Green Options

Timberland has announced a new policy agreement with Greenpeace to ensure that leather used in new boots and shoes won’t contribute to deforestation in the Amazon.

The policy will issue a moratorium on purchasing any cattle raised in newly deforested areas within the Amazon Rainforest, and it will force all of its suppliers to do the same.

Unrestricted expansion of rubber tree plantations in South East Asia could lead to “devastating environmental effects”, according to authors Ziegler, Fox and Xu writing in a May, 2009 perspective article in Science.

Throughout the “montane” (foot hill and low mountainous) mainland of South East Asia (inclusive of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and China), rubber plantations are expanding. So far, an estimated half million hectares have been planted, and by 2050, that land mass area could triple. This expansion will come at a cost to broad leaf, evergreen forests and “swidden” areas (with vegetation from older slash and burn efforts).

Nike has stopped all imports of leather from the Amazon region of Brazil, after a Greenpeace report claimed that its shoes and trainers could be speeding up the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest and contributing to global warming.

The report, published last month, revealed how cattle hides from deforested areas were entering the supply chains of global brands including Nike, Clarks, Adidas and Reebok.

According to the NGO, deforestation for cattle ranching in Brazil alone is now the biggest driver of deforestation anywhere in the world.

300 volunteers in Pakistan planted 541,176 mangrove trees by hand in a single day, setting the Guinness World Record for tree planting.

The volunteers, using no mechanical equipment, planted the mangroves in the Indus River Delta wetland ecosystem in the Southern Sindh Province of Pakistan, beating India in a friendly competition which seeks to preserve endangered forests and help temper the global warming effects of deforestation.

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.