Brazil's other big forest in dire straits

The ongoing degradation of the Amazon rainforest has obscured the plight of its smaller sibling: the Atlantic forest in Brazil, which is a biodiversity hotspot. Once covering about 1.5 million square kilometres, the rainforest has been reduced to about one-tenth of its original area in the past 500 years, a new study has shown.

The Atlantic forest supports more than 20,000 species of plants, 260 mammals, 700 birds, 200 reptiles, 280 amphibians and hundreds of unnamed species.

Unless the damage is halted, monkeys and birds unique to the region will go extinct, including iconic species such as the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and the northern woolly spider monkey (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), both among the most endangered of all the world's monkeys.

"Unfortunately, the forest is in very bad shape," says Jean Paul Metzger at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. "Species extinctions will occur more rapidly and, since 30 per cent of the species are endemic to the region, they will disappear forever."

The desperate state of the forest became clear when Metzger's colleague Milton Cezar Ribeiro mapped the entire region in great detail using satellite images, combined with vegetation maps produced by the SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation, a charity campaigning to save the forest.

Ribeiro found that of the remaining forest, about 80 per cent is split into fragments of less than 0.5 square kilometres. The average distance between these fragments is 1.4 kilometres, making it difficult for animals to move from one part of the forest to another.

To make matters worse, only about 14 per cent of the remaining forest is protected. That's because 70 per cent of Brazil's population lives in what was once the Atlantic forest, including the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. "So in 500 years, and mainly in the past 100 years, we destroyed 90 per cent of the forest," says Ribeiro.

One priority is to protect the largest remaining tracts of forest, particularly the Serra do Mar, along the coastal mountains near São Paulo. Also, reconnecting the fragments to create larger areas will help the movement of otherwise marooned animals.

"If the Atlantic forest were a medical patient, it would be on life support and gasping for breath," says Bill Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Manaus, Brazil. "I see a dire need to protect the remaining fragments, and to reconnect fragments wherever possible."

Mark Cochrane of South Dakota State University in Brookings agrees: "It is imperative to create a comprehensive conservation plan as soon as possible."

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/183942-Brazil-s-other-big-forest-in-dire-straits

A Brief Tour of Brazilian Payments for Ecosystem Services

Brazil is home to more than four million plant and animal species – and, it seems, nearly as many laws and mechanisms for preserving the environment. That's one reason the next Katoomba Meeting is taking place in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso – at the heart of South America and the southern edge of the Amazon Rainforest.

Leading up to that event, Ecosystem Marketplace is examining Payments for Ecosystem Services in Latin America.First in a series

What pops to mind when you think of Brazil?

For many of us, it's the country's unending string of soccer virtuosos. For others, it's the four-day Carnaval that fills the streets of Rio and other cities this weekend.

But for ecologists, Brazil is something else altogether. It's the Amazon Rainforest, the Atlantic Forest, the Cerrado Savanna and other amazing biomes that help purify the world's air by extracting greenhouse gasses and other impurities from the atmosphere while supporting countless species of plant and animal.

Unfortunately, for the bulk of us, what comes to mind are not these natural treasures themselves, but their destruction – a direct result of our economy's inability to recognize the value of the ecosystems on which its own existence depends.

Twelve Steps to a Better Biosphere

Ecosystem Marketplace has documented scores of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and corporate donors who have launched voluntary Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes designed to incorporate the economic value of ecosystems into our market economy and to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), but such schemes will only bear enough fruit to make a difference if governments provide the regulatory drivers they need.

Brazilian state and federal governments have also launched a dizzying array of instruments and efforts to funnel private money towards environmental projects, and anyone looking to understand the evolution of PES in Brazil needs to be familiar with twelve of these efforts – even though many of them are not PES schemes in the strict sense of the word.

Most, for example, don't create a direct payment from the beneficiary of an ecosystem service (such as a city that gets clean water from mountain streams) to a provider of that service (such as indigenous farmers who maintain the catchments that provide the water). The principle of "protector receives" isn't always adhered to, but the principle of "polluter pays" is.

Furthermore, not all are created equally: some are little more than proposals, while others are backed by legislation long in force.

