382 – Forest-Type / World-wide

–World-wide: 27) Shift from poverty-driven to industry-driven deforestation, 28) Indigenous people attacked for forestland all over the world, 29) Half a billion tonnes of tropical carbon emissions could be avoided with $1Billion in annual bribes, 30) Understand: Green Carbon, Brown Carbon, Gray Carbon, Blue Carbon, 31) Carbon-eating super tree fantasy, 32) Half world’s monkeys and apes facing threat of extinction,

Articles

World-wide:

27) A shift from poverty-driven to industry-driven deforestation threatens the world’s tropical forests but offers new opportunities for conservation, according to an article coauthored by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “New Strategies for Conserving Tropical Forests” will be featured in the September issue of the leading journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Rhett Butler of Mongabay.com, a leading tropical-forest Web site, and Laurance argue that the sharp increase in deforestation by big corporations provides environmental lobby groups with clear, identifiable targets that can be pressured to be more responsive to environmental concerns. “Rather than being dominated by rural farmers, tropical deforestation is increasingly driven by major industries—especially large-scale farming, mining, and logging,” said Laurance. “Although this trend is pretty scary, it’s also much easier to target a handful of global corporations than many millions of poor farmers.” The United Nations estimates that some 13 million hectares (33 million acres) of tropical forest are destroyed each year; but these numbers mask a transition from mostly subsistence-driven to mostly corporate-driven forest destruction, say Butler and Laurance. http://www.rainforestportal.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=104362

28) Indigenous peoples and farmers faced multiple attacks in Guatemala last month; while in Brazil, the government began preparing to station military forces on indigenous lands circling the border. In Canada, the Takla Lake First Nation continued blocking access roads on their territory, and in Fafak, 46 West Papuans were arrested, beaten, and humiliated for holding a flag-raising ceremony. Meanwhile, Indigenous People in Guam, Papua New Guinea, Peru, India, America, Bolivia and elsewhere, positioned themselves to resist a series of new development projects that threaten to devastate their lands, contaminate their waters, and help destroy their way of life. http://ahniwanika.gnn.tv/blogs/28996/Underreported_Struggles_16

29) New research done at Ohio State University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that if wealthy nations spent collectively $1 billion annually to pay landowners in tropical countries not to cut down forests half a billion tonnes of carbon emissions could be avoided annually and deforestation reduced by one-tenth. Science Daily has the complete story, but this is the gist of it: Using three different forestry models, researchers assigned dollar values to each tonne of carbon which could be saved through ‘avoided deforestation’ in different parts of the world. Each has different economic and biological assumptions and calculated different values for carbon credits to calculate how much it would cost to avoid different emission levels. For example: The cost to achieve a 10 percent reduction in global deforestation through 2030, resulting in between 0.3 billion and 0.6 billion metric tons of reduced carbon emissions annually, would cost between $2 and $5 per metric ton of carbon credit – or between $0.4 billion and $1.7 billion per year. Achieving a 50 percent reduction in deforestation, and a corresponding 1.5 billion to 2.7 billion metric ton reduction in emissions each year, would cost $10 to $21 per metric ton, or between $17.2 billion and $28 billion per year, according to the model calculations.Ultimately, “compared to other options, an avoided deforestation program would be relatively cheap and practical for the United States. It would save American taxpayers money and provide a huge transfer of funding from one region of the world to another, giving developing countries a large chunk of the world’s economic pie to use as they see fit,” study co-author Brent Sohngen was quoted as saying. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/one-billion-dollars-could-slow-deforestation-reduce-carbon-emissions.php

30) Green carbon occurs in natural forests, brown carbon is found in industrialised forests or plantations, grey carbon in fossil fuels and blue carbon in oceans. Untouched natural forests store three times more carbon dioxide than previously estimated and 60 percent more than plantation forests, said a new Australian study of “green carbon” and its role in climate change. The scientists said the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Kyoto Protocol did not distinguish between the carbon capacity of plantation forests and untouched forests. Yet untouched forests can carry three times the carbon presently estimated, if their biomass of carbon stock was included, said the ANU report released on Tuesday. Currently, forest carbon storage capacity is based on plantation forest estimates. The report “Green Carbon, the role of natural forests in carbon storage” said a difference in the definition of a forest was also underestimating the carbon stock in old-growth forests. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP255954

31) Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

32) Almost half the world’s monkeys and apes are facing a worsening threat of extinction because of deforestation and hunting for meat, an international report showed. “We have solid data to show that the situation is far more severe than we imagined,” said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) primate specialist group. An assessment for an IUCN “Red List” of endangered species found that 48 percent of the 634 known species and sub-species of primates – humankind’s closest relatives such as chimpanzees, orang-utans, gibbons and lemurs – were at risk of extinction. In a previous report five years ago, using different yardsticks, just 39 percent of primates were judged at risk. The IUCN includes governments, scientists and conservation groups. Habitat destruction, led by burning and clearing of tropical forests for farmland, and the hunting of monkeys and apes for their meat were the main threats. Some species were “literally being eaten into extinction,” a statement said. “Gorilla meat, chimpanzee meat and meat of other apes fetches a higher price than beef, chicken or fish” in some African countries, Mr Mittermeier told Reuters. He said that deforestation was aggravating hunting. Roads cut to help loggers and burning of forests to create farmland were opening previously inaccessible regions to poachers. Primates were suffering most in Asia, with 71 percent of all species at risk, against 37 percent in Africa. The report was to be released at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. In southeast Asia, human populations were higher than in Africa and habitats for orang-utans, gibbons or leaf monkeys were getting ever more fragmented. Demand for pets and Chinese hunger for traditional medicines were adding pressures. Among species most at risk, or “critically endangered”, were the Bouvier’s red colobus, an African monkey which has not been seen in 25 years, and the greater bamboo lemur of Madagascar totalling only about 140 in the wild. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24130810-23109,00.html