Climate change may kill the Amazon rainforest

The dieback of the Amazonian forests caused by climate change is not inevitable but remains a distinct possibility, according to a study led by the Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a detailed examination of the climatic and ecological evidence of the likelihood of an Amazon dieback. The researchers conclude that the fate of Amazonian forests will critically depend on the interaction between global climate change and local deforestation and fire use. The study suggests direct intervention to maintain the forest is needed to minimise the risk of a ‘tipping point’ or dieback occurring.

Researchers analysed the simulations of 19 Global Climate Models, comparing them with climate observations from the 20th century, and found that almost all the models under-estimated current Amazonian rainfall. This underestimation occurs because climate models are unable to capture some of the peculiar features of the geography of South America.

After correcting this underestimation of rainfall, they found that most models suggested that Eastern Amazonia was likely to shift towards a more seasonally dry ‘monsoonal’ climate rather than a dry ‘savannah’ climate. This suggests that Amazonia would remain wet enough over the year to sustain a forest although some models suggested a large reduction in rainfall was still a possibility.

The study then examined recent ecological field studies that have explored how Amazonian forests respond to seasonal drying. Critically, these seasonal forests may be fairly resilient to occasional drought, but are likely to be more vulnerable to fires. The study warns that these areas will become tinderboxes if deforestation, logging and heavy fire use is not controlled.

Lead author Professor Yadvinder Malhi, from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, said: ‘Forest protection within Eastern Amazonia could play a major role in minimising the prospects of major dieback, while also contributing to tackling global climate change. Forest cover will help Eastern Amazonia adapt to climate change by helping maintain local rainfall in the dry season, limiting the spread of fires and stopping surface temperatures rising too high. This will help people living in the local towns as well as the forests themselves.

He added: ‘Even with sufficent funds and willpower, the implementation of ‘Biosphere Management’ on such a scale will be a huge challenge. Brazil has recently announced an ambitious plan for slowing down Amazonian deforestation and deserves full international support. It will be critically important to understand the local and national social, political and economic context if this strategy is to succeed. We urgently need to protect one of our planet’s most important ecosystems and at the same time mitigate against climate change.

‘Active forest protection in the Amazon forest region can help the region adapt to climate change and minimise the risk of a dieback. This strategy will also contribute to the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’

The research was led by Oxford University in collaboration with the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh; Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire; Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, Sheffield; and the Met Office Hadley Centre, Jointcentre for Hydro-Meteorological Research, Wallingford.

http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=2171

From maid to minister

When Marina Silva was 16, she was illiterate. She lived in the small and isolated Brazilian Amazon state of Acre, and worked as a maid and seamstress to support her siblings. Her mother and two sisters died when she was 14, and Silva herself was suffering a life threatening illness, with which she still battles today.

So how, then, did Marina Silva rise to become the Brazilian minister of environment and share the UN's highest environmental prize with the likes of Al Gore, former US vice-president and Noble Peace Prize winner?

The story of Marina Silva is well known in Brazil.

It is a remarkable rise for a woman who now is considered by many in the environmental movement as an unlikely "trailblazer".

Many politicians around the world are born into wealth, and Brazil is no exception.

But Maria Silva had no such luck.

Silva was born deep inside the Brazilian Amazon. Her father worked as a rubber tapper, extracting liquid from trees that is then a main ingredient of rubber.

Life was tough, her two sisters died six months before her mother, Silva's brother passed away when he was just seven days old.

Silva did not grow up wanting to be a famous politician, her dream was more simple.

Literal ambition

"When I was growing up ... people that worked in the government belonged to traditional families, families that owned some kind of property,"Silva told Al Jazeera in at her home in the capital Brasilia.

Silva watched her father read and was left with a feeling of amazement.

"My father knew how to read and I was fascinated when I saw him looking at a piece of paper and then speaking about what that paper said.

"My dream was to learn how to read and to become a nun and to be able to help others as a teacher, to take care of others."

To fulfill that dream Silva moved to Rio Branco, the state capital.