This brief overview of these mechanisms is by no means a comprehensive analysis, but rather a summary of the goals, strengths, and weaknesses of each effort. Many of these issues will be explored in more detail in the weeks leading up to the 14th Katoomba Meeting, which takes place April 1-2 in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

ICMS Ecológico: the Ecological Sales Tax

The first mechanism is "ICMS Ecológico" (Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços Ecológico, the "ecological sales tax" – although a direct translation is "Ecological Tax on Circulation of Goods and Services. Download the TNC brochure, right). ICMS Ecológico raises funds through a sales tax on all goods and services and then pays the money out to municipalities based on how many "conservation units" (protected areas) they maintain or the level of sanitation infrastructure present in the municipality.

This is not a federal initiative, but rather a common name for initiatives launched by several Brazilian states. The primary aim is to compensate municipal governments for the tax revenue they lose when land is designated a protected areas, but it also has an incentive effect, encouraging the designation of new conservation areas.

The main motivation for the ICMS is the creation of new protected areas, and criteria for improving management of existing reserves only exist in some states. However, we should add here that the money that gets distributed to the municipality is not earmarked for conservation – it is up to the local government to define how to utilize the resources, and in some cases, depending on the state there are quality criteria related to the use of the resources which ends up acting as an incentive to reinvest in protected areas.

The state of Paraná launched the first ICMS Ecológico in 1992, followed by São Paulo one year later. The idea quickly spread to the states of Minas Gerais (1995), Rondônia (1996), Amapá (1996), Rio Grande do Sul (1998), Mato Grosso (2001), Mato Grosso do Sul (2001), Pernambuco (2001), and Tocantins (2002).

São Paulo alone has amassed a conservation coffer of 40 million Brazilian Real ($R) since 1993, but critics say the mechanism isn't really delivering new conservation – in part because it simply rewards municipalities that are already fortunate enough to have large swathes of conservation, but also because debate over the best mechanism for distributing the funds is far from resolved.

Compensação Ambiental: Environmental Compensation

Brazil – like the United States and the European Union – has a program to offset the environmental impact of new development by requiring a compensatory payment for the non-avoidable impacts of new development. The program was initiated in 2000, but until recently required the payment of a licensing fee that had nothing to do with a project's environmental impact and everything to do with its budget.

to either the federal Ministério do Meio Ambiente (MMA – Ministry of Environment)

Specifically, developers were required to pay a licensing fee, usually amounting to between 0.5% and 2.0% of the cost of their development. The payment is supposed to bypass public budgets and go straight to a protected area that is impacted by the project, but the law failed to define a method for determining the size of the payment.

As we all know, the debate over how to best value the economic impact of environmental degradation is central to all PES schemes, and simply ignoring that debate in favor of a mechanism based on the cost of the project led to a flurry of lawsuits, culminating in a 2008 Supreme Court decision mandating license fees more closely related to actual impacts.

Now the licensing fee is truly meant to be a "Compensação Ambiental" (Environmental Compensation), which means that licensing agreements should be tied to environmental impacts, and payments are directed towards protected areas (in Brazil, these are protected areas equivalent to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Category One (nature reserve, free of development) or Category Two (limited protection) Protected Areas.

It all looks great on paper, right down to prescribing five specific uses for the money (studies for the creation of new reserves, management plan, sorting out land-tenure, purchase of goods and services necessary for managing an area, and management related research). The law creates a direct connection between private money and public action, and the amount of money raised since the initial licensing began is estimated at anywhere from $R237 million to double that amount.

In practice, however, there's still no way to assess environmental impact as mandated by the court ruling – and, as with ICMS Ecológico, no agreement on the best mechanism for executing the funds – or getting them into the protected areas. Now with the Supreme Court ruling everything has come to a halt while we await a new methodology for defining how to calculate costs associated with impacts, and with determining whether past payments needs to be revisited in order to meet the new valuation criteria.

Payment for Watershed Services

In 1997, Brazil passed the Lei da Política Nacional de Recursos, a law that essentially recognizes water as a public "good", whose use must be duly compensated through a financial payment. Furthermore it stipulates that resources generated through this means should be used to protect the resource at its origin. This opens up the possibility for water payments to be directed towards conservation projects, but does not mean that all resources from water usage is directed towards conservation. Part of the payments can go towards maintaining the infrastructure that delivers the water, and the water that we pay for through our utility bill has nothing to do with the charges that are established under this law.

