Mary Allegretti | August 13, 2007
The last 30 years of development in the Amazon have proven an essential rule: Whenever social groups depend on forest resources—for economic and social development—they will work to protect those resources. And the opposite is also true: If the market does not value the natural products of the forest sufficiently, the poor migrants who settle there will cut down the forest and use the land for farming or raising cattle.
The latter is what happened in most of the countries of the Amazon Basin between 1970 and 1990, when military regimes stimulated the transfer of poor groups to remote areas. An inevitable consequence of these movements of poor people into the Amazon was increased deforestation. Most often the migrants would clear the forest, sell the timber, plant for subsistence for one or two years, and then sell out to medium- and large-sized producers. With this money they advance further into the frontier and repeat the same cycle.
But this cycle is not irreversible. In some areas of the Amazon region, small farmers have realized the need to change the system, so that the forests themselves help produce income, and in so doing, the farmers are motivated to help protect the forests.
Many of the former migrants who today protect the Amazonian forest left the northeast region of Brazil to work in the Amazon region during the rubber boom at the end of the 19th century. When cultivated rubber from Southeast Asia replaced Amazonian rubber on world markets at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the workers left the Amazon and became poor migrants or marginalized city-dwellers. But rubber's decline did not completely disorganize the social life that had been built around it: Those who remained in former rubber areas found opportunities to market other naturally occurring Amazonian commodities, including the Brazil nut, oil from the copaiba tree, and, more recently, forest products like the oil and fruit of the assai and artisan craftwork made from native trees and plants. Forging survival from the products of the forest, the former rubber tappers created a genuine forest society in the Amazon region.
In the 1970s, the Brazilian military introduced and made major investments in a new model of Amazonian development based not on sustainable use of resources from the standing forest but on farming, mineral activities, colonization, and large infrastructure projects. One result was conflict, often violent, between those who were already there, depending on the forest for their subsistence, and newcomers who saw the forest as an obstacle to farming, ranching, and other government-supported activities.
Gradually the rubber tappers became aware of their rights to lands that they had been occupying for generations. In 1976 in the state of Acre in the western Amazon region, they found a way to defend their way of life. Known as the empate, a nonviolent form of resistance, this was the first social movement to defend the forest. It was led by Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and the president of the Union of Rural Workers of Xapuri (a city located near the border between Acre and Bolivia). In 1985 it convened similar alliances elsewhere in the Amazon region. With support from national and international nongovernmental organizations, the first National Meeting of Rubber Tappers was organized in Brasília. The meeting had two important results: the creation of a representative entity, the National Council of Rubber Tappers, and the formation of a kind of environmental land reform specifically designed for the forest populations, entitled the Extractive Reserve, or Resex.
The Resex program, and others developed since (including Reserves of Sustainable Development), protect land used by local populations whose subsistence is based on harvesting products from the forest, complemented by agriculture and the farming of small animals. The program has as its basic objective to shelter the ways of life and the culture of the forest-dependent populations whose existence is based on sustainable systems of exploitation of the natural resources (sometimes including logging) developed through generations and adapted to local ecological conditions.
Between 1990 and 2007, 81 such units of land were created encompassing 81,000 square miles, or 4.29 percent, of the Brazil's Amazonian region, benefiting more than 200,000 people. One such unit was founded in 1997 by Brazil's Amapa state: the 32-family Rio Iratapuru Sustainable Development Reserve, located at the mouth of the Iratapuru river, a tributary of the Jari River. This community has undergone a profound transformation. Families that were isolated from one another joined together to form a town. They created a cooperative to organize marketing of the Brazil nut, a staple of the local economy. They also introduced two manufacturing facilities, one to make biscuits and another one for vegetable-oil processing, and formed a partnership with Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company, to share knowledge about and possible benefits of the region's resources.
Similar work has been undertaken by Project RECA, the Joint Economic and Accumulative Reforesting Effort, an association of 364 families located between the Brazilian states of Acre and Rondônia in the western Amazon. RECA was formed in 1989 by migrants who were living in the region under extremely precarious conditions: a malaria epidemic and a lack of infrastructure, schools, and health-care services. After several years felling and burning trees, they realized that the soil would not support agriculture for many years, so they looked for a more sustainable system. They decided to form an agroforestry system based on the fruit of the cupuaçu tree, the pupunha (the palm that produces palm hearts), and Brazil nuts—all resources occurring naturally in the forest. In 1993 they opened a factory to process the cupuaçu, a member of the chocolate family, and started to benefit not only from the pulp, used to make a beverage and other foodstuffs, but from the seed, extracting the oil and making chocolate-like candy. In 1995 they launched commercial production of pupunha seeds, and in 1999 they began to export the seeds as well as palm hearts. The farmers of RECA have an efficient and democratic system of organization and of management that is considered a model in the whole Amazon region.
A group of small producers in a variety of other areas in the Brazilian Amazon has worked out an innovative development policy called Proambiente (Program for the Socio-Environmental Development of Family Production). Proambiente's initial assumption is that qualitative changes are needed to achieve sustainability and that the entire cost of making those changes should not be fully borne by producers since the entire society benefits from the environmental services that are generated. The program advocates six environmental goals: reducing deforestation, absorbing atmospheric carbon, recovering hydrological functions of the ecosystems, conserving land, preserving biodiversity, and reducing the risk of fire. The program is being developed in 11 zones in the Brazilian Amazon and has been defined as national public policy and incorporated into the government's budget. Though Proambiente is still a young program, it represents a radical change in the model of Amazonian colonization.
In my 20 years of experience, it has become clear to me that forest destruction need not be the only approach to the Amazon's natural resources. Others based on politics, innovative resource-management practices, and socio-environmental governance have emerged as well, resulting in more sustainable uses of the forest.
But agrarian conflicts persist, and the creation of protected territories is not enough to secure a sustainable future for the tropical forests and their inhabitants. For one thing, the fruits of the forest do not always command high enough prices to support the newly environmental farmers. Without a serious change in market conditions, it will be necessary for the government to intervene on behalf of indigenous and traditional communities. Securing a sustainable future for the Amazon region, with the added prospect of climate change, requires policies that remunerate the farmer and the forest.
Mary Allegretti, former secretary for the Amazon in Brazil's environment ministry, is a Brazilian anthropologist and independent researcher. From 1981 to 1988 she worked with rubber tapper Chico Mendes, helping define the national concept of protected areas for traditional communities.
The Fractured Landscape
A road here and a cattle ranch there imperil more than the immediate vicinity.
Philip M. Fearnside | August 13, 2007
The landscape in Amazonia is rapidly becoming fractured, weakening the rainforest's capacity to withstand the escalation of ever-stronger assaults, ranging from chainsaws to climate change. The forest is not only being crisscrossed by highways, pipelines, and other kinds of infrastructure. It is also riddled with clandestine logging roads and the scars of forest fires.
DIRECT DESTRUCTION
The dominant form of rainforest destruction is still deforestation, the deliberate cutting of trees with chainsaws, followed by burning to prepare the land for planting. Cattle pasture is the principal land use replacing forest, and large- and medium-sized ranches account for around 70 percent of the clearing. The portion that is cleared by small farmers is often planted for a year or two in annual crops such as manioc or rice, but after this initial use the land winds up converted to cattle pasture just the same.
In some parts of the Brazilian Amazon, highly capitalized soybean plantations are making inroads in the forest. However, the greatest impact of soybeans is not the land directly cleared for this crop, but rather the highways that are built or improved to transport the harvest to deepwater ports, most importantly the BR-163 (Santarém-Cuiabá) Highway that is expected to bring soybeans from Mato Grosso state to the Amazon River. Highways like these set in motion a process of deforestation for ranching and for securing speculative claims to the land that suddenly becomes much more valuable due to the presence of the road. The road also brings logging, landless migrants, and investments in all sorts of forest-destroying activities, both legal and illegal. In addition to highways, other kinds of infrastructure projects lead to forest fragmentation and destruction. These include pipelines for oil and gas, industrial waterways, electrical transmission lines, and hydroelectric dams.
Logging is one of the most pernicious activities. Most Amazonian logging is still illegal and is done with no regard for the damage it causes to the remaining forest when logs are removed. Even legal logging in forest management areas has significant impacts. In Amazonia, the extraordinary diversity of tree species means that most of the trees are not commercially valuable. Clear-cutting for timber, as in the coniferous forests of North America, is not economically viable. Future technologies may change this: Biofuels represent a potential threat to the forest not only for plantations of crops like sugar-cane and oil palm, but also for direct production of alcohol from wood cellulose of any species if methanol production technologies advance as some expect in the coming decades. The future threat of clear-cutting apart, today's selective logging has major consequences.
Logging spreads to vast areas, and the expansion of the highway network dramatically increases the area affected. Logging spreads deforestation by providing access to a vast network of "endogenous roads," by motivating clearing in order to establish land claims to timber-rich forests, and by providing money to pay the costs involved. The aftermath of logging is a forest with many holes in the canopy, allowing sun and wind to dry out the forest floor. A large stock of fuel for forest fires is created by the dead trees killed by machinery or pulled over by vines when neighboring trees fall, together with the branches and other debris left from the harvested trees. This sets the stage for a vicious cycle of degradation by fire that can destroy the remaining trees, leaving a bare area that will appear as deforested on satellite imagery. Logged areas are much more likely to burn than are unlogged areas, and when a fire does occur it is more destructive in the logged area.
Forest fires in Amazonia are very different from those in North America, where fires in coniferous forest like the one portrayed in Walt Disney's film, Bambi, rush through the crowns of the trees. In Amazonia, forest fires take the form of a thin line of flames slowly moving through the forest understory. While the size of the flames may appear unimpressive, their effect on the trees is devastating. Damage is worse because the fire front advances so slowly: Just as you can pass your finger quickly through the flame of a candle and not get burned, if you hold your finger there for a minute the result is entirely different. The fire heats the cambium beneath the bark at the base of each tree trunk, killing many of the trees. These dead trees provide the fuel for the next fire, which will be hotter and will kill more trees. After fire has passed through an area of forest three or more times, the forest is basically destroyed.
INDIRECT DESTRUCTION
Loss of forest to deforestation, logging, and fires contributes to another increasingly apparent threat—climate change. Climate change and forest loss reinforce each other in a positive feedback relationship: Climate change kills forest, leading to more climate change that kills still more forest. Half of the dry weight of the forest is carbon, and when the trees burn or rot they release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. These emissions add to the increases in the atmospheric loads of the gases that come from fossil-fuel combustion and other human activities all over the world. The resulting global warming kills Amazonian trees through a combination of increased temperature and decreased rainfall. When temperatures increase, trees need more water just to survive. Several global climate models indicate that continued global warming would lead to decreased rainfall in Amazonia, along with greatly increased temperature.
A key factor in the changes in Amazonia is the effect of the El Niño phenomenon, which occurs in today's climate when the surface waters in the tropical Pacific warm past a critical threshold. This event has been occurring at increasingly frequent intervals since 1976. The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released earlier this year, indicates that there is now general agreement that "El Niño-like conditions," meaning warm water in the Pacific, will be more frequent with continued global warming. The climate models do not yet agree as to the link to El Niño itself—that is, to the droughts and floods that occur at different locations around the world as a result of the phenomenon triggered by the warm water.
Unfortunately for us in the Amazon, this is the part that we know from direct experience, without depending on climate models. Whenever the water in the Pacific warms, we have droughts and forest fires in Amazonia. If a model shows the Pacific warming up and nothing happening in Amazonia, it means that there is something missing from the models, not that we are safer in Amazonia.
In 2005 Amazonia was hit by a very severe drought that was not caused by El Niño, but was related to global warming. While El Niño is triggered by warm water in the Pacific, in 2005 the drought was the result of a patch of warm water in the Atlantic—the same one that gave rise to hurricane Katrina. A study by Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in 2006, indicates that half of the higher-than-normal temperature of the Atlantic water was directly due to global warming, and much of the remainder was an indirect effect. Continued warming will make such droughts more severe when they occur.
