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Amazon Rain Forest May Go Extinct by 2080 If Deforestation Keeps On    [

    As Brazil's Rain Forest Burns Down, Planet Heats Up
    By Jack Chang
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Saturday 08 September 2007

    Tailandia, Brazil - For more than a decade, Vigilio de Souza Pereira has carved his living out of the thick Amazon rain forest around his ranch in northern Brazil.

    When Pereira needs more land for his crops and cattle, he cuts more virgin jungle and sets the vegetation ablaze. When the nutrient-poor soil has been depleted, he moves on and cuts down more jungle.

    Such slash-and-burn agriculture has helped the 51-year-old Pereira and millions of other farmers and ranchers scratch out a living from the forest, but it's put Brazil at the heart of the environmental challenge of the century.

    As vast tracts of rain forest are cleared, Brazil has become the world's fourth-largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, after the United States, China and Indonesia, according to the most recent data from the U.S.-based World Resources Institute.

    And while about three-quarters of the greenhouse gases emitted around the world come from power plants, transportation and industrial activity, more than 70 percent of Brazil's emissions comes from deforestation.

    Burning and cutting the forest releases hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that the vegetation had trapped. Those gases collect in the atmosphere, prevent heat from escaping and help raise the Earth's temperature.

    Keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere has become crucial to saving the planet from catastrophic climate change, scientists say. However, stopping the destruction of the vast Amazon rain forest means confronting the region's lawlessness and persuading Brazilians such as Pereira to leave the forest alone.

    "Brazil has a huge amount of forest that's still there, and that means Brazil has a much greater role in terms of future deforestation," said Philip Fearnside, a research professor at Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research. "Any changes that happen here have great influence on whether the Earth gets warmer."

    The 1.5-million-square-mile Brazilian Amazon, larger than the entire nation of India, contains more than 40 percent of the world's rain forests, and about a fifth of it already has disappeared, mostly in an "arc of deforestation" along the forest's southern and eastern edges.

    Every year, another chunk of forest the size of Connecticut or larger disappears as farmers, illegal loggers and others clear jungle, mostly without government approval. Violent clashes over land are common, as are murders of environmentalists.

    Stopping the destruction means persuading people such as wood merchant Francisco de Assis to give up selling illegal lumber extracted from the rain forest around the northern Brazilian town of Tailandia.

    The town, little more than a wide spot on the highway a decade ago, has grown into a 54,000-person city of sawmills, bars and hastily built shacks. It also has Brazil's seventh-highest homicide rate.

    "This business is keeping people alive," de Assis said on a recent afternoon as he led potential buyers through just-cleared jungle. "But I don't think there'll be any wood left here in a few years."

    The effects of the Amazon's continued destruction could be especially severe in southern Brazil, where much of the country's agriculture, industry and population is based. About 40 percent of the precipitation there comes from moisture evaporated off the rain forest's thick tree cover. Cutting back more of the Amazon could mean starving the area of water.

    "The hydroclimatic cycle of the Amazon really depends on having forest there," said Thomas Lovejoy, president of the U.S.-based H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. "It's all rolled into one big picture, which in the end comes down to what happens to the forest."

    Veteran diplomat Sergio Serra, who in April was named Brazil's first ambassador in charge of global warming issues, said his country is doing its part by, among other things, strengthening enforcement of environmental laws and creating vast forest reserves.

    As a result, he said, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon dropped by about 50 percent from August 2004 to July 2006. Environmentalists said lower global prices for soybeans grown in the Amazon, as well as tougher enforcement, help explain the drop.

    "Brazil is conscious of its responsibilities," Serra said. "We are already combating the problem with more vigor, and that led to this significant decline."

    Convincing millions of people that they can make more money by leaving the trees alone than by cutting them down is key to saving more of the forest. Already, some farmers are cutting trees selectively and selling the wood as "green" lumber for multiples of the price they'd get for illegal wood.

    Environmentalists say Brazil also could take part in an international market of carbon credits that would pay people not to cut down forest. Brazil's government opposes such a carbon market because it wouldn't reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Serra said.

    Persuading agribusiness giants to stop buying soybeans and other crops grown on deforested land is also crucial, many said.

    "The important thing that we want to show is that if you don't create economic stimulus for protection, it'll be very difficult to have any quick action," said Jose Heder Benatti, the president of a land management agency in the state of Para. "Because we live in a capitalist country, the market is a strong force for action."

    Pereira, the farmer, said he was open to such ideas, although he hadn't yet seen how he could make as much money conserving his land as he does clearing it for cattle, soybeans and other crops.

