I recently read some news about rainforests and the fact that they remain an intricate part of this planet, especially when it comes to removing carbon from the air. During the mid-20th century, the country of Costa Rica indiscriminately chopped down a majority of its ancient forests and far to the south, the Amazon forest was being cleared to make way for agriculture.
Today, Costa Rica is in the middle of a huge conservation push and Brazil is so serious about slowing green loss' that it has done more than any other country to limit emissions that are leading to global warming.
On the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have been declared to halt the rampant removal of that country's forests. These promises are backed by business interests with the power to make them stick.
In the battle to limit the risks of climate change, it has been clear for decades how absolutely necessary the globe's immense rain forests are. We must save what we have left and make concerted efforts to let new ones grow. This alone is one of the most promising and helpful strategies we can muster in the near-term. This is simply because of the huge role forests play in what is referred to as the carbon cycle.' Trees pull carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas (GHG), out of the air and lock the carbon away in their wood and in the soil.
Let's not fool ourselves. Humans have cut down or damaged at least three-quarters of the world's forests and that wholesale destruction has accounted for much of the excess carbon that is warming our planet. After desirable timber is harvested from a forest, any residue such as, stumps and scrub is destroyed, usually by burning. This alone pumps inordinate amounts of carbon back into the air.
Driven by a growing environmental movement in countries that boast of tropical forests, and by mounting pressure from Western consumers who care about sustainable practices, corporate and government leaders are making a fresh push to slow the cutting. There is even talk of eventually halting it altogether. On top of this, plans are being made to encourage forest regrowth on a scale so massive that it might pull a sizable fraction of human-released carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away.
"The public should take heart," said Rolf Skar, who helps lead forest conservation work for the environmental group Greenpeace. "We are at a potentially historic moment where the world is starting to wake up to this issue, and to apply real solutions."1
In any case, Greenpeace and other groups expect years of hard work as they try to hold the feet of business leaders and politicians to the fire to make good on promises. Thus far, wealthy Western governments have allocated only a few billion dollars to help developing countries save their forests.
Paradoxically, trees are most often removed to make room for farming making the single biggest threat to forests the need to feed growing populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the wherewithal to eat better. Saving trees will require producing more food on less land.
"For thousands of years, the march of civilization has been associated with converting natural ecosystems to crops that serve only man," States Glenn Hurowitz of Climate Advisers, a consultancy in Washington. "What's happening now is that we are trying to break that paradigm. If that succeeds, it's going to be a major development in human history."2
Scientists are still trying to figure out how much of a difference an ambitious forest regrowth strategy could make. A leading figure in the discussion - Richard A. Houghton of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts - has argued for turning some 486 million hectares (1.2 billion acres) of degraded or marginally productive agricultural land into forests. Researchers say that figure - approximately the size of half the land in the United States - would be possible if farming in poor countries became far more efficient. Dr. Houghton believes that if his target were pursued aggressively, and coupled with more concerted efforts to protect existing forests, the rapid growth of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere could be slowed sharply - or even stopped. That would give the world a few decades for an orderly transition away from fossil fuels. "This is not a solution, but it would help buy us some time," Dr. Houghton said.
Costa Rica is considered a forest success. Much of the country's old-growth trees were lost from the 1940s to the 1980s before policies put in place stemmed the loss. Forests have regrown and now cover more than half of the country. The dense, natural cover remains untouched by roads and has not been used for timber production. Serious threats do persist, however, including a boom in pineapple farming that once again give landowners an incentive to cut down recovering forests. For now, the second-growth forests cover roughly 14 percent of the country's land area
The Amazon, spreading across nine countries of South America, is the world's largest tropical forest. The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, which for years and years treated it as a limitless resource. Developing the region lead to road construction that opened the forest to illegal land grabs. Crews harvested select trees for timber and then cut or burned the rest to allow for cattle pastures and soybean planting.
By the middle of the last decade, 17 percent of the Amazon had been cut, which prompted cries of outrage from environmentalists and people whose ancestors had lived in the forests for millennia. As deforestation came to a head in 2004, Brazil came under international condemnation and in 2006 marketplace pressure was brought to bear.
Crops grown on deforested land, notably soybeans, were being used in feed to produce meat for Western companies like McDonald's creating a potential liability in the eyes of their customers. The outcries were so loud that the restaurant chain imposed a moratorium on products linked to the felling of forests.
Brazil started deploying satellites to monitor damage, cut off loans to some farmers, and used police to enforce laws against illegal logging and clearing. It didn't take long for corporations to get on the bandwagon to apply pressure. All of these tactics have resulted in an 83 percent drop in deforestation over the past decade. Brazil is beginning to witness regrowth on a large scale in the Amazon and is spending millions to restore forests along its Atlantic coast.
Indonesia is still a wild card. It is currently the hotspot for vegetation clearing losing more forest each year than Brazil despite being a much smaller country. The purpose of much of the deforestation is to make room to grow palm oil for use in Western consumer products like ice cream and soap. Companies and environmental groups are promising a severe crackdown on the offenders.
Time is of the essence. All of this dedication to saving and/or regrowing forests shows what may be possible if the world gets more serious about wrestling global warming to the ground. We don't even have to show the trees how to remove carbon dioxide - they've been doing it forever
1 Gillis, J. "Restoring Forests to Fight Warming." New York Times International Weekly (January 3-4, 2015): 1
2 Ibid. 6