Water payments that relate to the use of resources from a particular watershed are collected by the local water management agency, which charges a usage fee and redistributes a portion of the payment to local watershed management committees.

In an effort to promote local participation, payments are to be assessed and distributed by local committees made up of volunteers, whose job is to assess the charges and then distribute payments to reforestation or environmental conservation projects within their watershed.

Unfortunately, this very effort to involve local communities is also the program's weakness, subject to the same challenges that efforts involving community input face around the world. (Anyone who has ever been involved in a local civic group can attest to the heated battles that rage over what color to paint a fence – let alone the best way to revive a degraded watershed.)

As this is a new initiative, many committees either don't exist or have yet to figure out how to work together, how to develop a plan, or how to conceive a vision that sets priorities and guides what needs to be funded and where and how to control costs. Few of the participants are trained conservationists or engineers.

The challenge is to promote an understanding of organizational structures and technical issues – not to mention good governance. A fundamental problem is water theft: water is often diverted from existing pipelines, which means that funding never really makes its way into the budget. This is a promising law, but one that needs better enforcement and practical guidance for committees to function in order to achieve the program's goals.

Gas and Oil Royalty Payments

As in other parts of Latin America, oil and gas companies in Brazil are forced to pay royalties, either to the federal government or the local government, depending on the jurisdiction.

These payments are earmarked for protection of biodiversity and reduction of air and water pollution – but the priorities aren't clearly defined, and the money is often pooled into larger budgets. This leaves the money it public coffers with no financial mechanisms for channeling it to the economic projects for which it is intended.

Many of these local governance issues flow from the newness of Brazil's democracy, which is just over 20 years old. If these local governance issues are not resolved, authority may be consolidated at a higher level. Other examples where this happens are the compensation payments for hydroelectric dams and for mineral extraction, which include the concept of compensating for environmental impact but are not necessarily directed towards environmental conservation.

Private Nature Reserves

Brazil offers private land-owners an opportunity to avoid paying property taxes by turning their land into a private nature reserve (Reserva Particular do Patrimônio Natural, RPPN).

Again, this can be done either at the state or federal level, and the treatment is different for each.

If registered at the federal level, the land is considered a "sustainable use" reserve, which means that some productive activity is allowed, provided the land becomes part of the national protected area system – following the SNUC law (Sistema Nacional de Unidades de Conservação or the National System of Protected Areas). This law obligates the owner to develop a management and monitoring plan and to earn money from limited extractive activities.

If registered at the state level, the land is considered a "strict protection" area, which means it can only be used for research and eco-tourism.

If incorporated into the national system, RPPNs fall into a category between strict protection and "sustainable use" – largely because the article describing sustainable use was vetted in congress. The result is a category that is often described as sustainable use, but in reality is more restricted.

Either way, the land is incorporated into Brazil's protected area system – and the designation is permanent. Because there is no turning back, most landowners have been reluctant to take advantage of this program.

Furthermore, exemption from the Imposto Territorial Rural (ITR, the Rural Land Tax) has proven to be a weak incentive, because the tax itself is low and often not enforced, and the bureaucracy created to administer the SNUC makes it difficult to create RPPNs.

While for-profit landowners have generally paid little heed to getting RPPN designation, we are seeing interest on the part of environmental NGOs and research organizations.

Mitigation Banking, Brazilian Style

Under the 1965 Código Florestal (Forestry Code), Brazil requires anyone owning more than 50 hectares of rural land to make sure that a certain number of hectares are set aside in a Reserva Legal (Legal Reserve). As in mitigation banking, the Código Florestal makes it possible for landowners to reach their quota either by setting aside their own land or by purchasing tradable certificates from other landowners within the same micro-region or watershed.

The percentage required to be set aside varies from as little as 20% to as much 80%, depending on the biome – and is the focus of a heated battle between the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Not surprisingly, the highest figure for protection is in the Amazon, where the required set-aside was raised from 50% to 80% under the administration of President Fernando Cardoso, who preceded Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva.