Another indirect effect that reinforces the damage from droughts driven by global warming is the effect of deforestation on water cycling. Two models published in 2007 confirm that deforestation makes the climate over the remaining forest both hotter and drier. These effects augment both the impact of El Niño and the direct effects of global warming, further weakening the forest's resistance to water stress and fire. All of these effects act to intensify and lengthen the natural dry season in Amazonia, shifting the climatic zones so that more of the region becomes climatically appropriate for savanna rather than forest.
PROSPECTS
The course of development in Amazonia is rapidly weakening the remaining forest both through projects directed by development plans and by uncontrolled social processes that advance into new areas regardless of what the government might wish. The infrastructure projects in Brazil's January 2007 "Plan for the Acceleration of Growth" (PAC) have enormous environmental consequences, though these accorded no weight when the plans were announced.
The BR-163 (Santarém-Cuiabá) and BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highways are prime among these. Until now, at least 70 percent of the deforestation activity in Amazonia has been confined to the Arc of Deforestation, a crescent-shaped area along the eastern and southern edges of the forest. These two highways will connect the Arc of Deforestation to the Amazon River, as well as providing entry points to new frontiers north of the Amazon River. The BR-319 is particularly pernicious in opening large, previously inaccessible areas to migration. Planned side roads would open the vast undisturbed block of rainforest in the western part of the state of Amazonas, while the flow of people along the already-existing BR-174 Highway from Manaus to Boa Vista would bring the land conflicts and squatter invasions that are commonplace in the Arc of Deforestation to new areas in the far northern portion of Amazonia.
On the positive side, there are continued advances in forest protection. An important process is the "demarcation" of indigenous areas, that is, marking the boundaries on the ground as opposed to merely drawing them on a map. Another area of progress is the creation of an increasing number of such protected lands, both by the federal and the state governments. These are essential in securing the long-term future of the forest. Maintaining the forest will require more than the usual knee jerk deploying of guards and upping of fines for unauthorized clearing.
The connection of deforestation to infrastructure decisions, however, is the fact that nobody in Brazil wants to face. One can't have both a decline in deforestation and the construction of ever more roads opening up new areas of forest, no matter how many plans for sustainable development and governance are announced simultaneously. Fortunately, the economic force of destruction is not the unstoppable juggernaut that many people unquestioningly assume.
Most of Brazil's deforestation is for cattle ranches that contribute very little to either the national economy or to supporting the Amazon's human population. The number of cowboys needed to maintain the pasture and cattle on these ranches is minimal once the trees have been felled. Some of the infrastructure projects that would be most damaging are highly questionable on purely financial grounds, independent of the astronomical cost they would have if their environmental impact were counted in the calculation. The rationale for the BR-319 Highway is to transport products to São Paulo from the factories in Manaus. Expanding the port in Manaus and sending the products by ship could accomplish this more cheaply and with incomparably less environmental impact.
The processes that fracture the Amazon landscape, such as deforestation, logging, and climate change, all have a momentum of their own that carries them forward even after efforts are begun to alter the course of change in the region and, in the case of climate, in the world as a whole. This means that there is no time to waste before actions are taken. Foreseeing the consequences of continuing on our current course in Amazonia can only help prevent the collapse of the forest if the actions are taken in time.
Biodiversity in Jeopardy
There are more life forms in Amazonia than anyplace else. But by the end of this century, there may be many fewer.
Michael Goulding and Adrian Forsyth | August 13, 2007
The Amazon basin is, above all, our planet's greatest celebration of biodiversity, where for hundreds of millions of years environmental conditions have favored an overall increase in the numbers of species. It is not clear why this has been so. Perhaps the principal factor has been a warm and humid climate, at least in large parts of the Amazon Basin.
Tracing the Amazonian landscape through time, we see huge rivers shifting their courses, rainforests contracting and expanding to the pulse of climatic change, and the evolution of several major ecosystems within the reaches of the world's greatest river network. These factors and others allowed the diversification of both animal and plant species. Indeed, flowering plants have been diversifying there for at least 65 million years. Although the plant species are far less diverse than the animals, it is the structure of the tropical rainforest that supports the millions of animal species found there.
The giant rivers of the Amazon weave together the ecosystems that support our planet's greatest profusion of life. The reflection of the trees that we see splashed across the water's surface is both literally and ecologically a reminder of how closely linked are the rivers and rainforest. In the Amazon one is unimaginable without the other. Flowing through vast floodplains, the Amazon's various river types include muddy, clear, and black-water tributaries, each with its own chemistry and unique combination of species.
The geography on which the rich biodiversity in the Amazon is expressed embraces five main geologic-ecologic regions: the Andes, Amazon Lowlands, Brazilian Shield, Guiana Shield, and estuary. The shield regions are the ancient but now highly eroded uplands (usually below 3,300 feet) north and south of the Amazon River. They are found mostly in Brazil within the Amazon drainage. The diversification of the Amazon flora and fauna is most prevalent here.
Large areas of the Amazon Lowlands have very sandy soils. These sandy regions discharge waters that, depending on light conditions and exact chemistry, appear amber, black, or brownish in color. They are generally called black-water rivers, of which the Rio Negro is the largest and most famous. Most of the rivers in the western part of the Amazon Basin that do not receive Andean sediments discharge black water. In fact the Amazon River may have been a black-water river before the rise of the Andes some 15 million years ago. Black water is usually very acidic in contrast to that found in muddy rivers, such as the Amazon River, whose pH is near neutral. A combination of highly sandy soils and acidic water has led to the evolution of unique flora and fauna in black-water river basins, which are almost biological islands within the larger rainforest.
Approximately 95 percent of the Amazon Basin consists of uplands and 5 percent is wetlands. Five percent might not sound like much, but because the Amazon Basin is nearly the size of the continental United States that means that an area more than two times the size of Florida is inundated to some extent each year. Under natural conditions rainforest covers about one-third to one-half of floodplains. In most of the Amazon lowlands, the floodplains are inundated with water for about six months each year from depths of four to 20 feet. During this time, the rich diversity of arboreal and aquatic life interacts via the flooded forest. Fishes, for example, swim among the flooded rainforest trees.
The Amazon Basin claims the world's richest concentration of flora, with approximately one-third of South America's floristic diversity and one-tenth of that of the planet. There are perhaps as many as 5,000 plant species on Amazon floodplains, including those in rainforest streams.
Because arthropods (jointed invertebrates, which are mostly insects) have been so little studied in the Amazon Basin it is not possible to make an accurate estimate of the total number of animal species that might be present. Estimates range from one to more than 20 million species.
Fishes and birds are the most diverse vertebrate groups in the Amazon. Fishes are by far the least known. Based on taxonomic work in the last four decades, a reasonable guess is that there are at least 3,500 fish species in the Amazon, compared to 800 native species in North America. The Amazon has the richest freshwater fish fauna in the world and also the richest bird fauna of any river valley. At the present rate of taxonomic progress it would take at least another century for Amazon fish species to be described and classified, and distributions known, to the level of those of their North American counterparts.
Amazonian birds are well known and few new species are described each year. The Amazon Basin claims approximately one-tenth of the world's birds, or about 950 of the 10,000 known species. There are many migratory species that contribute to the incredible avian diversity in the Amazon. Bats, with perhaps 150 species, are the richest mammal group in the Amazon, followed by rodents. The Amazon also has the most diverse primate fauna in the New World.
Humans have been in the Amazon Basin for at least 12,000 years, which is not very long compared to their presence on most of the other continents. Their impact on biodiversity, however, has received considerable attention from social scientists, and it is often hypothesized that indigenous peoples greatly modified rainforest and savanna ecosystems before the arrival of Europeans.
The archaeological evidence is sufficient to demonstrate wide occupation of the Amazon Basin and relatively dense human populations in some areas, such as on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon River and in the savanna regions of eastern Bolivia. Some anthropologists have even suggested that the great diversity witnessed in the Amazon today is the result of human-caused forest fragmentation that led to genetic isolation and thus the evolution of new plant and animal species. There is no sound biological data to support this, however, and the evidence now suggests that the Amazon rainforest is very old and was highly diverse before humans arrived. Indigenous peoples undoubtedly had significant impacts on local biodiversity but probably not on regional biodiversity because of the wide distribution of most species.
With the arrival of Europeans, some Amazon plant and animal species began to be heavily exploited for food, but none were driven to extinction. The giant river turtle, manatee, and pirarucu fish were the three most important species exploited until about 1960. The giant river turtles were killed for meat and their eggs were being gathered in the millions by mid-19th century. Their populations plummeted and they have not been allowed to recover to their natural levels. The Amazon manatee was overexploited for meat, hide, and oil by the end of the 19th century. The large pirarucu, a fish species that grows to more than 250 pounds and 10 feet in length, was used as a substitute for salted cod in Brazilian cuisine. All three animals continue to be exploited, though perhaps the manatee is the most threatened.
When South American cities began to grow rapidly after the 1950s, fish became the main protein source of those urban populations. The Manaus and Belém fishing fleets grew exponentially and both began to exploit rivers as far away as 1,200 miles. There were few, if any, regulations. By the 1980s it became obvious that some fish stocks had been overexploited, but more alarming was floodplain deforestation and the introduction of large numbers of cattle and water buffalo, which were eliminating fish habitats that included flooded forests and floating meadows. Unfortunately there is still too much zeal to regulate fishermen and too little effort to protect the habitats on which commercial fish species depend.
Each of the Amazon's five main ecosystem regions faces its own set of biodiversity threats. Perhaps the greatest threats to biodiversity come in the Brazilian Shield and Guiana Shield regions and the floodplain forests of the Amazon lowlands. Large-scale agriculture, such as soybean farming and cattle ranching, has been rapidly expanding in upland areas toward the central Amazon from both the south and north. Brazilian Shield rivers, such as the Tocantins and Tapajós, are becoming more turbid because of increased erosion as the result of large-scale agriculture. Higher turbidity, along with increased pesticides, will undoubtedly threaten aquatic biodiversity in the long run. Floodplain deforestation has been heavy in the past few decades along the lower 1,200 miles of the Amazon River, and this has undoubtedly hurt fisheries.
Many headwater areas of the Andean slopes have been heavily deforested in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, though there is no evidence that this has yet altered rainfall and river-level patterns, impacts that might seriously affect biodiversity. Alluvial gold mining in Peru and Bolivia has increased the sediment load of the Madeira River, a naturally turbid river anyway. Mercury from gold-mining operations has been a serious concern for more than two decades, but fortunately it has not shown up in dangerous levels in fish food chains.
To date there is no evidence that any species in the Amazon Basin has become extinct as a result of human activities, but extinction is probably a poor measure for most Amazon species, as so many of them are widely distributed and have recognizable subspecies. The most likely scenario is that, by the end of the 21st century, the populations of many subspecies will be greatly reduced and in some cases driven to extinction. This, more than loss of a species per se, will decrease the genetic diversity in the Amazon.
The greatest concern that we should now have regarding Amazon biodiversity is our lack of understanding it. At present there are only a few scientists who study some of the huge regions discussed earlier in this article. There has been an arrogance of late; many believe that enough is already known about Amazon biodiversity and therefore that large-scale investment in cataloguing flora and fauna and studying their ecology is not worth the resources required. That naiveté spread across governmental organizations, NGOs, and benevolent foundations, is the major threat to the development of a meaningful conversation on Amazon biodiversity. Until we better understand the extent of the biodiversity out there and how it is distributed, it will be virtually impossible to develop strategies to protect it, given the far-reaching economic development that will take place during this century.
Michael Goulding is a conservation scientist at the University of Florida and the author of numerous books on Amazon ecology.
