US must do more to fight tropical deforestation: NGOs

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Environmental leaders pleaded Monday for greater US government commitment to helping preserve the world's endangered tropical rainforests, which are seen as key in the global fight against climate change.

"Tropical deforestation is a major contributor to global warming. It contributes about 15 percent of all greenhouse emissions according to most recent estimates," said Douglas Boucher of the Union of Concerned Scientists and chairman of the tropical forest and climate coalition, speaking to reporters. "To give you an idea of what that means in terms of scale, that is larger that the entire emissions of the European Union," he said.

"It's also larger than the entire emissions of the global transportation sector -- every car, train, plane, boat on the planet all combined," he said. Boucher urged US lawmakers to pass a sweeping energy bill currently being debated by Congress…..

Tropical dry forest, Chacachacare, Trinidad and Tobago. Copyright F.B. Lucas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License