The deadline for compliance is 2010, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries – backed by large agriculture interests – wants to not only roll back the ceiling to 50% in the Amazon, but also to allow the trading of certificates across watersheds and allow reforestation with non-native species. The Ministry of Environment wants to keep the ceiling at 80%, focus trading within watersheds, and limit most reforestation to native species.

The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism

China and India have been erecting wind parks and other clean energy projects with funding from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows greenhouse gas emitters in the developed world to offset some of their emissions by funding such projects in the developing world.

Brazil, however, already gets the bulk of its electricity from hydro plants and wind farms, while 75% of its cars run on ethanol. This leaves few options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources under the current Kyoto Protocol.

The bulk of Brazil's CDM income (or "MDL" income, for Mecanismo de Desenvolvimento Limpo) goes to support methane capture projects in landfills, and is not a significant generator of income.

Since the majority of Brazil's emissions come from deforestation, its main contribution for reducing emissions would come from avoiding forest loss. However, avoided deforestation is not eligible to receive carbon credits under the current regulated market. This opens the door for a voluntary market and for new negotiations that will unfold from a post-Kyoto agreement (post 2012).

Amazon Protected Areas Program

The Amazon Protected Areas Program (ARPA) is a federal program designed to protect 37.5 million hectares of Protected Area by 2012 – a size equivalent to all of Spain. It also aims to consolidate another 12.5 million hectares of existing reserves. It is estimated that R$900 million (US$395 million) is needed to meet this objective.

This program is now entering its third and final phase and now funds 60 protected areas covering 23 million hectares. It is overseen by a multistakeholder governing council, funded primarily by Germany's KfW Bank Group (formerly the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, or Reconstruction Credit Institute), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and WWF (formerly the Worldwide Fund for Nature), and administered by the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO).

Ultimately, the hope is to create a R$544 Million (US$240 million) endowment fund to cover recurring costs and support the protected areas. The fund currently has R$50 million (US$22 million).

The program is currently focused only on the Amazon, leaving other protected biomes such as the Caatinga and Atlantic Forest on their own.

Forest Concessions

Brazil also earns money from public lands by leasing them to timber companies, which are obligated to re-plant the forests and pay a tax. The program, however, is unevenly administered, and obligations to replant are often ignored by leasers, who find it easy to simply get away with non-compliance.

As with many of Brazil's environmental laws, this effort will hinge on enforcement, and the development of an effective enforcement mechanism is central to the debate.

Commercial Forestry Certificates

The environmental community is lobbying for a certification program that will go along with forest concessions to improve monitoring and enforcement of these instruments.

Such programs already exist, and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has been active in Brazil, but instead of one nationally-agreed upon standard for certifying that timber has been harvested in a sustainable way, the market has generated a gaggle of varying certificates that mean different things to different people.

Larger users of wood products, including Aracruz Celulose, Brazil's leading paper and pulp company, have expressed an interest in supporting a national standard. Indeed, companies like Aracruz have much to gain on the public relations front, but smaller producers say they can't afford the administrative costs.

Green Tax Deduction

In Brazil, as in most countries, people and companies can write charitable donations off on their income tax – but in Brazil, the only recognized categories of charity are Culture, Education, and Athletics.

A new bill, Imposto de Renda (Income Tax) Ecológico, aims to extend that status to donations in support of environmental projects. It has the backing of major NGOs like WWF, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy, as well as support from the Moore Foundation, but has run into stiff resistance from government entities concerned about reduced tax revenues and NGOs active in education, culture, and athletics.

http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/article.news.php?component_id=6524&component_version_id=9770&language_id=12

Predicting diversity within hotspots to enhance conservation

New strategy can identify hotspots within hotspots, focusing effort and money

With limited funding and an inadequate number of scientists, governments in countries containing "hotspots" of threatened biodiversity are wrestling with how to protect plants and animals in disappearing habitats.

But a new strategy developed by University of California, Berkeley, biologists could help scientists, governments and private organizations worldwide to identify the areas within hotspots where they should focus their time, effort and money - areas likely to have a wealth of unique diversity.

The research, led by UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Ana Carolina Carnaval and evolutionary biologist Craig Moritz, professor of integrative biology and director of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, appears this week in the journal Science. Their colleagues are Michael J. Hickerson of Queens College, New York, Célio F. B. Haddad of Universidade Estadual Paulista, and Miguel T. Rodrigues of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.