Adrian Forsyth, board president of the Amazon Conservation Association, is vice president for programs at the Blue Moon Fund and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.
Better Governance
Expanding the network of protected areas and better environmental-law enforcement can help to curb deforestation.
Stephen Schwartzman and Paulo Moutinho | August 13, 2007
A group of scientists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the environmental research group IPAM, and the Woods Hole Research Center have built a satellite-data-driven model of future deforestation scenarios for the Amazon, based on how much has already been cleared and the well-documented historical relationship between building and paving roads and forest clearance. Their conservative, business-as-usual estimate: 40 percent of the existing forest cover of the Amazon (the whole basin, not just the Brazilian part) will be gone by 2050. Worse, no one knows if there is a tipping point, beyond which the ecosystem unravels irreversibly—or where it might be if there is one.
There are other possibilities. When the model is run assuming an expanded network of protected areas and better environmental-law enforcement (the "governance" scenario) it predicts 60 percent less deforestation than under "business-as-usual." But is there any reason to think that a "governance" scenario for the future of the Amazon is more than an algorithm in the model?
Well, yes, there is. Consider the Indian lands in the Brazilian Amazon. Forty years ago, when the frontier was first opening, indigenous peoples had constitutional rights to the lands they traditionally occupied, which was virtually no land. Today they have over 20 percent of the Amazon officially recognized as theirs (two Californias, for about 250,000 people), and they mostly keep people out who they think are going to settle and clear forest. Indian lands are rife with logging and mining invasions, some are seriously threatened by projected hydroelectric power ventures large and small, but you only have to look at the satellite images to see that where the Indian land starts is where deforestation stops. In fact, all kinds of reserves—indigenous, sustainable use, parks—stop deforestation even in the middle of active frontier areas. Creating an indigenous reserve or a park means people illegally deforesting and occupying land will not be able to get title to and sell it. Only incompetent land speculators would pay hired guns to occupy public land that's not no-man's land anymore.
All told, the government has created some 93,000 square miles of newly protected areas in the Amazon over the last four years, as well as unleashed a series of high-profile law-enforcement actions that put hundreds of illegal loggers and corrupt government functionaries in jail, issued millions of dollars in fines, seized mountains of timber and equipment, and shut down sawmills all over the frontier. This, in part, is responsible for about a 60-percent decline in deforestation from 2004 to 2006, along with a strengthened real (Brazil's currency) and falling commodity prices. Repression of illegal activities has worked, but people are out of work, businesses are closing, and resentment is running high and growing along the Trans-Amazon and the BR-163 highways. In the absence of sustained commitment to implementation and enforcement of the newly protected areas, and above all, real economic alternatives for local people, mere law enforcement won't work for much longer.
The private sector is, however, beginning to wake up to eco-consciousness. The Earth Alliance, a cattle ranchers' and soy farmers' NGO, has adopted best-practices standards and satellite-based monitoring methods so that their members can show buyers that they're following the law and will keep on producing without clearing any more forest. There are several efforts to create industry-wide standards for soy, which may ultimately limit its impact. And Brazil's government has created a forestry-concessions law that, through better monitoring and enforcement and by making sustained-yield forestry more competitive, may end illegal logging altogether
The Role of the Public Sector
Concerted governmental policies to protect the forest have been few and far between.
Anthony Hall | August 13, 2007
It is only within the last four decades that governments sharing the Amazon Basin have taken the region seriously. Ignored for centuries as a distant, exotic outpost, Amazonia is now called upon to serve a number of diverse and often contradictory development agendas. These range from economic growth and national integration to biodiversity conservation and the mitigation of global climate change.
Settlement has invariably been accompanied by problems of deforestation, environmental destruction, and land-use conflict. These consequences have been most marked in Brazil, which occupies three-quarters of the Amazon Basin and has the longest history of occupation, but they are becoming increasingly apparent in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Public policy makers thus face major challenges in attempting to protect Amazonia's fragile ecosystems from these pressures while meeting the livelihood needs of its 25 million-plus citizens.
CONSERVING THE AMAZON
Conservation of natural resources, of which Brazil is a leading proponent, has been the most important official environmental policy pursued in the Amazon Basin. Just under 40 percent of Brazilian Amazonia (over 837,000 square miles) presently enjoys some form of government protection in nearly 300 "conservation units," such as national parks, national forests, biological reserves and extractive reserves, as well as indigenous areas.
When fully implemented, the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program (ARPA), the world's largest tropical conservation program, will increase this by a further 70,000 square miles. Tumucumaque National Park alone covers 15,000 square miles and is the world's largest such protected area, accounting for 1 percent of Brazil's rainforest. Peru has over 60 protected areas, most in the Amazon, making up 15 percent of its national territory, while the figure for Bolivia is over 10 percent. In Brazilian Amazonia, landowners are required to maintain 80 percent of their properties as standing forest or "legal reserve." Brazil's advanced system of satellite surveillance of the Amazon (SIVAM) is designed to support environmental policing operations, among other activities.
Although conservation has proved to be the most effective bulwark against advancing frontier settlement in the Amazon, it is fraught with problems of enforcement. Both the Brazilian federal environmental control agency (IBAMA) and state-level environmental control agencies are generally poorly resourced and understaffed. In 2005, for example, IBAMA allocated 850 officials to police a region of 1.9 million square miles, the equivalent of one staff member for almost 2,300 square miles. Furthermore, only a small proportion of fines (3 percent according to one study) imposed by IBAMA is ever collected. Regular allegations of corruption involving officials and the illegal logging industry have undermined the agency's reputation. IBAMA also routinely comes under strong political pressure to relax regulations—by the logging sector most notoriously—and the powerful pig-iron smelting industry in Pará state, which relies heavily for its profits on charcoal supplies obtained illegally from standing rainforest. The effectiveness of such "command-and-control" tactics is also undermined by the fact that indigenous reserves, national parks, and other protected areas suffer from illegal invasions at the hands of land grabbers, gold miners, and loggers.
Yet despite these problems, policing of the forest can make a difference where resources are applied intensively and backed up by strong measures on the ground.
SUSTAINING THE AMAZON
In parallel with the conservation agenda, and following principles espoused in the Brundtland Report (1987) as well as the Earth Summit (1992) held in Rio de Janeiro, efforts have been made to apply principles of sustainable development in the Amazon—combining conservation with environmentally sound economic activities capable of supporting local populations. The murder in 1988 of Brazilian rubber tappers' leader, Chico Mendes drew international attention not just to the rainforest but to forest-dwelling populations whose survival depends on the nondestructive use of natural resources. Policy making, it was acknowledged for the first time, had to take into account their interests as part of any development or environmental plan for the region.
Some new models of development are adapted from traditional and indigenous land uses, which integrate local economic activities with preservation of the region's natural capital. A sustainable development plan is being implemented along the infamous BR-163 Highway in Brazil, which links soybean production areas in Mato Grosso to grain export terminals on the Amazon River.
These are encouraging ventures, but they demand new skills and support facilities that are often difficult to acquire in the short term. The "Amazon factor," a combination of adverse regional conditions, is often blamed for frustrating such development efforts. These challenging elements include: harsh physical and climatic conditions; poor infrastructure in terms of power supplies, roads, communications, credit and technical assistance; distance from urban markets; lack of organizational and managerial capacity at the grassroots level; the perishable nature of tropical products; low standards of quality control; and, not infrequently, poor planning that takes no account of the economic feasibility of new local enterprises but relies rather on undue optimism sustained by financial aid from well-meaning donors.
Overseas development assistance has been instrumental in supporting the design and implementation of major environmental policies in the Amazon, especially by reconciling more traditional conservation goals with the principles of sustainable development. The $428 million Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7), launched in 1993 and administered through the World Bank, was funded by the European Union, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. It has supported a range of conservation and sustainable development activities such as extractive reserves, agroforestry, development of science and technology in the Amazon, decentralization of environmental management to the state level, and a highly successful program to demarcate indigenous reserves.
The Global Environment Facility, set up in 1991 as the institutional arm of the Convention on Biological Diversity, whose funds are channeled through the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, and United National Environment Program, has been pivotal in supporting conservation activities to the tune of over $80 million. The Inter-American Development Bank has supported many Amazonian projects in fields as diverse as sustainable furniture manufacture, ecotourism, and the marketing of forest tree products. In addition to these multilateral donors, bilateral support for Amazon development has come directly from U.S., European and other governments.
Yet despite this international commitment to promoting sustainable development in Amazonia, contradictions are sometimes apparent. Within the World Bank Group, for example, environmental standards are not uniformly applied. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which deals with governments, has increased its support for the region and is careful to apply strict environmental safeguard policies. Yet the private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has a less demanding set of rules. Recently, the IFC came under heavy fire for financing major cattle and soybean enterprises in Brazilian Amazonia, activities normally associated with deforestation, without adequate screening against potentially harmful environmental impacts.
IS AMAZONIA GOVERNABLE?
In Amazonia governments are faced with competing agendas for the environment and for the economy that must somehow be reconciled, a difficult task even with the best political will in the world. Public policy optimists often assume that the forces driving Amazon deforestation will readily respond to official regulation. Outright conservation and intensive policing can indeed be effective if properly executed and may halt the advance of ranching, farming, and logging. Yet the uncomfortable fact is that such measures are relatively ineffective when viewed within the wider scheme of things. Destructive forms of land use may simply be diverted towards unprotected areas. Policing and law enforcement face formidable logistical challenges. Further-more, the limited scale and as yet unproven long-term viability of most sustainable development projects imposes further limitations. This situation is not helped by the fact that governments themselves tend to invest very little of their own money into these alternative approaches, often relying instead on overseas aid to foot the bill.
This is the crux of the matter. Domestic funds are usually reserved for the more "serious" business of supporting mainstream, export-oriented economic development, such as ranching, logging, mining, or soybean farming. Much evidence suggests that forest loss is influenced not so much by environmental policy per se as by these wider economic activities and the market forces that drive them. Deforestation rates increase during periods of rising commodity prices when investments are profitable. Such trends are reversed when prices fall or when successful economic stabilization takes place, as occurred in Brazil during the mid-1990s, for example, when land speculation became less attractive.
Other adverse ecological impacts are due directly to government action or connivance with private interests. Traditionally, government subsidies in Brazil and neighboring countries have strongly supported cattle ranching, mining, and other commercial enterprises. One example of blatant official disregard for Amazonia's environment is oil production in Ecuador's Oriente province. As the country's major source of export revenue, during the 1970s and 1980s oil production rose rapidly, and foreign companies were granted virtually free license to pollute. Only when the indigenous movement rose up to place a check on exploration and drilling operations, and companies such as Texaco were obliged to respond to legal challenges, was the industry brought under some degree of control.
Brazil's $240 billion Accelerated Development Plan emphasizes investments in the energy and transport sectors for Amazonia, but its proposed hydropower schemes in western Amazonia have been heavily criticized for ignoring environmental safeguards. In response to such objections, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vociferously complained recently that national development was being compromised by catfish—a reference to the dangers posed to migrating fish by dam construction, a phenomenon highlighted by environmentalists. In another sign of governmental frustration with environmental campaigners and regulatory bureaucracy, the federal environmental control agency (IBAMA) was restructured this year to streamline project licensing and facilitate the execution of infrastructure projects.
In view of these competing economic and environmental agendas, it is not clear that public policy as such can ever play a role in seriously shaping Amazonian development along more ecologically friendly lines. Such progress will necessitate a more integrated, cross-sector approach on the part of governments than has been the case so far. Authorities must be capable of coordinating planning and action across a range of ministries in order to encourage harmony and compatibility of development objectives with environmental goals. For this to come about, however, it will also require stronger political and financial commitment on the part of governments working in collaboration with civil society and backed up by clear and consistent policies toward Amazonia on the part of international development organizations.
