Green Options

Results recently published in the journal Global Change Biology show a population drop of 60% in worldwide caribou and reindeer numbers over the last three decades.

The dramatic decline in population is likely due to climate change and increased industrial development in boreal forests around the world.

One of the biggest issues facing us right now is global warming. Its effects on animals and on agriculture are indeed frightening, and the effects on the human population are even scarier. The facts about global warming are often debated, but unfortunately, even if we disagree about the causes, global warming effects are real, global, and measurable. The causes are mainly from us, the human race, and the effects on us will be severe.

Japan has agreed to supply Peru with a $120 million loan to help protect approximately 136 million acres of the Amazon Rainforest from deforestation.

The loan will have an annual interest rate of 0.1% and won’t need to be repaid for 40 years. It is part of a plan to help Peru reach a rate of zero deforestation in the next 10 years. Peru’s Minister of the Environment says that the amount of forest that will be protected help store 20 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, aiding in efforts to combat global climate change.

Haiti’s sorrowful rank as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world has been directly attributed to the degradation of Haiti’s natural environment (less than 1.5% of its original tree cover remains intact) as well as a lack of governance structures, underinvestment in social capital, obstacles to private investment, and a spiraling “poverty trap”.

Trees for the Future, a US-based NGO, has planted 65 million trees in dozens of countries. And they’re still going.

For almost exactly 20 years now, Trees for the Future has been coaching farmers on sustainable agroforestry techniques. That’s a fancy way to say farmers can improving their soil and crop quality by planting trees around the farm. The trees help by holding in soil moisture and drawing water back to refill water tables, preventing erosion and improving soil fertility.

Most of you know by now that deforestation, and the emissions that cleared forestlands add to the atmosphere, exacerbates climate change. But it may come as a surprise to learn that the opposite is true. New scientific findings suggest that climate change is threatening remaining forests more dramatically than previously suspected.

Until recently, climate scientists thought that trees, and the biodiversity they support, could withstand a temperature rise lower than 3C. New findings, announced at last month’s Copenhagen “Congress” to discuss climate issues, estimate that a 3C temperature rise will result in a 75% loss of forests. The report’s sponsoring organization, the UK Meteorological Office’s climate change research division, has said that a 4C temperature rise - consistent with current human activities - will cause 85% of trees to disappear.

Under even the most conservative climate change scenario - a 1C temperature jump - will kill off one third of Amazonian forests, which alone contain one tenth of total carbon stored in land ecosystems.

Scientists now estimate that the chance of staying below a 2C temperature rise are only 50%, even if drastic cuts in emissions take place over the next ten years. Already, a .75C temperature rise above pre-industrial has been locked-in, with another .6C expected, based solely upon current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A new study from the journal Nature Geoscience has found that 50% of the total temperature increases in the Arctic over the last century have been due to black carbon, a substance that only stays in the atmosphere for several days to weeks.

This means that if black carbon emissions were immediately halted, it may only take a few weeks for warming trends to reverse by half.

By Lester R. Brown

In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo “ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,” according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin. Each of these governments had belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth’s forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece. Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations. Thus, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.

Unfortunately, even these official data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not reflect the gravity of the situation. For example, tropical forests that are clearcut or burned off rarely recover. They simply become wasteland or at best scrub forest, yet they still may be counted as “forest” in official forestry numbers. Plantations, too, count as forest area, yet they also are a far cry from the old-growth forest they sometimes replace.

The Canadian government has made good on a promise to protect 15.8 million acres of unique British Columbia rainforest–an area more than twice the size of the entire country of Belgium.

From Hawaii, U.S.A. to Limpopo, South Africa and everywhere in between, the push is on to convert coal-fired power plants to burn biomass.  Just in the past few days, FirstEnergy announced plans to convert one of its coal plants into one of the largest biomass plants in the U.S.  As if this full frontal assault wasn’t enough, a major conference is set in July to explore the full potential for converting coal plants to biomass co-firing.  That could bring an eventual end to coal mining operations like the one pictured above, but the question is: where’s all that biomass going to come from?

The Rio state government will build concrete walls around some of the city’s biggest slums (pictured on the hillside above) in an attempt to halt deforestation of the surrounding jungle, officials said.

Seven miles of walls, reaching a height of three metres (10ft) will be built around sections of at least 11 slums this year, Icaro Moreno, the president of the state’s public works department, said.