The UC Berkeley researchers' strategy involves looking at multiple species in an area and, based on current range and models of past climate, estimating the species' past distributions. This gives an indication of which regions have been climatically stable, and thus likely to harbor a diversity of species, and which areas have been unstable and likely to be less biodiverse.

"With this method, we can identify areas that have been working as refugia for biodiversity," Carnaval said. "These are areas that have remained climatically stable through time, where local communities have been able to persist. Despite the fact that we haven't sampled them exhaustively yet, we think there is a lot of undocumented, hidden diversity there, the potential for a lot of species still unknown to science, and, especially, a lot of endemism."

Applying their strategy to the Atlantic forest hotspot, which extends from Brazil's southern border, stretching inland to Argentina and Paraguay, to the country's northeast coast, they pinpointed the central part of the Atlantic forest, much of it in Bahia state, as more diverse than previously thought. This is all the more remarkable because the central forest is among the least studied yet most threatened components of the Atlantic forest, Carnaval said.

"The study demonstrates that the southern portion of the Atlantic forest was more climatically unstable during the Late Pleistocene, relative to the central corridor, which served as a large climatic refuge for neotropical species," she said. "Yet, the central region is poorly known and under extreme anthropogenic pressure. This unveils new priorities for conservation that must reach policymakers, the public and NGOs (non-governmental organizations)."

Two decades ago, scientists proposed identifying "biodiversity hotspots" where "exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat" so that conservation planners could focus on these hotspots "in proportion to their share of the world's species at risk," in the words of Oxford University's Norman Myers and colleagues, who published the first hotspot map in 2000 in the journal Nature. Endemic species are native species found nowhere else.

Carnaval and her colleagues have taken the next step, which is to narrow the focus even more, using the Atlantic forest of Brazil - which, unlike the much larger Amazon, is considered a threatened hotspot - as a test case.

The central Atlantic rainforests, home to tamarins and marmosets, include mangrove swamps along the coast, moist evergreen tropical forests nearby, semi-deciduous inland forests, where many trees drop their leaves in the dry season, and dry forests of deciduous trees even farther from the coast. Much of this rainforest has been cleared for farming, primarily for sugar cane, and only an estimated 8 percent of the original area remains. More than 60 percent of Brazil's population - approximately 100 million people - lives in cleared forest areas in the region.

Focusing on three species of tree frogs found throughout the forest, the UC Berkeley researchers modeled the species' distributions 6,000 years ago, when local conditions were generally cooler and wetter, as well as 21,000 years ago, a cool-dry period. Based on their model, they predicted that southern areas of the forest appear to have been comparatively less stable from a climatic standpoint, and thus recently colonized by the study species and likely to hold far less genetic diversity than the central region.

The team tested this prediction by looking at genetic variation among the frog species today. Frogs in stable areas should have more genetic variation because they have lived and evolved for a longer period of time, while in unstable areas, frogs that may have moved in recently should have less variation. Presumably, frog diversity will reflect diversity throughout the ecosystem.

That is exactly the pattern the researchers found. Taking DNA samples from 184 frogs of three treefrog species - Hypsiboas albomarginatus, H. semilineatus and H. faber - at dozens of sites within the Brazilian coastal rainforest, they sequenced mitochondrial DNA from each and compared the sequences of the same gene from all individuals. Southern frogs had much less genetic diversity than those in the central and northern regions.

"We find a lot of diversity in areas shown as climatically stable by the paleomodels and much less diversity in the south, where models suggest climatic instability," said Carnaval. "Also, we find evidence of population expansion from the central region to the south."

Reanalyzing previously published genetic data by others, Carnaval and Moritz also found supporting evidence from mammals and reptiles. Similar patterns have also been published for birds.

"The study has shown us that the central Atlantic forest, which hasn't had the investment of resources and effort as the southern, has been stable from a climatic standpoint and therefore is likely more diverse than currently believed. But because this area is under great human impact, it deserves conservation and research priority," Moritz said.

"We are not saying the south is not important; today, we find lots of endemics in the south and lots of diversity in the south," she added. "But the data point to another area that should receive more attention from both the conservation and research standpoint."