Anthony Hall, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, has more than three decades of experience working in Brazil and Amazonia.
Till the Cows Come Home
Once economically marginal, cattle ranching in the Amazon now yields big bucks.
Mark London and Brian Kelly | August 13, 2007
Marabá, the traditional hub for logging and gold-mining activities, also serves as the capital of cattle ranching in the Brazilian state of Pará. Located in southern Pará at the intersection of a trunk road of the Belém-Brasília with the Trans-Amazon highways, Marabá is also intersected by both the train that runs from the mineral-rich Carajás hills to the port of São Luís and the Tocantins River, which is navigable all the way to Belém.
As the cattle-ranching industry matured first around Marabá, many of the early conclusions about its impact were drawn from nearby areas. During our first series of visits in the early 1980s, we had traveled uncomfortably by bus from Marabá to Belém for more than 18 hours. We wrote, "We gazed out the window at evidence for dire predictions of what would happen to the entire Amazon if it were cleared. The stampede into the jungle here had begun only two decades before with the completion of the Belém-Brasília Highway. Rapidly trees had been cut and burned to make way for pasture. Crops of grass sown in their place had grown sparser each year until they quit growing altogether. Thin cows wandered miles between meals. The desert of failed ranches went on for an hour—gray sky, gray dirt. It was 50 miles of moonscape."
The lunacy of the activity became even clearer as we traveled from ranch to ranch and found out that no one was making money. People had perfected methods of deforestation but were clueless about how to raise cattle profitably.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the government offered generous subsidies throughout Amazonia for agriculture, primarily cattle ranching. The military government's motivation was geopolitical, not economic. Typically the land grants and financial support went to well-heeled individuals or large corporations cozy with the government.
The cattle industry has been under attack since the environmental movement first focused on the Amazon. The furor over this subsidized destruction intensified in the 1980s when a sensational, but inaccurate, rumor spread that the "hamburger connection" was the primary culprit of Amazon deforestation. People in the Amazon, the theory went, were landless so that Americans could eat the cows that displaced them. None of this was true (at the time the United States wasn't importing Brazilian beef), but it did make good press.
The strategy of the environmental movement could be relatively simple: cut off government subsidies, and cattle ranching would cease. The forest would be safe. Part of the plan was implemented, as the government curbed subsidies by the early 1990s. Yet, from 1990 to 2005, the cattle population in the Amazon increased from 26.2 million head to 65 million. At the same time, the total amount of deforested land in the Amazon increased from about 160,000 square miles to 240,000 square miles. With a 5.5-to-1 ratio of clearing for cattle over clearing for farming, the cows were the culprit.
Somewhere along the way, a significant assumption underlying the stop-subsidies-and-you-will-stop-cattle argument changed. Cattle ranching be-came profitable. A breakthrough study conducted by Sergio Margulis of the World Bank in late 2003 highlighted this change in economics: "[Beef] cattle ranching in Eastern Amazonia or on the consolidated frontier is highly profitable from the private perspective and it produces rates of economic return higher than those obtained from the same activity in the country's traditional cattle-ranching areas [in the south]. In addition to the availability of cheap land, these returns are the result of surprisingly favorable production conditions—mainly rainfall, temperature, air humidity, and types of available pasture. The direct return on cattle ranching itself (excluding profits from the sale of timber) consistently exceeds 10 percent." The business is even more impressive when you consider that ranching land is an appreciating asset. The land's appreciation provides a private alternative to government support, as banks, viewing the land as adequate collateral, willingly loan capital to support cattle ranching. Now the operation and the asset underlying it both make money.
We traveled to the fairgrounds on the outskirts of Marabá to interview James "Jimmy" de Senna Simpson, the Pará treasurer of the Rural Producers' Union, and Diogo Naves Sobrinho, the Pará president of the cattle association. Tired of being vilified in the world press, attacked by Greenpeace, and besieged by the landless movement trying to occupy their lands, neither welcomed us warmly.
"I obey the law. I make money," said Simpson of his cattle business.
There was no reason to doubt either statement. But they spell doom for the trees of the Amazon, unless a way can be found to reconcile the rights of these law-abiding citizens, participating in a free-market economy, with the perceived environmental needs of a larger group in the region as well as those far removed from the site. To the extent Amazon deforestation affects global warming, these lawful activities are the culprits. But under what theory do you punish someone for obeying the law?
Simpson, whose family emigrated from Scotland in 1948 to work on cattle ranches in the south, arrived in Pará in 1992. About 50 and balding, dressed in a polo shirt and neatly pressed jeans, he sat behind a clean desk in an air-conditioned office in the empty fairgrounds, speaking with confidence in his cause. "Amazonia isn't what they say it is outside of Brazil. It's not full of criminals or being destroyed. It's growing and developing. It's the last agricultural frontier whether that's what the world wants or not."
There is a seemingly endless supply of land in the Amazon and a seemingly endless demand for meat in the world. Between 1997 and 2003, the volume of beef exports from Brazil increased from about 232,000 to about 1.2 million metric tons. The increased supply has lead to a steadying of, even reduction in, beef prices in Brazil and the export market, making this source of protein more affordable. Additionally these exports have provided approximately $1.5 billion of sorely needed foreign-exchange earnings for the country. Simpson reminded us that Brazil had become the largest exporter of beef in the world. "And this is why the United States doesn't want the Amazon to develop: competition."
Such arguments once were the defensive posturing of rapacious ranchers in the Amazon. Most observers thought that the problem would eventually evaporate: Brazil would tire of propping up an industry that was not only unprofitable but also internationally unpopular. The ranchers would return to their homes in the south. But the ranchers who stayed, through years of trial and error with different types of pasture grass and with different cattle breeds, now present a more perplexing dilemma. When economic activity, dependent on the environment, becomes profitable, the issues are joined. In the 1970s, no one other than the generals could justify the massive deforestation caused by ranching. Today, the free market justifies it.
Excerpted from The Last Forest: The Amazon in the Age of Globalization by Mark London and Brian Kelly. Copyright © 2007 by the authors and reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
Climate Change and the Forest
Warming breeds drought, drought breeds fires, fires release carbon, carbon breeds warming.
Daniel Nepstad | August 13, 2007
In 1984, on the outskirts of Paragominas, a bustling and violent cattle town in the eastern Amazon, I walked through a pasture, brown and dusty from drought, into a 500-acre island of virgin forest. The moist greenness of the leaf canopy that reached more than 100 feet above my head and the squishy dampness of the humus, dead leaves, and branches on the ground were a world apart from the parched African grasses and gaunt white zebu cows I had just seen. Although I didn't realize it at the time, it is in understanding the differences between these two worlds -- the rainforest and the cattle pastures that are replacing them -- that we begin to realize how the lives of people around the world are tied to the fate of Amazon forests. The climate of the Amazon and the climate of the planet are both dependent upon the deeply rooting, drought-resistant trees that comprise Amazon forests, just as the survival of these trees depends upon climate. The risk is that the early symptoms of climate change will act synergistically with logging, fire, and drought to replace much of Amazon rainforests with fire-prone scrub vegetation, accelerating global warming in the process.
To penetrate the complex web of relationships between climate and rainforest, we must begin with a lesson in tree physiology. Hug a tree on a warm, sunny day, and your arms surround thousands of tiny, little tubes full of water that is racing silently skyward, like soda up a straw. Everyone has seen these tubes, which biologists call "vessels" and "tracheids." They help form the grain in wood. Seasonal variations in the diameters of these tubes make up the growth rings we see on the cut surfaces of tree trunks. Wood is the plant world's most successful invention for accomplishing two extraordinarily difficult tasks. Its remarkable strength allows trees to position their leaves to capture sunlight far above the ground. And its exquisite plumbing network of vessels and tracheids supplies these leaves with water absorbed from the soil.
For many years it was assumed that Amazon trees are not very good at absorbing water from the soil because of their very shallow root systems. Back in 1984, as I returned to that 500-acre forest island nearly every day of the five-month dry season, the mismatch between the assumption and what I was seeing slowly sank into my graduate-student mind. Some simple calculations led me to predict that the towering, green trees had to be absorbing moisture from at least 25 feet beneath the ground surface, well beyond the two- or three-foot rooting depth assumed by most. Otherwise these trees would have turned brown and gone dormant, just like the African forage grasses planted in the neighboring pasture. Twenty-five feet was the depth of soil needed to store the amount of water that the forest was releasing to the atmosphere through "transpiration" -- the evaporation of water from leaves into the air -- and that was not being supplied by the meager, dry-season rains that had fallen. I hired some well-diggers from Paragominas, a town south of Belém, to test my calculations and look for deep roots. One hearty digger dug down 68 feet, aided by an industrial fan that pumped fresh air into his damp, dark, grave-sized hole. The last tree roots disappeared 60 feet beneath the ground's surface. By 1992 my research team had dug dozens of deep holes across the Amazon with similar results. The assumption of shallow rooting in Amazon trees was put to rest in 1994 as we published our results in the journal Nature despite stiff resistance from some reviewers of our controversial findings.
Deep roots are far more than a botanical curiosity. For by allowing Amazon forests to remain green and lush during the severe seasonal droughts that affect about half of the Amazon region each year, these cryptic tree organs facilitate the release of enormous amounts of water to the atmosphere through transpiration. Thanks to deep roots, Amazon trees can supply the atmosphere with vapor year round, and this vapor is the most important ingredient of rain clouds in this region. The year-round greenness of Amazon forests is important for another reason. Fires that are lit by cattle ranchers to kill the woody brush that invades their pastures often escape from control, and burn right up to the edge of the neighboring forest. Usually the fire goes out as it encounters the damp leaves and branches lying on the forest floor. But in 1984, ecologists Christopher Uhl and Robert Buschbacher made a disturbing discovery, also in the Paragominas region. The burgeoning logging industry of Paragominas was creating ragged holes in the rainforest, damaging 20 trees for every choice timber tree that it harvested. Uhl and Buschbacher went to forest after forest and the result was the same. The holes created by the logging teams were allowing sunlight to stream into the forest interior, drying up the damp humus and dead leaves, turning the forest floor into kindling. In the wake of logging crews, forests were losing their resistance to fire -- and were burning.
In 1992 I got my first frightening glimpse of the future of the rainforest in a warming world. The water temperature of the ocean off the coast of Peru started to heat up in a particularly severe El Niño episode. El Niño changes atmospheric circulation patterns around the world, making it rainier in some places (like California and São Paulo) and drier in other places (like the eastern Amazon and Borneo). In Paragominas it had rained only four inches in five months, and the trees were starting to show their thirst. During our monthly measurement of leaf water stress (imagine eight men climbing trees on mountain-climbing ropes, plucking leaves from the branches just before sunrise!), my jaw dropped as I measured each leaf with the same sobering result. The forest had run out of water! Leaf water stress had skyrocketed.
A few days later, it rained three inches, and the drought was over. But what would have happened had the drought continued? Would the forest have shed its leaves, becoming an enormous tinderbox? Would trees have died? Which ones? I realized that I couldn't wait for the next El Niño episode to find out, and I had my field crew start to build a small roof in the forest to divert rainfall from the soil. Satisfied that we could simulate a truly severe El Niño episode to learn how the forest reacts to a depletion of soil moisture, I began to raise money to expand the little soil shelter to 2.5 acres. In 1997, as forty laborers dug trenches, built towers up into the forest leaf canopy, and constructed 6,000 clear plastic panels to divert water from the soil, Peruvian coastal waters began to heat up again. For the first time, small fires that I set on the forest floor had to be put out. The humus and dead leaves had dried enough to catch fire, even without the help of logging crews. By the end of the 1997 dry season, the 500-acre forest I knew so well was gradually slipping over the edge. As our research team looked at the rainfall data from the region, we realized that this was not a local phenomenon. The forests of the eastern Amazon were being pushed to the limit of their drought tolerance. It was an environmental crisis in the making.
