Rainforest Questions

Q: At the current rate of deforestation, how long until the rainforests are gone?

A: This question is hard to answer – in part because some rainforest will always subsist in remote and mountainous areas where exploitation is uneconomic. Global statistics tell us that the tropical deforestation rate is about 0.5-0.6% per year so at that pace it would take 160-200 years to lose it all. But those kind of numbers can five a false sense of security. There are many areas where deforestation has been much faster and where most of the remaining intact lowland rainforest could be gone in a decade, e.g. Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Ghana and Sierra Leone in West Africa, the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, much of the Philippines and quite a few countries in Central America (although Costa Rica has started gaining forest over the past decade).

A: Perhaps the most important action that most people in developed countries can take is to signal to their political leaders that action to slow forest loss is a priority that enjoys widespread public support. While sometimes it seems that political leaders don’t listen, history shows that the more people ask for action, the more likely it will follow. The campaigns to save the great whales, to protect the ozone layer and for the phase out of toxic chemicals, all testify to the power of citizens in bringing about major change. This is what we now need to do for the rainforests. By taking action yourself, and by urging your friends and family to do the same, it is amazing what a difference can be made.

Another action is to be a more careful consumer. There are now many products that are made without causing forest loss. For example, FSC certified wood and paper ensures that forests where timber is harvested are managed sustainably. You can also ask large retailer chains, and large food processing companies, how they ensure that the palm oil, soy, and beef used in their products does not originate from deforested land. Some of these products produced in a way that doesn’t harm the rainforests are already offered for sale, and certified by organisations such as the Rainforest Alliance. Companies listen to their customers, and by changing how you shop you can change how firms develop their businesses.

Raising awareness is another key way to make a difference, by talking about the issue and helping others to understand what is going on helps to build the groundswell of opinion that we need to change how societies think about things like this. Again, there is good reason to believe this works – just look at the issue of climate change and how peoples views have changed.

A: An estimated 6 million hectares of tropical rainforest are cut down each year (Hansen et al, 2008), which equates to nearly 7 million m2 per hour and approximately 2000 m2 per second.

A: Rainforest nations are most likely to adopt more environmentally benign development strategies if they believe that such actions will not detract from their priority to reduce poverty and elevate people’s living standards. No country cuts down its forests for no reason – the forests are being lost for what are in the short-term apparently sound economic reasons. Providing economic alternatives is the surest way to keep the forests standing.

If people have jobs, enough to eat, education and health care services derived from development strategies that keep the forests intact, then countries will stick with those policies. The international community must find the resources needed to enable this to happen. This is why the PRP has recommended a new mechanism to enable financial transfers on a scale that will enable countries to fund alternative development strategies.

A: This is a very interesting question with many possible answers, depending on the scale, (local, national or regional) and the kinds of consequences you are looking at. Many Brazilian scientists believe that the water vapour generated by the rainforests in the northeast of the country generates rainfall thousands of miles away for the crops in the South of Brazil, and even in Argentina! (There is an animation of how these so-called “flying rivers” work on http://www.riosvoadores.com.br/show_projeto.php?id_media=973). According to climate modellers working at the Hadley Centre in the UK, the rainforests in the western Amazon are similarly dependent on rainfall generated by the Eastern Amazon, and could dry out and change into savannah once more than 30-40% of the rainforests are lost. At a more local scale, people in many tropical islands live near the coast and depend heavily on coral reefs for fisheries and tourism income. Inland forests are essential for preventing soil erosion but once they are lost, the heavy loads of eroded silt that the island’s rivers carry to the sea often end up smothering the reefs, killing the corals and destroying local livelihoods. This is probably why Tommy J. Remengesau, the former President of the Polynesian island of Palau, who declared many new protected areas both on land and in the sea, said: “In Palau, the environment is the economy!”