The method tested on Brazil's Atlantic forest should work in other understudied, highly threatened tropical regions worldwide, Moritz and Carnaval emphasized.

"The broader story is that we think this technique could be applied in other countries and other hotspot areas to identify regions that haven't been well sampled yet, regions that could possibly harbor as yet undiscovered unique diversity," Carnaval said. "This is a general method for identifying and prioritizing hotspots within hotspots, for finding highly diverse areas that have not been fully explored."

"Ana and her colleagues have discovered, using a very simple approach of combining genetics and environmental modeling, how we can make pretty strong predictions that can guide conservation efforts," Moritz said.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoc--pdw020209.php

Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia

The Biggest Floating Christmas Tree in the World,
is Inaugurated in Rio De Janeiro

Event brought together thousands of people at the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Nov 29, 2008 The inaugural event of the 13th consecutive edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, the biggest floating Christmas tree in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records, brought together thousands of people this Saturday (November 29, 2008). Considered the third greatest event in the city of Rio de Janeiro, after Carnaval and New Year's Eve, the Tree brings something new for 2008 in the form of "A melody of peace for the Brazilian family." The spectacle of lights and colors has taken on a musical touch. An electronic carillon, imported from Italy and similar to the one used in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, has been installed within its structure to reproduce Christmas carols with bells played manually by professional bell-ringers. There are also fireworks scheduled for every Saturday.

The programming of the inaugural event, with a live television broadcast in real time by the Tree's hot site included a concert given by popular Brazilian artists such as singers Elba Ramalho, Joao Bosco, Roberta Sa and guitarist Turibio Santos, as well as the Choir of the Bradesco Foundation, made up of 112 young students. The American soprano Carol McDavit, who has been settled in Brazil for the past 20 years, also made an appearance.

The project has become the largest event sponsored by a single private company in Brazil. This is the 13th edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, which for the first time will have thirteen flashing sequences of different images to dazzle the public. At the top of the 85- meter Tree, the star is now accompanied by two angels representing peace. The 52 kilometers of lighted strands are to evoke the Christmas theme, and 1,600 flashing lights are to evoke twinkling stars.

Certification in the Guinness Book

The second certification in the Guinness Book of Records, as the "largest floating Christmas tree in the world," was obtained because of the height of 85 meters in 2007 and recorded in the recently published 2009 edition. With its launching in 1996, the Tree was 48 meters high and up until the 2006 edition, 82 meters. The first certification in the Guinness book was awarded in 1999, when this symbol of Christmas measured 76 meters.

Technology and the Environment

For the past three years, the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia has had generators fueled by biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. For the third year, to ensure rationality in the consumption of fuel, the generators will be controlled by a computerized system.

Neutralization of Carbon

Emissions of carbon gas into the atmosphere produced by the assembly, display and dismantling of the Tree will be neutralized by the planting of trees in regions of the Mata Atlantica rainforest.

WWW.ARVORENATALBRADESCOSEGUROS.COM.BR/FOTOS

Brazil's endangered species list triples in size

Deforestation and illegal animal trade have done enormous damage to the species of Brazil over the last 20 years. The country's list of endangered animals now stands at 627 species -- 288% higher than the 218 species that were on the same list in 1989.

It's not clear if this is the first major revision to Brazil's endangered list since '89, but it's a significant update: 489 species were added to the list, while 79 were considered recovered enough to be dropped from the list.

Environment Minister Carlos Minc said "Industry is expanding, agriculture is expanding, people are occupying protected areas and our conservation units do not have the protection needed," but "We'll fight to remove the largest number of species possible from that list."

Minc reported that 90% of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, where most of these newly endangered species reside, has been chopped down. More than 232,000 square miles of Brazilian forest have been destroyed since 1970.

Minc took over as Environment Minister earlier this year, after his predecessor, Marina Silva, resigned, citing government "stagnation" in the fight against deforestation.

http://www.plentymag.com/

Brazil fines 24 ethanol producers for illegal forest clearing

Brazil fined two dozen ethanol producers accused of illegal clearing the country's endangered Mata Atlântica or Atlantic rainforest, reports The Associated Press.

The companies face 120 million reals (US$75 million) in fines for operating without licenses and planting sugarcane in illegally deforested areas, Environment Minister Carlos Minc said in a press conference. The firms will be required to restore 143,300 acres (58,000 hectares) of forest.