Our news release to the Brazilian media met with denial. Government officials declared that "the Amazon forest does not catch fire" even as the low (shin-high) naturally occurring fires burned for weeks into virgin rainforest, invisible to the official satellite-based fire-detection system. But the denial quickly melted away in January of 1998, as forest fires moved across the Brazilian state of Roraima and the homeland of the Yanomami Indians. The fires became an international emergency as images of indigenous families driven from their forest homes ran on prime-time television. The Brazilian government requested a $15 million loan from the World Bank to prepare itself to fight forest fires, and our little research team raced to map out the forests that were at greatest risk. In May of 1998, we presented our map of forest-fire risk to the Brazilian Congress, warning the government that forests once burned were more likely to catch fire again in a vicious cycle. As we had seen from previous burns, forest fires toasted the bark at the base of trees, condemning many of these giant organisms to slow death, creating gaping wounds in the canopy. As the 1997–1998 El Niño episode roared on, drought, fire, and the risk of further burning came together in a recipe for large-scale forest destruction. More than 15,000-square miles of forest -- an area twice the size of Massachusetts -- caught fire during this drought episode.
The 1997–1998 El Niño episode finally came to a halt just as we installed the last plastic panels across a patch of rainforest soil, initiating a four-year-long period of reduced rainfall. During the third year of our experiment, which I led together with my long-term friend and colleague, Paulo Moutinho, one of our main predictions fell flat. Instead of small trees succumbing first to the effects of our imposed drought, the largest trees began to die. Deprived of soil water to a depth of 45 feet, the sun-exposed leaves of the tallest trees become particularly vulnerable to tissue damage and death. Like logging and forest fire, a severe drought kills some of the trees that contribute most to the deep, damp shade of the forest interior, and therefore increases the risk of forest fire for years after the drought has gone by.
As I survey the forests of the eastern Amazon from forest trails, small airplanes, buses, or pickup trucks, I see a magnificent ecosystem teetering precariously close to a tipping point. El Niño episodes may become more common in a warming world, some climatologists believe. And in 2005, the warming waters between western Africa and the Gulf of Mexico showed us that there is more to worry about than El Niño. The warming of the tropical North Atlantic Ocean in 2005 gave North America one of its most brutal hurricane seasons, with devastating consequences for New Orleans. This same anomalous warming of the North Atlantic also created a high-air-pressure system above the Amazon that inhibited the rains over large areas of the central and western Basin. Hundreds of riverside villagers were stranded, unable to navigate the rivers for lack of water. Fish kills contaminated water supplies, and palls of smoke provoked respiratory ailments. We don't know the full extent of fire damage for 2005. But in the southwestern corner of the Amazon, at least a thousand-square miles of forest caught fire.
At some time in the near future, we may see a mega-drought that extends for three years that kills trees and fosters fire across a third or fourth of the Amazon Basin. Every dead tree will slowly release the carbon in its wood into the atmosphere as it decomposes or burns. There are approximately 120 billion tons of carbon stored in the wood of Amazon trees, equivalent to 15 years of today's worldwide, human-induced emissions of carbon to the atmosphere. A catastrophic period of drought and fire could erase the gains made in lowering greenhouse-gas emissions through the Kyoto Protocol, and through the many new initiatives underway in California and elsewhere. And if such a devastating drought crippled the forest's ability to pump vapor into the atmosphere, feeding the rain clouds that supply the entire region, the chances of another mega-drought would become greater.
It is in all of our interests to prevent this scenario of widespread destruction of the Amazon. A promising new system for rewarding those tropical countries that achieve success in lowering their greenhouse-gas emissions from tropical forests could be the carrot that is needed to encourage Brazil and other nations to do what the United States was unable to do: keep most of its virgin forests standing.
Daniel Nepstad is senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center and founder of the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM).
The global economy discovers the most obscure corner of the rainforest.
Mark J. Plotkin | August 13, 2007
Ask someone the location of Suriname and you are as likely to hear "Africa" and "Asia" as you are "South America." While Latin America is demographically dominated by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Catholics, the Guianas -- from west to east the countries of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana on the northeastern shoulder of South America -- comprise a curious mosaic left by British, Dutch, and French colonization with input from indigenous populations, as well as Africans, Hindustanis, Indonesians, Chinese, Jews, Lebanese, and even Laotians and Cambodians.
So off the beaten track is this corner of the world that even the origin of the region's name is in dispute. According to most references, the term "Guianas" comes from an Amerindian word meaning "Land of Waters." This is certainly untrue: in the dominant tribal dialects, the suffix "yana" means "people." The name in fact represents an English corruption of a Spanish spelling of the name of a tribe living on the borders of Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil. The correct name and spelling of this tribe is "Wayana," but the early Spanish explorers wrote it on their maps as "Juayana" or "Guayana."
For two reasons, all three Guianas are of enormous interest from the viewpoint of conservation and development. The first is their extraordinary amount of relatively pristine rainforest (they retain over 80 percent of the original forest cover). The second is their extraordinarily low population densities -- among the lowest in the world. Suriname, with an area roughly that of the U.S. state of Georgia, has fewer people than Oklahoma City.
From a conservation perspective, these low population densities can prove both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that the abundance of natural resources is not being threatened or even destroyed by the survival needs of huge numbers of poor people, as in Haiti or El Salvador. The curse is that these small populations are potentially more susceptible to corruption. In an increasingly globalized world, in which small countries feel ever more marginalized and unable to compete economically on the global stage, there is increased temptation to sell off resources at bargain-basement prices.
In Suriname, for example, a recent influx of cheap foreign goods -- particularly from China -- has out-competed local businesses to the point where a business suit can be purchased for the same price as a bag of Brazil nuts. The death and dearth of local businesses in both Suriname and Guyana mean that people often have to work two, three, or four jobs to survive. The lure of easy money in the drug trade or the willingness to turn a blind eye to such illegal activities as uncontrolled gold mining becomes ever greater.
International tourism -- and ecotourism in particular -- is among the world's fastest growing industries. Ecotourism in the tropics in the Western Hemisphere got much of its start in Suriname. Thirty years ago, when much of what we now call ecotourism fell under the category of bird-watching, three of the most popular destinations were Costa Rica, Peru, and Suriname. Political difficulties in the 1980s all but choked off this trade in Suriname for well over a decade, but ecotourism is now again on the rise across the Guianas. Given the relatively pristine state of their ecosystems, these countries are especially well positioned to capture an increasing share of global ecotourism revenue, provided they build the necessary infrastructure and protect the resources on which this trade depends.
Conservation has a long history in the Guianas: the first protected area was established at the spectacular Kaieteur Falls of Guyana in 1921. Suriname has the most extensive system of parks and protected areas of any of the three countries; the reserves are superb although the infrastructure is not. Beginning in 1947, Suriname's government was determined to establish a system of protected areas which would include a broad cross section of the many ecosystems found there, from rainforest to savannas and from granitic mountains to beaches where sea turtles nest. This system covers over 14 percent of the country and serves as a major draw for ecotourists coming to Suriname. Better management, infrastructure, and marketing would result in a sharply increased tourism industry.
Both French Guiana and Guyana lag far behind Suriname in their protected-area systems. Guyana has long been planning the establishment of a series of national parks, but much of this is still in the discussion stage. In 2006 French Guiana announced the establishment of the "Parc du Sur," an enormous tract that covers over a quarter of the country. Detailed management plans and a trained guard force are still urgently needed.
While much of the discussion of conservation in the Western Hemisphere tropics (in general) and the Amazon (in particular) has centered on national parks, a long-overlooked component of rainforest conservation has been the lands of indigenous peoples. In Suriname, national parks and protected areas cover around 14 percent of the country, yet lands claimed by the Trio and Wayana tribes of the interior cover close to 50 percent. Furthermore, indigenous peoples depend on these forests and know them far better than any outsiders (including park guards and scientists). They clearly constitute underutilized allies for the protection of these ecosystems, but these indigenous peoples (and their friends in both the government and the NGO world) must do a far better job of making the case that they should be seen as the cutting edge of the conservation vanguard. As long as recognizing the land rights of indigenous peoples is seen by national governments as a sacrifice rather than as a conservation and sustainable-development opportunity, this type of "biocultural" conservation -- protecting both biodiversity and indigenous culture -- will be an underutilized tool in the conservation toolbox. There are signs of hope: Guyana has already made some tentative steps in this direction by granting titles to land to indigenous communities, and both Suriname and French Guiana are considering similar proposals.
Nonetheless, all three countries stand at a conservation crossroads. For much of recorded history, these territories were largely cut off from much of the outside world. However, in a political world driven to compete for and capture natural resources -- particularly with the advent of Brazil, China, and India as major players in the global marketplace -- all three Guianas are receiving attention from old and new industrial superpowers in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. None of the Guianas have powerful local conservation lobbies, and the seductiveness of big monies for natural resources in depressed economies is very real. Mining and forestry are not new to these countries, but the scope of potential projects being discussed or even planned goes far beyond what has taken place before.
Mark J. Plotkin is president of the Amazon Conservation Team.
Deforestation and Global Markets
An Amazonian dilemma: Brazil has become a global producer, and China a global consumer.
Stephen Schwartzman and Paulo Moutinho | August 13, 2007
Forest clearing on Amazonia's expanding frontiers is not about desperate poor people clearing the forest to eat. It is about land sharks fighting it out over the best parts and forcing the little fish to pick over the remains. In the wake of forest clearing, ranchers, agribusiness, and small farmers become established, more forest is cleared every year -- and the frontier moves on.
Deforestation per se is relatively easy to monitor and measure using satellite data, and Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been doing so accurately since 1988. Historically the rate of deforestation has varied with fluctuations in the economy and the weather, but the long-term average is about 6,900 square miles per year. The frontier got its start in the 1970s with the military government's geopolitically inspired roads, harebrained colonization schemes, and fat subsidies for cattle ranching, then cruised through the '80s and early '90s when placer gold mining and mahogany logging kicked in. In the first years of the millennium, however, the level of development rose dramatically. While Brazil's economic growth stagnated, deforestation climbed steadily to 10,500 square miles in 2004, the second highest year on record.
This dramatic and historic change came about when global markets began to reach out and touch the Amazon. China's soaring demand for soy (pig and chicken feed for an increasingly prosperous population) coincided with increased demand for soy in Europe following the outbreak of mad cow disease. Beef prices also spiked, and with a weak real (the Brazilian currency), Brazilian exports were cheap. Agribusiness exports from the Amazon brought Brazil record trade surpluses even with limp GDP -- but drove deforestation higher.
Now it's showtime for Brazil's burgeoning participation in global commodity markets. Brazil could overtake the United States as the world's biggest soy producer. The Amazon now produces 2 million tons of soy a year. In 1995 it wasn't even 200,000. Brazil's cattle market is about to boom as well, though the country has yet to eradicate hoof-and-mouth disease in its cattle herd. Hoof-and-mouth disease rarely bothers people, but it wreaks havoc on livestock, so the United States and the European Union won't take fresh meat from the Amazon region of Brazil. However, the region is on the verge of being certified by an international, industry-financed watchdog, which will open up these rich markets. In the meantime, there is burgeoning demand from Russia and the Middle East. And since researchers have developed new strains suited to the hot, wet Amazon in recent years, soy in the Amazon has only just taken off.
There is plenty to be worried about here. Clear-cutting and burning ranch-sized swaths of forest is easy enough to detect from space. But there is a lot of other damage that is harder to see from a distance that is potentially just as bad. Selective logging, for rapidly dwindling supplies of mahogany and other high-end hardwoods, may affect as much land as is deforested every year. Even very selective logging (a tree per 2 acres or less) can have serious effects. Some forest-climate models predict that half the Amazon could turn into savanna by midcentury if global CO2 emissions continue unabated.
