the University of Ghana, Legon, in Accra. The objective of the two-day forum is to provide an opportunity for the stakeholders including timber dealers forest conservationists and non-governmental organisationas to discuss with the Forestry Commission modalities for a comprehensive Timber Utilisation Contract (TUC) area plan development and identify ways of enhancing sustainable forest management in Ghana. It was organised by the Forestry Commission (FC) with sponsorship from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Addressing the forum, the Chief Executive Officer of the Forestry Commission, Prof Nii Ashie-Kotey, said Ghana adopted forest management certification as a tool for achieving sustainable forest management in June 1996. Prof Ashie-Kotey said it, however became apparent that, practical forest management in Ghana was below the required standards because the capacity, knowledge and understanding of the workings of forest certification and management was low in Ghana. In order to provide technical guidance in that regard, the WWF extended its Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN) programme to Ghana in 2004. “Four years of GFTN activities in Ghana have enhanced the capacity of a number of concession holders in the area of certification and improved forest management in their respective concessions,” he said. Prof. Ashie-Kotey said this was achieved through training, capacity-building programmes on reduced impact logging, certification and auditing. Prof. Ashie-Kotey said inspite of these major achievements, one key impediment that remains to be resolved is the inadequacy or the non-existence of forest management plans. This has necessitated the stakeholders forum. Mr Mustapha Seidu, Projects Leader of WWF – West Africa Forest programme office in a presentation, said GFTN is a WWF initiative to eliminate illegal logging, transform global market place into a force for saving valuable and threatened forest and facilitate trade links between companies committed to achieving responsible forest management. He said GFTN operates in 34 countries, working with over 360 companies, trade in more than 42 billion US dollars of forest products annually and manage 26.1 million hectares of forest worldwide. http://www.modernghana.com/news/173380/1/Experts%20hold%20forum%20on%20forests%20management.ht
ml

Kenya:

8) The Environment and Mineral Resources minister has ordered a ban on the importation of timber-harvesting equipment such as power saws to protect forests. Mr John Michuki ordered the National Environmental Management Authority (Nema) director-general, Dr Muusya Mwinzi, to enforce and amend existing laws with a view to banning any importation of machinery used in harvesting timber. “We have the Forest Act 2005, which has clear provisions to support this initiative. The director-general of Nema is directed to ensure guidelines are developed for the management and control of the environment. This Act is only second to the Constitution in terms of its power,” he said. Mr Michuki also announced a Sh16 billion programme to rehabilitate Nairobi River in the next three years. He said the filth and destruction of the river system and its environs were shocking, adding, Vision 2030 has identified the environment as a critical component for sustainable development. The minister said the enforcement of environmental laws had been forgotten. He said population pressure, coupled with inadequate resources, had compromised the delivery of services for most residents of Nairobi, leading to many challenges such as environmental degradation. He said about 56 per cent of the city’s residents live in slums and are located along the banks of Nairobi River. “These informal settlements, which lack sanitary facilities, have encroached on the riparian reserve, which should be kept off by 30 metres on each side of the river banks,” he said. Meanwhile, Nema’s Dr Mwinzi has announced a river-cleaning initiative aimed at rehabilitating the Nairobi River basin. The initiative would be undertaken in collaboration with all relevant ministries and the City Council of Nairobi, the director-general said. http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=1&newsid=126949

9) The Mijikenda Kaya forests along the Coast have been added to the United Nations’ list of World Heritage sites. The decision, taken on Tuesday during a Unesco meeting in Canada, is likely to inspire thousands of tourists to visit the forests. Kenya had previously won World Heritage designations for Lamu Old Town and Lake Turkana and Mt Kenya national parks. The Mijikenda Kaya forests are among 27 sites approved by Unesco this week for World Heritage status. Several countries sought unsuccessfully to have sites added to the list at the annual meeting that ends on Friday in Quebec City. In announcing the designation of the forests, Unesco said “the site is inscribed as bearing unique testimony to a cultural tradition and for its direct link to a living tradition”. The Kaya forests consist of 11 separate parcels of land spread over 200 kilometres and containing the remains of numerous fortified villages (kayas) built by the Mijikenda. The kayas, which date from the 16th century, are now regarded as the abodes of ancestors and are revered as sacred sites, Unesco noted. As such, they are maintained by councils of elders. A total of 878 sites around the world have received World Heritage designations in the 27 years that Unesco has been making such inscriptions. http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=1&newsid=127019

Tanzania:

10) Recently four villages, two in Morogoro district and one each in Babati and Muheza districts, managed to obtain a total of Sh8 million from a programme under the Kyoto Protocol for sale of carbon dioxide sequestered through participatory management of their village forests. The villages are Mangala and Gwata in Morogoro district, Handei in Muheza, Tanga region and Ayasanda in Babati district in Manyara region. The programme is called Kyoto; Think Global, Act Local (K:TGAL) and is one of the efforts being done to sell carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases, sequestered through participatory management of village forests. Contracts defining roles of the villages and K:TGAL programme were signed with the village governments and the money is in the process of being transferred to the villages’ bank accounts. The programme has been coordinated by Prof Rogers Malimbwi and Mr Eliakim Zahabu, both academicians working with the Faculty of Forestry and Nature Conservation at the Sokoine University of Agriculture. Prof.Malimbwi said the programme involved participatory forest management (PFM) and entailed involvementg of local communities in the management of natural forests that would otherwise degrade or be deforested as a result of carbon emissions. The government supports PFM in an effort to reduce the current 17 million hectares or 50 per cent of the total forest land in the country which is prone to deforestation and degradation during agricultural expansion, charcoal making and timber harvesting activities. http://shalinry.org/emissions-pact-pays-off/2008/07/
In 1972, Catherine Craig celebrated her 21st birthday at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, while she was studying with the famed primatologist Jane Goodall. Thirty years later, Craig returned, this time as a conservation biologist with a focus on evolution and ecology and a very particular subspecialty – spider webs. The Gombe she found was horrifically different from the one she had experienced in her youth. The areas bordering the park had been victims of the slash and burn agriculture that is destroying forests around the world. “I couldn’t blame the people who had destroyed that land because they’re starving, they need to eat, and, to them, slash and burn makes absolute sense,” Craig said recently as she walked through an Audubon preserve across the street from her Lincoln home. “But it still bothered me.”The farmers were destroying the forest to survive; to stop them, she needed to find an alternative, something that would compel the farmers to preserve the land. She thinks she has, and it’s something she already knows a lot about: wild silk. Craig, who’s affiliated with Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, got “hooked on silk,” during a year in Costa Rica after graduate school. She saw spider webs everywhere in the rain forest, and wondered how they worked, why so many different species of spiders were spinning similar webs, and why, after millions of years, insects had not learned to avoid them. She wrote her Ph.D on the materials and design of the webs, went on to a career in academia – including nearly a decade at Yale – and then, when she returned to Gombe six years ago, found a calling. The forests that were being slashed and burned contained wild silk moths. If she could teach the farmers how to harvest the silk from their cocoons, to profit from that silk, to make a livelihood from that silk, then, she hoped, she could convince them to preserve, and even replant, the forests. In 2003, Craig founded Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International, which took its seemingly simple idea – plant trees, raise larvae, earn income – to Madagascar, a biologically rich Indian Ocean island nation where deforestation is also a problem and which had a tradition of silk production and weaving on which to build. There had already been projects similar to Craig’s but because her whole point was to preserve the native forests, hers was the first to use wild silk. http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2008/07/07/she_hopes_to_save_forests_with_silk/

Congo:

Conserving the Congo forest, and indeed all of our forests in Africa, as well as accelerating forestation efforts, is vital to our survival on a continent where the Sahara Desert is expanding to the North and the Kalahari Desert is expanding to the Southwest. For this reason the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF) was launched in London on June 17. The initial financing of the CBFF comes from a pair of $200 million grants from the governments of the United Kingdom and Norway. Ten countries in the Central African region established the Congo Basin Forest Initiative to manage the forest more sustainably and conserve its rich biodiversity. The Congo Basin Forest is the world’s second largest forest ecosystem and is considered the planet’s second lung, after the Amazon. The forests of the Congo Basin provide food, shelter, and livelihood for over 50 million people. Covering 200 million hectares and including approximately one-fifth of the world’s remaining closed-canopy tropical forest, they are also a very significant carbon store with a vital role in regulating the regional climate. The diversity they harbour is of global importance. Spanning an area twice the size of France, the Congo Basin rainforest is home to more than 10,000 species of plants, 1,000 species of birds, and 400 species of mammals. Today, the Congo Basin rainforest is coming under pressure. Increased logging, changing patterns of agriculture, population growth, and the oil and mining industries are all leading to ever greater deforestation. This situation is not sustainable for the people who live there, for the countless species that may be driven to extinction, or for the climate. Reversing the rate of deforestation in the Congo Basin is therefore essential both to securing the livelihoods of the people in the region and to maintaining the carbon-storage capacity and biodiversity of the forest. Forests are indispensable yet we take them for granted. Though they appear inexhaustible, they can perish. The two nations who share the island of Hispaniola — Haiti and the Dominican Republic — provide a vivid example of what happens when we destroy our environment, and especially forests. http://chrisy58.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/quick-benefits-can%E2%80%99t-justify-cutting-down-for
ests/