"We will not let companies that destroy the Atlantic rain forest have any peace," Minc told reporters. "If these environmental crimes continue, they will provide ammunition for those who want to slap trade barriers on the export of Brazilian ethanol."

The fines come shortly after a group of Brazilian ethanol firms signed the first deal to export sustainably-produced ethanol. The deal, announced last week, will send to Sweden 115 million liters of to meet to certain social and environmental standards. The Brazilian soy and beef industries have recently announced similar certification initiatives.

In recent months Brazilian authorities have cracked down on loggers, ranchers, farmers, and charcoal producers believed to be operating in violation of environmental laws. Last week agents seized 3,100 head of cattle found grazing on illegally deforested lands in the Amazon. Minc said the cattle would be auctioned to fund Fome Zero, the government's food program for the poor. Earlier this year the government conducted operation "Arc of Fire" to stop illegal logging on the Amazon frontier.

The moves are part of an effort by Brazil to counter criticism over a recent jump in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and neighboring ecosystems that analysts say is linked to rising commodity prices. Brazilian authorities note that while forest clearing has climbed over the past year, it is still considerably lower than the peak year of 2004 when more than 27,000 square kilometers of forest were lost. Further Brazilian ethanol is widely recognized as the most efficiently mass-produced biofuel on the market, yielding 5.5 times as much energy per unit of input compared with U.S. corn ethanol.

Brazil's Mata Atlantica once blanked the coast of the country but hundreds of years of logging and agricultural expansion have reduced the ecosystem to about eight percent of its original extent. The forest is home to dozens of well-known endangered species, including the charismatic Golden Lion Tamarin.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0701-brazil.html

Parati (Paraty), Brazilian pearl of the tropics

The town is located on the Bay of Ilha Grande, which is dotted with many tropical islands. Rising up some 1,000 meters behind the town are the tropical forests, mountains, and waterfalls.

The town, also known as Paraty is surrounded by many Nature Parks including Serra da Bocaina National Park, Serra do Mar State Park, the Park Reserve of Joatinga and the Environmentally Protected Area of Cairuçu, where the village of Trindade is located. It is an area of tropical humid forests with coastal/marine component; mixed mountain and highland systems.

The temperature in Paraty ranges from 64F - 80F, (18C to 30C), though the summer months can be even hotter.

Sea breezes temper the heat and afternoon rains are common in the summer. It makes the city a popular destination for visitors from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, the rest of Brazil and the world.

It is almost literally a place that time forgot. It was one of the richest towns in 17th-century Brazil, thanks to its location between the gold mines of Minas Gerais and the Portuguese ships that took their output back to Europe, but, by 1720, a new road had been built between Minas and Rio de Janeiro, cutting the town out of the commerce (and the money) resulting in 200 years of almost total isolation.

Parati is a beautiful colonial city located south of Rio de Janeiro.

Containing some of the best and best preserved examples of Portugese baroque architecture, it should come as no surprise that it has been listed as a National Historic Monument - discovered by celebrities and people in the know from Rio and Sao Paulo.

The result of such isolation is (residents like to say it is a 300-year-old town with just 30 years of tourism) is a wonderfully preserved collection of cobbled streets, whitewashed one- or two-story houses, good restaurants and not a fast-food or tacky knick-knacks shop in sight.

Carnival atmosphere: festival at Parati

As book lovers from around the world descend on this baroque style place for a star-studded festival, Rory Ross finds out what gives this sleepy, whitewashed Brazilian town its novel appeal.

On 9 August, 2006, the fourth International Literary Festival kicks off in this immaculate colonial hamlet on the coast of Brazil. Parati, a mere dot on the map, is roughly equidistant between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It's the sort of backwater you might think would struggle to host a game of Scrabble, let alone an international literary festival. And yet, for a few days each year, it becomes the centre of the book world.

Literary Festival at Parati - read the original article

The historic "centre" (it is actually on the edge of town) was built just below sea level with water on three sides, which means that its streets are washed once a month when the tide is at is highest. Cars are banned - the locals get around on foot - or on bicycles or by donkey and cart - and there's always a cooling breeze coming off the bay.