Oil development in Peru and Ecuador, the expansion of soy farming in Bolivia, and coca cultivation, cattle ranching, and civil war in Columbia are also threatening the ecological stability of the region, and in some cases, the lives and livelihoods of indigenous and local peoples. But because of Brazil's large-scale clear-cutting of the Amazon, no country has yet approached the magnitude of that country's threat to the environment and its own people.
The Search for Solutions
From indigenous people to carbon traders, concerned groups have stepped up the fight to save the Amazon.
Roger D. Stone | August 13, 2007
Brazil has a prodigious ability to spend billions of dollars on Amazonian projects of little benefit to Amazonian people, flora, and fauna. In 1997 the federal government launched SIVAM (System for the Vigilance of the Amazon), a $1.4 billion program to deploy a fleet of 33 airplanes, specially equipped with sensitive monitoring gear, along the nation's northern frontier. The principal purpose of this shield is to enhance national security by offering protection in an area almost entirely bereft of roads or people of any sort, let alone forked-tongued foreign devils.
Growing numbers of huge hydroelectric plants supply heavily subsidized power to aluminum smelters along Amazonia's rivers and to large cities in Brazil's southern region. Meanwhile, locals who need far less energy than is being supplied must cope with the environmental consequences of damming and flooding the once-pure rivers. Decomposing forests flooded to create the dams, some of which generate scant power in return for the damage they cause, emit vast amounts of methane, a far deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The cleanest airport terminal buildings this side of Switzerland, in Belém and in Manaus, (p'ra Inglés ver, as they say -- for the English to see) lie in discouraging proximity to some of Brazil's most fetid slums. Poorly planned road projects open up new areas to deforestation and cattle ranching while doing little to improve the flow of goods to markets.
It would be an exaggeration to call such efforts part of a "grand design" for the region. The projects mentioned above, and others like them, were hatched and bred separately, not as part of an overall policy. At the outset of the presidency of Brazil's current leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has expressed disdain for environmental issues, the environmentalist and anthropologist Mary Allegretti designed, wrote, and circulated for the Environment Ministry a well-reasoned sustainable development plan for the region. With its ink still wet, it disappeared. Says the author: "There simply was not enough power in the Environment Ministry to convince the other branches of government to take sustainable development seriously."
In the absence of agreed-upon alternatives to conventional development models, it seems likely that Amazonian nations will in large measure continue to go in for conventional development. Road-building projects will open up new lands to logging, ranching, and oil, gas, and mineral exploration. Some projects are already in high gear. The advance of agricultural frontiers, with forest cutting and burning as inevitable accompaniments, will render the region ever more vulnerable to drought and to further devastation from fires. Airports will continue to close each burning season because of the thick smoke from the fires, and the smoke itself will contribute to global warming.
As long as good returns can be made from soy, logs, and cattle, there is little reason to doubt that the so-called Arc of Deforestation will continue its expansion into previously little-touched areas. Five percent of all soy produced anywhere now comes from Amazonia, and this number is bound to climb, assuming the market continues to grow. It seems unlikely that Amazonian nations would miraculously shift gears and do what few societies anywhere in the world have ever done: control the human impulse to make way for farmland by cutting down trees.
Despite all the above, as we said at the outset of this report, there are reasons to think that, out of the jumble of conflicting forces now shaping the region's future, there will emerge a middle ground of adequate development and adequate protection. Several of this report's authors see advances, as well as the predictable retreats, toward the elusive nirvana of "sustainability." "There's plenty to report other than gloom and doom," says primatologist Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and a three-decade veteran of Amazonian involvements. "I'm gung ho about the Amazon."
At the broadest level, the measured view is related to discerning Amazonia not as a huge, steamy, unbroken stretch of wet forest and endless rivers, but as a diverse mosaic. Its landscape is defined not only by the advancing agricultural frontier, but also by natural ecological divisions between rich and poor soils, mountains and flatlands, areas of moist and dry woodland, dense "jungle" and fertile cerrado. It has become popular among some academics, notably the archaeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt and the geographer William Denevan, to remind audiences that before Amazonians succumbed to European guns and diseases during the conquest, they lived quite comfortably in substantial and sophisticated settlements and at quite high population densities. "Amazonia never was a virgin," author Mark London reminds us.
One reason for measured hope is that Brazil's government, while maintaining its strong ongoing interest in environmentally destructive forms of development, has also taken some positive steps. The recently declared Amazon Region Protected Areas Program (ARPA) is off to an impressive start. Already some 88,800 square miles of land have been secured for strict protection or "sustainable resource use," and the program is well along on the pathway toward achieving 10-year targets. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports a long string of positive results since on-the-ground implementation began in 2003. ARPA, it says, is "exceeding expectations and delivering extraordinary conservation results." For WWF, says Matt Perl, director for Amazon protected areas, ARPA is "definitely a flagship program."
Complementing ARPA and other efforts to protect forest lands is a new Brazilian forest law, passed in 2005, that aims at curbing illegal land occupation, contracting out publicly owned lands to private loggers for sustainable management, and creating jobs. Though some are skeptical, others praise the move. Says the International Tropical Timber Organization: "Legalizing the economic use of federal forest lands for the production of timber and non-timber products will facilitate the development of forest industry, increase employment and revenues, and generally improve conditions for local communities." Another positive factor is the rise in concern for forest protection at the state level. Commendable state-level initiatives are under way, from Acre, in Brazil's far west, to Amapá at the basin's eastern edge. What started out as an innovative land certification and zoning program in Mato Grosso state in the early 2000s later fell victim to corruption by officials managing it and the arrest and dismissal on corruption charges of the state's environment secretary. But this setback is said to have been overcome, with state governor and soybean king Blairo Maggi expressing ever greater desire for the region to prosper sustainably.
What these sorts of programs reflect is not just a change of heart at the level of state governor -- no candidate has recently posed for the TV cameras brandishing a chainsaw, as one did some years ago -- but also the increase in the number, quality, and professional skills of less senior state government officials who have little use for forest destruction. These people are often found working hand in hand with members of a fast-growing network of Brazilian nonprofit organizations that are concerned with "socio-environmental" issues. In the 1970s Peru's conservation movement essentially consisted of one dedicated aristocrat, Felipe Benavides, who ran an embryonic chapter of the WWF. Now hundreds of Peruvian environmental groups such as the well-established Peruvian Association for the Conservation of Nature closely monitor everything from marine turtle habitats to remote development schemes such as the potentially destructive Lower Camisea natural gas project in the remote Lower Urubamba Basin.
In Brazil, organizations of that sort began to take hold in the 1970s when pioneer conservationists successfully agitated for the creation of national parks in Amazonia and elsewhere. The movement first became prominent during the late 1980s, when the violent death of rubber tapper Chico Mendes aroused worldwide concern, and achieved further visibility and prominence during the course of the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian NGOs have gone on to become fundamental in all aspects of Amazonian development. A number of them, including the environmental research organizations IMAZON and IPAM in Belém, have become important if only for the matchless quality of the information in their reports.
International nongovernmental organizations such as the Amazon Conservation Team, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the WWF have also become deeply rooted in Amazonia. Earlier on, those representing these sorts of groups were widely accused of being high-handed in their dealings with the local people they claimed to be trying to help, and of favoring the wellbeing of wildlife over human needs. Foreign scientists suspected of being spies had trouble getting visas allowing them to do their research. Xenophobic attacks persist, but now the international NGOs work in far smoother partnerships with local groups, and they have done much to generate funds from abroad to sustain their activities.
With national treasuries providing scant funds for Amazonian protection, and most of these allocated to policing functions, the international NGOs have played a prominent role in generating fast-mounting sums of international public and private financial support for more progressive activities. Where funding for Amazonian conservation was once the province of a few large U.S. foundations, now there are many bilateral and multilateral donors, including the World Bank-managed Global Environment Facility (GEF).
An impressive example of what the nongovernmental sector can accomplish even with little direct support from any official agency is to be found in and near two mid-Amazonian regions called Mamirauá and Amana, now officially declared Sustainable Development Reserves. Here, starting in the early 1980s with inspired leadership from the late José Márcio Ayres, a pioneer Brazilian primatologist, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has achieved notable success in helping local fishing communities create sustainable and profitable stocks for many species that could easily become overharvested. "Thanks to science-based fishing quotas," reads one WCS report, "populations of the commercially valuable pirarucu have dramatically increased since the early 1990s and the reserves' fishermen are earning greater profits than ever before."
Ground has also been gained, some feel, through a major demographic shift -- the concentration of the once largely scattered Amazonian peoples into towns and cities, where some 70 percent of them now reside. While Amazonian urbanism has created new problems of poverty, health, and sanitation in mushrooming shantytowns, the shift has also lessened the pressure of advancing swidden agriculture into pristine forest areas. How much this shift has helped remains uncertain, for many of the formerly "rural" people now live in towns of 50,000 to 100,000, of whom many continue to carve illegal roads out into the forest and practice slash-and-burn farming. Notably, though, much of the population that is truly "rural" consists of still-isolated groups of indigenous people who are well known as the region's best forest stewards. Some of these groups are severely harassed by environmentally irresponsible oil and gas exploration as well as by intrusive ranchers, miners, and loggers. But encouraging progress has been made, in Brazil at any rate, in demarcating the large amounts of land to which these groups have constitutional rights. And they themselves have learned much about using modern technologies to monitor and protect their lands.
As well, scientists continue to make progress in inventorying and cataloguing the basin's biological wealth, documenting the effects of deforestation on the biota, and giving planners and policymakers an ever more solid scientific basis for their actions. The proliferation of scientific knowledge, from a very low baseline not many years back, is truly impressive.
Ultimately, what must be understood is that the region's future lies irrevocably in the hands of the nations that own it. No amount of arguing that its precious biodiversity and major role in the global climate cycle make the basin "ours" will prevail over local claims of sovereignty, even though Amazon-provoked climate change may affect farmers as far away as Africa and the U.S. midwest. So what can we in the United States do about it? A lot. Rather than practice swaggering unilateralism or threatening retribution in reaction to "bad" choices by Amazonian nations, we would be better advised to work sensitively through established channels of communications in hopes that the result will be policies and practices that work for us all, protecting much of the forest while also addressing regional economic goals.
The international community of concerned citizens, governments, foundations, and aid donors can encourage these sound approaches to future Amazonian development:
* Work hard to create viable forest carbon finance mechanisms that will function effectively at the state and local level as well as nationally and globally, and pay Amazonian people and nations well to store carbon for everyone's benefit.
* Improve efforts in developed countries to control drug use, treat addiction more as a medical than a criminal matter, and promote economically viable alternative farming opportunities rather than spraying coca fields with deadly toxins. Improve the environmental and social quality of anti-narcotic initiatives.
* Increase support for truly sustainable development initiatives in the basin, particularly those that strengthen the hands of indigenous communities with vested interests in protecting the standing forest and those that improve the livelihoods of other Amazonians with traditional artisanal skills.
* Systematically alert media to examples of egregious environmental performance by oil companies and other polluters extracting natural resources from the region. Encourage application of the "polluter pays" principle.
* Alert U.S. and other executive directors at the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to environmental and civil-society pitfalls from major development projects in the pipeline for board approval.
* Do everything possible to limit public and private purchases of Amazonian hardwoods to those that have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or other well-qualified international agencies to have been sustainably harvested.
* Through scholarships and direct support for capacity-building university programs in environmental science, management, and technology, help Amazon nations build on the considerable strength already achieved in training much-needed professionals in these fields.
* Work closely with Amazonian nations to design, support, and expand scientific research efforts in the region, especially those directed at analyzing the consequences of biodiversity losses and of regional and global impacts from global warming.
* Help generate expanding financial resources and management tools to enable Amazonian governments to demarcate, declare, and manage enlarged networks of protected areas within the basin's borders.
