197 – Earth’s Tree News

Today for you 37 news items about Earth’s trees. Location, number and subject listed below.

37) In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis? The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total. “Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change,” said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP. http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2539349.ece