One visitor (Alex Bellos) had this to say:

Part of Parati's charm is that the historic centre is still lived in by locals, many of whom have refurbished their homes as bed-and-breakfast pousadas. I stayed in the Pousada do Ouro, an 18th-century mansion with dark wooden beams, antique furniture and a courtyard filled with plants.

The centre is beautifully maintained, the houses painted traditionally with white walls and brightly coloured doorways. It feels much bigger than it is, partly because the giant cobbles make it tiring to walk around, but also because the streets all curve sideways at the end. You can never see beyond a few blocks. There were two reasons for this: to protect the town from sea winds and to hide it from pirates.

The effect makes the centre feel brilliantly self-contained. Wherever you are you can never see out.

http://www.excitingbrazil.com/parati.html

Brazil's Johnny Appleseed

Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr.

Profession: Photojournalist

Cause: Restoring Brazil's Atlantic rainforest

Why I was moved to support this cause:

What I saw, throughout my life, was this incredible relationship between human degradation and environmental degradation. They are completely linked, one to the other. After so many years of traveling and seeing this unhappiness, I began to lose confidence, and believed that the human species was heading straight into the wall. Because we are rational, we forget we are animals, part of nature. This split in humans--this departure from the fact we are really nature and part of the planet--this has created the big complication for man.

In 1990, me and my wife, Lelia Deluiz Warnick, bought a 2,000-acre cattle farm from my parents in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. We decided to transform this land into a national reserve and to replant the property with the Atlantic forest that was there 80 years before.

The Atlantic forest is the most neglected part of the rainforest in Brazil. The country has two big forest ecosystems, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic rainforest, and we now have just 7% left of this big Atlantic forest that was once twice the size of France.

Our wish, when we started this project, was to try and see if we could add ourselves, humans, back into the planet. The big hope here is that we can rebuild our planet--that what we destroy we can also rebuild.

What I am personally doing to support this cause:

In October, 1998, our family farm in the Rio Doce Valley of Minas Gerais became Brazil's first Private National Heritage Reserve, and the following year Lelia and I created the nonprofit Instituto Terra. Lelia is its president.

Our plan is to plant 2 million trees over this 2,000-acre area; we started planting in 1999, and we are now at 1.1 million trees. The tropical rainforest is a very sophisticated ecosystem, and you must plant a lot of different types of trees. There are more than 300 species of trees in the rainforest, with some of them growing 25 meters high.

The water came back to the property. The birds and insects came back. And now we are seeing the animals return.

We have eight people working full-time at the Instituto Terra. We also have a training center, where we hold classes. One set of classes is for people in the region, and is built on the belief that if you change people's attitude, you will change behavior. So we have classes for miners, for forest police, for bulldozer operators. If you teach the bulldozer operator how to properly build a road, they won't kill the rivers.

The Instituto's training center has a library, lab, auditorium and place for the students to live and eat. We bring in researchers from universities and foundations, specialists who also teach classes. The second type of classes we offer are for students from technical agriculture schools. They come for two years to the Instituto Terra, and we teach them environmentally sustainable agriculture.

We also have a big nursery for the native plants of Minas Gerais. We have the capacity to produce 1 million seedlings a year of 160 different species of native plants.

What you can do:

I want the public to engage themselves in helping to save the planet. To plant a tree in the U.S., China or in Brazil is exactly the same, because what you are contributing is the sequestration of carbon on this planet. We have this huge problem of global warming, and the only way to reduce this carbon is by planting trees. What we are doing at the Instituto Terra is creating a factory of carbon sequestration for all the carbon omitted into the atmosphere, and, at the same time, producing water. What we want people to do is join us in tackling this problem, because together we can do something.

Please join us. We fight all the time for money, and have received help from individuals and foundations and companies, from the state of Brazil and the governments of Asturias in Spain, and Emilia Romagna and Rome regions in Italy. But every year we are running for money. In the U.S., the Tides Foundation in San Francisco collects donations for us; only a tiny contribution goes to their overhead. Please visit our Web site to learn more about the Atlantic forest and what we do, and to make a contribution in the section, "Ways to Help."

http://www.forbes.com/philanthropy/2008/01/25/brazil-rainforest-ecosystems-pf-ii-in_ss_0125philantrophy_inl.html