* Seek opportunities to encourage large industrial corporations that are increasingly practicing "green" production methods at home to apply to their Amazonian operations the rigorous standards they claim to uphold internationally.
These are some of the positive forces and ideas at work in the basin, aspects too often ignored or underemphasized in reports that focus sharply on disaster areas where lawless chaos prevails and forest destruction is rampant. Perhaps, even when you add up all the constructive ideas and projects of quality, you still have no match for the power of easy and too-often crooked money. "It's a territory in dispute," says Marcio Santilli of the influential Instituto Socioambiental. "And it's a very difficult situation now because, in spite of its gravity, there is no common or general interest in positive solutions."
But at the very least, there are fewer places to hide. Global warming has put Amazonia back on Page One.
Roger D. Stone, guest editor for this special report, is director and president of the Sustainable Development Institute. He was formerly a correspondent and news bureau chief for Time magazine with three years' service in Brazil. He has also been a vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and of the World Wildlife Fund, and president of the Center for Inter-American Relations. He is the author of five published books including
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August 13, 2007 |
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Ultimately, until the standing forest is worth more than what it's cleared for, large-scale conservation is probably a losing fight. This is potentially where the international carbon market comes in. The Bush administration has done a good job of convincing Americans that the Kyoto Protocol has failed (even though its effects cannot be measured yet). The little secret they hope no one will notice is that the global carbon market, non-existent two years ago, has already generated $30 billion in trades.
The value of the carbon stored on an acre of Amazon forest is already more than most of the things people clear forest for. All of a sudden lots of companies with real money to invest are figuring out how to buy forest carbon, despite the fact that there are officially no rules for trading it in the European or Kyoto Protocol markets. Until only a few years ago, Brazil was solidly against even talking about forests in climate negotiations. Now it has one of the proposals on the table for how forests can get into the system.
--Stephan Schwartzman and Paulo Moutinho
A key element for the future of these areas will be the degree to which the economy supporting their human populations can be transformed to rely on the value of the environmental services of standing forest, rather than the sale of traditional commodities like timber and beef. I first proposed this transformation in 1985, initially as a complement to management of forests for timber and nontimber forest products like rubber and Brazil nuts, and since 1992 as a more far-reaching redirection of the rural economy in the region. "Environmental services" is now a household word, and is reflected in a variety of federal and state initiatives in Brazil and elsewhere. The Amazon forest provides many environmental services, roughly grouped into biodiversity maintenance, water cycling, and protection against increasing global warming.
It is this last service that has progressed the farthest in terms of international negotiations, thanks to the Climate Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Sooner or later there is bound to be a break in the political barriers that now block actions on the scale needed to deal with the problem. When this happens, financial flows to maintain the Amazon forest will be part of the solution, along with the obvious need to desist from the profligate use of fossil fuels. The first priority for Amazonia must be creating the institutional mechanisms to use this resource so that it serves to maintain both Amazonia's traditional population and the forest.
--Philip M.Fearnside
Studies attribute at least 20 percent of the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to deforestation. In a 24-hour period, deforestation releases into the atmosphere as much CO2 as aircrafts flying 8 million people from London to Miami.
So why have we not done more about curbing deforestation in order to slow down climate change? One of the disappointing flaws of the Kyoto Protocol that was ratified by many nations is that its system of carbon credits does not give credit for avoided deforestation, reforestation, and afforestation. The developed world must wake up to its duty to compensate the developing nations for avoiding deforestation through the creation of large protected areas of forest and to finance reforestation and afforestation. It is vital that the successor to the Kyoto Protocol include such provisions. We need a system that allows carbon credits in all the world's markets for sustainable management of existing forests, whether the forests will serve as reserves for conservation of biodiversity or for sustainable production. In order to make a system of carbon credits for avoided deforestation, it will be necessary to substantially increase the amount of sustainably managed forests, since we cannot expect the Amazon countries to leave their entire forest area untouched and totally unproductive.
It is also important to establish a system of carbon credits for reforestation and afforestation. There are now various initiatives to show that commercial returns can be generated by investment in sustainable reforestation and afforestation. A leader in this area is the company Sustainable Forest Management, which uses venture capital to create new production forests and preserve existing forests.
We are intimately connected to the fate of the Amazon rainforest, whether it be as a result of the products we use or of our unwillingness to pay for the environmental services the region supplies to the whole world. Every day we are getting closer to total environmental disaster, and it is to a large extent in the hands of the developed world to decide whether or not we are willing to pay subsidies to those countries that are protecting the whole world ecosystem through maintaining their forests. The solution to global warming cannot just be technological. It will also have to be biological -- finding ways to maintain the essential environmental services that Amazonia and other areas of forest contribute to the support of life on Earth.
Whither Amazonia?
A new generation of forest-friendly political leaders has emerged in parts of the Amazon.
Thomas E. Lovejoy and Yolanda Kakabadse | August 13, 2007
The Amazon is no longer the overlooked region of its constituent countries or the remote region of the world that it once seemed. Vast as it is, it is clearly not impervious to human impact. Indeed, in this era of globalization, the Amazon is vulnerable, economically and environmentally, to outside forces and can, in turn, affect other parts of South America and the world.
Some 25 years ago the Brazilian scientist Eneas Salati shattered the age-old paradigm that vegetation is the consequence of climate and, in reverse, has no effect on climate. He demonstrated elegantly that the Amazon literally generates half of its own rainfall within the basin. That led, of course, to concerns about the potential of deforestation to cause the hydrological cycle to degrade.
Now we know that when the moisture-laden, westward-moving Amazonian air masses hit the high wall of the Andes, a significant fraction of the moisture is deflected south and provides rain to southern Brazil and northern Argentina. So now we understand that even if the Amazon as a forest -- and as probably the greatest repository of biological diversity on Earth -- is not viewed as important by some in southern Brazil, the Amazon as a rain machine is crucial to agribusiness and the production of hydropower.
We also know that the Amazon can be affected climatically by things that occur beyond Amazonia. In 1997 El Niño (which 30 years before had been considered a local phenomenon off the coast of Peru) showed that it not only can reach across the Pacific to cause drought and fires in Southeast Asia but that it also can reach across the Andes and cause drought on the eastern side of the continent, including in northeast Brazil and the Amazon.
In 2005 the Amazon suffered the most severe drought ever recorded. It was linked to changes in the Atlantic circulation and was completely independent of El Niño. This is probably a preview of what climate change could bring. The Hadley Center's global-climate model predicts drought and Amazon dieback if greenhouse-gas concentrations increase to double pre-industrial levels -- around 560 parts per million (ppm). (We are currently at 385 ppm.)
Recent analysis indicates that world tropical deforestation contributes more than 20 percent annually to the net increase of CO2 globally. Brazil is one of the largest contributors to that, almost entirely due to Amazon deforestation and burning. Of course it makes no sense for the Amazon to be contributing in this way to its own risk from climate change.
The Amazon River system is rich in fish diversity -- 3,500 species, more than in the entire North Atlantic -- some of which are very important for food, and some valued by the ornamental-fish trade. More than one fishery is showing signs of serious overfishing. Deforestation in headwaters can create serious problems downstream, and some fish species literally swim the length of the river system in the course of their lives. All of these links need to be integrated into a policy for a sustainable future for Amazonia, and that can only be achieved through policies that connect from the basin to the national level, and, ultimately, to the global level. The Amazon has to be managed as a system; anything short of that is bound to fail. The Amazon Cooperation Treaty (ACT) is a very useful instrument in this regard, especially now that it has a permanent secretariat in Brasília.
In the meantime, however, deforestation continues in almost all the Amazon countries. At the moment, Brazil, which does a far better job of measuring Amazon deforestation than the other countries, has made some serious progress in reducing the rate. Nonetheless, Amazon deforestation is getting perilously close to the tipping point where the hydrological cycle will irreversibly degrade. But the exact tipping point is unknown, and defining it is, in fact, a much more complicated problem than it might seem, depending as it does on the impact of deforestation and different kinds of replacement vegetation (for instance, soybeans vs. second growth) in different parts of the basin. It would be tragic to discover the tipping point by triggering it. We have reached the point where deforestation should be stopped, not slowed.
At the same time, any approach to manage the Amazon sustainably must take into account economic forces both within and without the basin. In parts of the Amazon, oil and gas concessions literally cover the map like quilt work. So too do forest concessions. Global interest in commodities like soybeans and timber bring market forces to bear, and not necessarily in good ways. Soybeans represent a threat to biodiversity and the hydrological cycle. Palm oil, while of little or no biodiversity value, at least is a tree crop and can contribute to the hydrological cycle. In the state of Pará some of the degraded land could be restored to productivity as palm plantations, although care should be taken to balance it with restoration of natural forest. There are real advantages to having palm plantations embedded in a matrix of natural forest.
Similarly, while sugarcane does not grow well in the Amazon, it can expand northward into the cerrado region of Brazil. Were it to do so, it could displace cattle ranching farther into the Amazon.
On the plus side of the agenda has been an impressive burst of activity in the creation of protected areas in virtually all of the Amazon nations. A new generation of political leaders has emerged at least in some places, including the Brazilian states Amazonas (Governor Eduardo Braga's government) and Acre (former Governor Jorge Viana), who embrace sustainability and see the future as dependent on the forest.
Ultimately, it is difficult to see a secure path to a sustainable future for the Amazon without considerably more resources from outside the region. That almost inevitably means resources from outside the Amazon nations, but global involvement needs to be perceived as supportive of national and regional actions, not as "internationalization." The Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7) was and is just such an effort. Braga's government sees this, for example, as payment for environmental services such as carbon sequestration, rainfall generation, and maintenance of genetic resources. Probably the most promising way to achieve this would be to include "avoided deforestation" as part of carbon trading under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, but there are probably other imaginative ways as well. What is critical is for a portion of the funds to end up in direct support of local communities so they can have a reasonable quality of life without destroying the forest.
In the end, the Amazon poses a challenge for each of the Amazonian nations, as well as for the entire planet. First, those nations have to work together to maintain the integrity of the Amazon as a system; they need the benefit of fairly uniform approaches. Second, because of the global importance of Amazonia, the rest of the world will need to pool financial and intellectual resources to foster Amazon sustainability. As complex as that is, and so easily clouded by concerns about biopiracy and sovereignty, there is no reason the obstacles can't be overcome. Indeed the Amazon itself provides every reason to do so
Thomas E. Lovejoy, whose involvement with the Amazon dates to 1965, is president of the H. John Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment.
Yolanda Kakabadse is former environment minister of Ecuador, president of the World Conservation Union, and executive vice president of Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano.
The Economics of Storing Carbon
Ghillean T. Prance | August 13, 2007
Ultimately, until the standing forest is worth more than what it's cleared for, large-scale conservation is probably a losing fight. This is potentially where the international carbon market comes in. The Bush administration has done a good job of convincing Americans that the Kyoto Protocol has failed (even though its effects cannot be measured yet). The little secret they hope no one will notice is that the global carbon market, non-existent two years ago, has already generated $30 billion in trades.
The value of the carbon stored on an acre of Amazon forest is already more than most of the things people clear forest for. All of a sudden lots of companies with real money to invest are figuring out how to buy forest carbon, despite the fact that there are officially no rules for trading it in the European or Kyoto Protocol markets. Until only a few years ago, Brazil was solidly against even talking about forests in climate negotiations. Now it has one of the proposals on the table for how forests can get into the system.
--Stephan Schwartzman and Paulo Moutinho
A key element for the future of these areas will be the degree to which the economy supporting their human populations can be transformed to rely on the value of the environmental services of standing forest, rather than the sale of traditional commodities like timber and beef. I first proposed this transformation in 1985, initially as a complement to management of forests for timber and nontimber forest products like rubber and Brazil nuts, and since 1992 as a more far-reaching redirection of the rural economy in the region. "Environmental services" is now a household word, and is reflected in a variety of federal and state initiatives in Brazil and elsewhere. The Amazon forest provides many environmental services, roughly grouped into biodiversity maintenance, water cycling, and protection against increasing global warming.
