Sunday, January 4, 2009

How to save the Amazon rainforest

Mongabay has a long article by Rhett A. Butler about deforestation: Environmentalists have long voiced concern over the vanishing Amazon rainforest, but they haven't been particularly effective at slowing forest loss.

…Given these trends, it is apparent that conservation efforts alone will not determine the fate of the Amazon or other rainforests. Some argue that market measures, which value forests for the ecosystem services they provide as well as reward developers for environmental performance, will be the key to saving the Amazon from large-scale destruction. In the end it may be the very markets currently driving deforestation that save forests.

Hope for avoiding the worst outcomes in the Amazon increasingly rest on the belief that markets will soon pay for the services provided by healthy rainforests. These services—which include biodiversity maintenance, rainfall generation, carbon sequestration, and soil stabilization, among others—have traditionally been undervalued by markets, but there are signs that the situation is changing.

…Excluded from receiving carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol, the “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation" (REDD) mechanism found new life in 2005 as a result of efforts by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, a group of tropical countries that seek to be paid for the carbon stored in their forests. …

Still despite its promise, REDD remains controversial and faces many challenges, including concerns over land rights; the establishment of baselines to measure reductions in deforestation rates; “leakage" when conservation measures in one area shift deforestation to another; providing sufficient incentives in “low-deforestation" countries which might lose out from REDD; and ensuring that local people see benefits. Further, because REDD is not yet sanctioned under an international framework on climate, credits from avoided deforestation are limited to voluntary markets where they are worth substantially less than carbon credits in compliance markets…

The largest river on the planet, the Amazon, forms from the confluence of the Solimões (the upper Amazon River) and the Negro at the Brazilian city of Manaus in central Amazonas. At the river conjunction, the muddy, tan-colored waters of the Solimões meet the "black" water of the Negro River. The mixing zone where the waters meet extends downstream through the rainforest for hundreds of miles, and attracts tourists from all over the world, which has contributed to substantial growth in the city of Manaus.

1 comment:

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