[Sustain] Biofuels & Carbon Credits Booms Spurring Deforestation
Eric Brooks
brookse32 at aim.com
Sat Mar 24 00:21:45 PDT 2007
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/Published on Thursday, March 22, 2007 by Inter Press Service
<http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=37035> /
*Biofuels Boom Spurring Deforestation *
*by Stephen Leahy *
Nearly 40,000 hectares of forest vanish every day, driven by the world's
growing hunger for timber, pulp and paper, and ironically, new biofuels
and carbon credits designed to protect the environment.
The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by
using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has
resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that
is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of
cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.
"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in
countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera,
managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition
<http://www.wrm.org.uy/GFC/>, an environmental NGO based in Asunción,
Paraguay.
"We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.
Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and
cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing
billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing
countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and
many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms.
Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of
bananas.
Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum,
including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst
means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil
palm.
Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very
difficult.
The FAO's /State of the World's Forests 2007/
<http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0773e/a0773e00.htm> released last week
reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day --
equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number
includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical
deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a
forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural
Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.
"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by
the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.
National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like
Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no
net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest
producer of pulp and paper.
"Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what
kind of changes have taken place there," he said.
Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin
to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to
nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown
to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native,
fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also
commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to
prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.
Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities,
resulting in a net loss of jobs.
"Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local
people," Lovera said.
Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other
plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into
nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow
crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern
with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.
Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or
other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow
the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the
ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy
prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into
soy, she says.
Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their
emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this
planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which
are just the latest threat to existing forests.
"Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.
The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of
reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a
tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree
planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders,
she says.
Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a
recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some
Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective
natural forests.
Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value
of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.
One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250
billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon
emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water.
The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily
stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and
governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation.
Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to
convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.
Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked
satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police
to enforce the law where it was being violated.
"Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in
the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted.
The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the
local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be
sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill
returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for
management, she said.
However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like
Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little
natural forest left.
"Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have
enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on
deforestation is the only way to stop this."
/This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development
by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists./
© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service
###
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