A: Palm oil and soya are omnipresent in our food chains. Soy is used in 60% of processed food including cereals, biscuits, cheeses, cakes, noodles, pastries, soups and spreads. Palm oil is in 1 in 10 supermarket products, including food, beauty and hygiene products.

Palm oil and soya also represent significant sources of revenue for rainforest countries and individual producers, and large quantities can be produced on non-forested land. Because palm oil and soya are so ubiquitous and because they provide rainforest countries with significant socio-economic benefits, boycotts of these products is not realistic nor desirable. In addition, palm oil is highly productive compared to other oilseed crops and its cultivation and processing require less fertilisers, pesticides, and fuel energy per unit of oil. Simple substitution with alternative crops could therefore have negative environmental and climate change impacts overall; much more land would be required if we were to derive vegetable oil from other crops.

Yet increased global population, and changing diets, are increasing demand and production are increasing pressure on forests. From the producers’ point of view, it is often more economically viable to install new plantations on forested land. Incentives must thus be provided to agricultural producers to increase yields in a sustainable manner and locate new production on land that has been previously deforested and is currently not in use. Yield increases can be achieved in a sustainable manner, for example through enhanced land management practices such as, crop rotation and improving irrigation. Expansion onto previously deforested land should ensure that existing land titles and local communities rights are respected.

A: Commodities are generally consumed. The beauty about paying for the ecosystem services the intact rainforests provide is that nothing is consumed, so the supply is inexhaustible: a ‘commodity’ like no other!

A: The evolving scientific consensus is that most old-growth forest continue to sequester additional carbon, probably because of the ‘fertilising’ effect of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and because many rainforests are not as old and pristine as we thought -  i.e. they are still recovering from recent or not-so-recent disturbance. According to Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds, this sequestration adds up to about 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon per year, close to the total carbon emissions of the US: see http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/18/trees-tropics-climate-change. But even if an old-growth forest were no longer locking away additional CO2, it is still very important to keep the carbon it stores – not just in the trees but also in the soil – out of the atmosphere. Cutting old-growth tropical rainforests and replanting them, even if this is with fast-growing trees, would always put additional CO2 into the atmosphere in the short-to-medium term, and is therefore not recommended. A much better idea would be to help local communities and businesses to replant the large areas of degraded lands occurring in the tropics, in order to recover their productive potential – and sequester a lot of carbon in the process.

A: Countries will always protect their rights to use their own resources as they see fit. Western countries have always done this, and now the emerging economies where much of the rainforest is located are doing the same. Among the resources the rainforest countries possess to aid their development are forests and land. These are being exploited for economic reasons and any serious attempt to do something else must be backed with an economic alternative. Many specialists believe that in the short-term it will not be possible to achieve sufficient economic gains through the more sustainable use of the forests alone and that external resources are needed as well. Recently there has been an intense international debate as to how such assistance can be mobilised in return for countries keeping their forests intact – in other words, what financial mechanisms can make the forests worth more alive than dead? Having carried out an intense analysis of the causes of and remedies for deforestation, the PRP has concluded that paying countries for the services provided by the rainforests is the strategy most likely to make the scale of difference needed. In the immediate policy environment, the service most likely to be rewarded is that of carbon storage and sequestration – although in future protecting biodiversity and water supplies might be added as well. This is quite straightforward logic that most people can grasp, but the implementation is far more complex. For example, who should decide on what to do with the money paid, who should pay it and what conditions can be linked to the transfer of funds. The PRP has been thinking about all of these questions as well and is confident that answers can be found. Should proposals for such a broad economic mechanism not be adopted, then we will essentially be faced with the situation we are in now, whereby a large number of small initiatives are doing some good but in the face of overwhelming economic incentives to the contrary are unable to hold the line. If we rely only on voluntary private investment without the fundamental economics having been altered, we will most likely continue to lose forests.

A: This is a very pertinent question. We believe it is not reasonable to ask developing countries to give up the economic opportunities inherent in deforestation without compensation – hence our proposed emergency mechanism which would pay them to keep their forests standing.