    Sticking to the status quo, however, isn't a solution, he said.

    "If the forest doesn't exist anymore, our colony will end," he said. "Without the forest, there won't be any rain or any crops."

    Any plan to crack down on deforestation, however, depends on the government's ability to enforce its laws, which farmers said is practically nonexistent in much of the jungle.

    The federal government's environmental agency, for example, has only a third the number of inspectors it needs to do the job in Para, which is three times the size of California, said Anibal Picanco, the agency's superintendent in the state.

    That means land owners such as Dario Bernardes who want to go green often find themselves at the mercy of the jungle's notorious lawlessness.

    Bernardes tried switching to sustainable forestry in 1994 on his 57,700-acre ranch near Tailandia and even won certification from the international Forest Stewardship Council, meaning he could export the wood as higher priced, forest-friendly lumber.

    All that untouched land, however, proved too great a temptation, and armed loggers poured in last year and devastated the property. Federal officials said they'd visited the area and seized illegal wood but couldn't stop the loggers from returning.

    The business, which had employed about 300 people, all but shut down. Today, the ranch is like much of the deforested Amazon - an apocalyptic landscape of charred vegetation and tree stumps.

    "We tried doing this the right way, but we received no support at all," Bernardes said. "If this continues, I don't give the Amazon 50 more years."

 

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    Amazon Rain Forest May Go Extinct by 2080 If Deforestation Keeps On
    Itar-Tass News Agency

    Sunday 09 September 2007

    Buenos Aires - The Amazon Rainforest may go extinct by 2080 if the deforestation rates do not change, Brazilian environmentalist Philip Martin Fernside said.

    In his words, Brazil is one of the countries most affected by the global warming, and it must become a leader in the campaign against deforestation.

    The country is already taking measures to contain the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest. Environment Minister Marina Silva said in late August that they will reduce the deforestation to 9,600 square kilometers from August 2007 through July 2008 as against 14,000 square kilometers in August 2006 - July 2007.

    The problem has not been resolved, mostly through the lack of funds. In the opinion of another expert, Paolo Mautino, the spending of developing countries on conservation of forests should be compensated. The Cabinet of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is promoting this idea.

    In the opinion of the expert, all countries should take an interest in the conservation of the Amazon Rainforest, as the deforestation has a negative effect on the entire climate and enhances the greenhouse effect.

    The Amazon Rainforest, also known as Amazonia or the Amazon Basin, encompasses seven million square kilometers (1.2 billion acres), though the forest itself occupies some 5.5 million square kilometers, located within nine nations: Brazil (with 60 percent of the rainforest), Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. States or departments in four nations bear the name Amazonas after it. The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests and comprises the largest and most species-rich tract of tropical rainforest in the world.

    The main sources of deforestation in the Amazon are human settlement and development of the land. Between 1991 and 2000, the total area of forest lost in the Amazon rose from 415,000 to 587,000 km, an area twice the size of Portugal, with most of the lost forest becoming pasture for cattle.

    Prior to the early 1960's, access to the Amazon was incredibly restricted and aside from partial clearing along rivers the forest remained basically intact. The key point in deforestation of the Amazon was when the colonists established farms within the forest during the 1600s. Their farming system was based on crop cultivation and the slash and burn method. The colonists were unable to successfully manage their fields and the crops due to the loss of soil fertility and weed invasion. The soils in the Amazon are productive for just a short period of time, and the farmers are therefore constantly moving and clearing more and more land. Amazonian colonization was ruled by cattle raising because ranching required little labor, generated decent profits, and awarded social status in the community. However the results of the farming lead to extensive deforestation and caused extensive environmental damage. An estimated 30% of the deforestation is due to small farmers and the intensity within the area that they inhabit is greater than the area occupied by the medium and large ranchers who possess 89% of the Legal Amazon's private land. This emphasizes the importance of using previously cleared land for agricultural use, rather the typical easiest political path of distributing still-forested areas.

    The annual rate of deforestation in the Amazon region has continued to increase from 1990 to 2003 because of factors at local, national, and international levels.

    In 1996, the Amazon was reported to have shown a 34% increase in deforestation since 1992. The mean annual deforestation rate from 2000 to 2005 (22,392 km per year) was 18% higher than in the previous five years (19,018 km per year).

    According to INPE (the National Institute of Space Research), the original Amazon rainforest biome in Brazil of 4,100,000 km was reduced to 3,403,000 km by 2005 - representing a loss of 17.1%.