It is this last service that has progressed the farthest in terms of international negotiations, thanks to the Climate Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Sooner or later there is bound to be a break in the political barriers that now block actions on the scale needed to deal with the problem. When this happens, financial flows to maintain the Amazon forest will be part of the solution, along with the obvious need to desist from the profligate use of fossil fuels. The first priority for Amazonia must be creating the institutional mechanisms to use this resource so that it serves to maintain both Amazonia's traditional population and the forest.
--Philip M.Fearnside
Studies attribute at least 20 percent of the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to deforestation. In a 24-hour period, deforestation releases into the atmosphere as much CO2 as aircrafts flying 8 million people from London to Miami.
So why have we not done more about curbing deforestation in order to slow down climate change? One of the disappointing flaws of the Kyoto Protocol that was ratified by many nations is that its system of carbon credits does not give credit for avoided deforestation, reforestation, and afforestation. The developed world must wake up to its duty to compensate the developing nations for avoiding deforestation through the creation of large protected areas of forest and to finance reforestation and afforestation. It is vital that the successor to the Kyoto Protocol include such provisions. We need a system that allows carbon credits in all the world's markets for sustainable management of existing forests, whether the forests will serve as reserves for conservation of biodiversity or for sustainable production. In order to make a system of carbon credits for avoided deforestation, it will be necessary to substantially increase the amount of sustainably managed forests, since we cannot expect the Amazon countries to leave their entire forest area untouched and totally unproductive.
It is also important to establish a system of carbon credits for reforestation and afforestation. There are now various initiatives to show that commercial returns can be generated by investment in sustainable reforestation and afforestation. A leader in this area is the company Sustainable Forest Management, which uses venture capital to create new production forests and preserve existing forests.
We are intimately connected to the fate of the Amazon rainforest, whether it be as a result of the products we use or of our unwillingness to pay for the environmental services the region supplies to the whole world. Every day we are getting closer to total environmental disaster, and it is to a large extent in the hands of the developed world to decide whether or not we are willing to pay subsidies to those countries that are protecting the whole world ecosystem through maintaining their forests. The solution to global warming cannot just be technological. It will also have to be biological -- finding ways to maintain the essential environmental services that Amazonia and other areas of forest contribute to the support of life on Earth.
Tomorrow's Amazonia
As farming, ranching, and logging shrink the globe's great rainforest, the planet heats up. A Prospect special report on the assaults on, and the efforts to protect, the Amazon.
Roger D. Stone | August 12, 2007
There's a brash, risky new Amazonia out there. Pioneer entrepreneurs are making fortunes from activities long considered not feasible in this vast and challenging place, gouging ever deeper into the rainforest in pursuit of wealth. The deeper they slash into the forest and burn it, the more greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the Amazonian forest has become a leading cause of global warming, with profound climate implications and dangers within the region and far beyond it. Why all this matters so much, and what there is to be done about it, is the subject of this report.
Amazonian soy growers, pushing aggressively into uncultivated lands, ship their very profitable product to customers as far away as China via a $100 million waterway that runs from growing areas in Brazil's Mato Grosso state to a grain port at Itacoatiara on the Amazon. Soy, now Brazil's top export, is "the most important protein in the world," says Brazilian "soybean king" and Mato Grosso Governor Blairo Maggi, in an interview with authors Mark London and Brian Kelly. "We are creating the greatest soy-growing area in the world. This is the next great breadbasket." Maggi, not universally admired by environmentalists, insists that he does not have to cut down a single tree to expand his already formidable agribusiness empire.
Domestic and foreign markets for beef are thriving as well, with new pasture grasses improving yields in Amazonia and with the highly contagious hoof-and-mouth disease more or less under control in Brazil. Immense profits are being made from largely illegal Amazonian logging, which is only lightly regulated by underfunded, and often corruptible, government agencies. With Southeast Asia's hardwoods being logged out, the future world-market prospects for Brazilian mahogany and some other hardwood species are bright. Manufacturers have made a roaring, if contrived, success out of the free-trade zone in Manaus, the capital of Brazil's huge Amazonas state. This booming city of 2 million, a thousand miles up the river, is among Brazil's most prosperous. The free-trade zone alone directly supports some 100,000 jobs. Amazonas Governor Eduardo Braga claims that his state remains more than 90 percent forested and that he intends it to become "the Costa Rica of the Amazon" through eco-sensitive development initiatives. Agriculture-triggered deforestation, meanwhile, races across southern portions of his domain.
And, say some, what's happening now is only the beginning of a grand, new development wave promising unprecedented wealth along a broad belt from the Andes to the Atlantic. Beyond the human imprints already imposed on the Amazonian landscape lie even grander designs being put forth by governments, bankers, corporations, and development agencies. Oil, gas, and mineral exploration continue apace. The Brazilian state oil company is currently building the first of many planned pipelines from Amazonia's heart to urban markets. Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez, has a similar idea and plenty of money to make it happen. The World Bank Group, which lacks a clear vision as to what it would like to see the Amazon become overall, currently favors heavy infrastructure projects, such as a soy port and facilities to support cattle ranching, over lighter-handed approaches more fashionable a decade ago.
At the Inter-American Development Bank, planners are progressively realizing the immense 348-project, $38 billion Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) scheme. It envisions roadways from Brazil to the Pacific, bridges, airports, pipelines, hydroelectric power stations, and waterways all designed to support resource exploitation and trade within and beyond the region and bring riches to many. Originally proposed by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 2000, IIRSA boasts a roster of 31 first-stage "top priority" projects scheduled for completion by 2010. New roads reach westward from Brazil's Acre state into Bolivia and across Peru, as if following Peru's visionary 1960s President Fernando Belaunde Terry's plan to link the Andes to the Atlantic and open new trade routes. "He dreamt about it then," says Avecita Chicchon, director of Latin American and Caribbean programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Now it's really happening."
Such schemes give new currency to some old ideas about the basin's potential. After traveling in Brazil early in the 19th century, the Bavarian scientists Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix foresaw a time when Amazonians would triumph over the "rank vegetation" and build an agricultural paradise. The great field biologist Alfred Russel Wallace expressed similar optimism about the prospects for converting the "primeval forest" into "rich pasture and meadow land." Recent successes challenge long-prevalent scientific arguments about the basin's poor soils and resulting fragility as reasons to pursue nondevelopment policies. And they revive long-simmering ideas about riches stored within the basin and up for grabs. Time magazine featured this breathless description in its October 18, 1982, cover story:
The lore of this awesome stream, infested with ferocious piranha and catfish large enough to gulp small children, surrounded by lush rain forests, with trees up to 150 ft. tall, stretching hundreds of miles, is also gilded by a lingering legend that this formidable landscape conceals phenomenal treasures.
With perhaps 15 percent of the total Amazon forest already gone, up from something like 3 percent only 30 years ago, and deforestation continuing at alarmingly high rates, these new visions of Amazonian development scare the daylights out of many scientists, environmentalists, and other careful observers of the region. They see the near-chaotic wave of human occupation and forest destruction, especially along the well-defined Arc of Deforestation on the basin's southern and eastern flanks, as a steepening graveyard spiral that, unrelieved, can ultimately have no positive outcome. Forest cutting and burning cause the release of ever greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming, triggers drought, and turns the once-damp forest into a tinderbox. Sayonara in short order, fear many of the world's best-qualified Amazon watchers, for the magnificent Amazonian rain-forest and its precious biodiversity—fully a quarter of all the world's plant and animal species. The biome, writes Brazilian climate scientist Antonio Donato Nobre, has "survived glaciation but not the chainsaw and the torch."
Conservationists' efforts to work out economic alternatives to Amazonian deforestation go back many years. Ethnobotanists have searched hard to find medicines in the wild from plants that cannot be farmed. Entrepreneurs have long sought to establish commercial markets for Amazonia's rich array of tasty fruits, the species du jour being a palm called the assai that yields a crushed pulp said to have health-giving properties. Brazil nuts, rubber, and some of the basin's myriad species of fish are other Amazonian products that traditional people can sustainably harvest, often from within government-designated protected areas called "extractive reserves." Ecotourism is seen as a limited but viable form of income-generating forest use. But of all the ways suggested to alleviate forest destruction, many experts now agree, the most promising involve new efforts to protect portions of the forested landscape.
"Climate change to the rescue," says Adriana Goncalves Moreira, a World Bank environmental specialist with a Harvard doctorate and an insatiable will to bring better order to the basin's future development. First, she and others argue, the maximum possible amount of Amazonian land must be sheltered from random development. In partnership with the Brazilian government, the World Wildlife Fund, and several other international donors, the World Bank is currently supporting the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program (ARPA). This huge, new system of national parks and protected areas in the largely unspoiled northern Amazon is 50 percent larger than the entire U.S. national park system. One way or another, about half of all Brazil's Amazonian forest is now legally protected, and by popular demand more and more of it is being salted away all the time. Protected status is also being applied to extensive parts of Peruvian and Ecuadoran Amazonia that are especially well endowed with indigenous communities and biological riches.
With substantial portions of the forest secured, Amazon specialists argue, the world can more effectively focus on the next step—refining new initiatives to pay Amazonian people and nations handsomely for storing the carbon the forest contains rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. The world's progress toward the creation of a formal market for tropical-forest carbon, via the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is agonizingly slow. Nonetheless UNFCCC parties are actively discussing new means of avoiding tropical deforestation via international compensation, possibly a carbon-trading mechanism. It is no longer a question of whether some mechanism for compensating tropical countries for forest carbon will emerge, says climate-change expert Stephan Schwartzman; it has become only a question of when—and what it will look like. And already (see "The Economics of Storing Carbon" sidebar, page A26) there is mounting interest among corporations in making informal purchases of forest-carbon offsets.
Those who would save the Amazon from disastrous helter-skelter deforestation are also working out the details of schemes to certify soy, cattle, and other Amazonian products as having been sustainably produced; already there is in place in Brazil a two-year moratorium on forest destruction to plant soy. The Forest Stewardship Council's log-certification program, now in existence for several years with some success, is only a small first step in this direction, it is argued; many other similar initiatives will come along. For all the opposition to these sorts of projects in Washington and a few other environmentally backward places, there is widespread hope that the day for them will finally come as public concern about the effects of global warming spreads ever more widely across the planet.
With such a rich assortment of big ideas in prominent circulation, it is a timely moment for this American Prospect special report. In it we offer a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of Amazonian deforestation and the reasons why climate considerations have thrust these issues onto center stage for the entire world. Then we turn to the development efforts now being attempted, commenting both on the technological breakthroughs that have made some of them newly possible and on old and new obstacles to success that public initiatives face: inadequate funds for management, vast distances, corruption, politics.
Weighing all the factors, we reach a conclusion that is gloomy—but less than apocalyptic. Even without climate change as a compelling new kicker, there have been many improvements in research, understanding, and policy within the nine nations that occupy the region and control the basin's destiny. And global warming and its ominous effects offer powerful new reasons to convert thought into action to arrest forest losses and keep carbon stored in the trees. On balance we see Amazonia as likely, as Brazilians would put it, to piorar cada vez menos—get worse at an increasingly slower rate. Finally we suggest some ways in which the international community can help—and offer reasons why it is urgently important to make the effort.
Roger D. Stone, guest editor for this special report, is director and president of the Sustainable Development Institute.
He was formerly a correspondent and news bureau chief for Time magazine with three years' service in Brazil. He has also been a vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and of the World Wildlife Fund, and president of the Center for Inter-American Relations. He is the author of five published books including
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