"When I got to Rio Branco, I started to take literacy classes in a programme for young people and adults," she said.

"I learned how to read and write in 15 days."

Political activist

Silva was then able to work her way into university, where she graduated with a degree in history. She briefly became a teacher, before meeting Chico Mendes, a famous Brazilian environmental and labour rights activist.

Shortly after meeting Mendes, Silva decided to dedicate her life to saving the Amazon rainforest.

She became the youngest woman ever elected to the Brazilian senate, where she distinguished herself as someone who fought at all costs for environmental rights.

Six years ago Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, the president, himself famous for working as a shoe shine boy as a child, named Silva as the head of the ministry of environment.

It is a position which oversees the Amazon, the world's largest forest.

Silva immediately confronted powerful logging, agriculture and corporate interests responsible for deforestation – a task few of her predecessors had dared take on.

"I cannot see my life separated from my fight," Silva said.

"I cannot see my fight isolated. I see it as an effort of many people inside and outside Brazil in the defence of the Amazon."

Silva suffered early set-backs. During her first year almost 600,000 miles of illegal highways were discovered in the middle of the Amazon.

But Silva fought on, and was eventually was credited for slowing the pace of deforestation by holding law breakers accountable at all costs, while also setting up inventive projects for sustainable development in indigenous communities.

"The Amazon forest lost 17 per cent of its vegetation in the last 400 years but the majority of this deforestation was done in the past 30 or 40 years," she said.

"That is why it is necessary to change the course of the process of development that has been happening in the region and take it into a new direction. Reduce the level of deforestation, and make a change in the model of development that has been implemented.

"We need to bring a new paradigm where the standing forest is more valuable and viable than cutting the forest for other economic activities. That is possible."

Fight for the Amazon

The United Nations has granted Silva the Champions of the Earth Prize, the highest environmental honour bestowed by the UN.

She shared the award with Al Gore and Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

"This is a confrontation between the legitimate interests of the present generation and the legitimate rights of future generations"

But Silva was recently reminded that hers is a never ending fight.

A recent report by the federal government indicated in the past six months Amazon deforestation has risen.

In response, Silva helped plan an ambitious and controversial federal operation to shut down the most blatant violators of the law.

However, the move resulted in thousands of poor Brazilians who rely on the logging industry for their only source of income being left without a job, especially in heavily deforested states like Para and Mato Grosso.

Critics say the environmental restrictions initiated by Silva are hampering Brazil’s economic progress and that under Silva, the ministry has been too slow to process permits for development projects in the Amazon.

Silva said: "This is a confrontation between the legitimate interests of the present generation and the legitimate rights of future generations,"

"That is why this fight for the environment is very complex. It is easier to fight for the interests of those who are here and it is more challenging to fight for the interests of those who are not born yet, who will be born in 10, 20, 100 or 1,000 years.

"That is the reason why the environmental cause is complex and at the same time it gives it legitimacy that cannot be denied, she said.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D9C60E9F-6536-4FDE-8658-304D4B8931E7.htm

Biofuels: a solution that became part of the problem

· Alarm expressed by top government expert

· UK food prices rose three times faster than inflation

Using plant-based materials for fuel in cars and trucks was until recently heralded as the answer to the need to reduce carbon emissions from petrol and diesel fuels.

But the alarm expressed yesterday by Professor Robert Watson, the government's highest-ranking environment scientist, that the headlong pursuit of biofuels could accelerate climate change, is the latest in a series of comments from senior figures that have shaken Whitehall.

Both Watson and the former chief scientific officer, Sir David King, have joined the chorus of those calling for a key "sustainability" clause to be introduced to ensure biofuels do not compound the problem by competing for land with staple food crops and speeding up deforestation.

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, Watson said: "It would obviously be insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that's actually leading to an increase in the greenhouse gases from biofuels."

The comments are controversial because the government has committed the UK from April 1 to ensuring that at least 2.5% of all petrol and diesel for vehicles comes from biofuels, with that figure moving up to 5% by 2010. Meanwhile, the EU is aiming for 10% of power for transport being provided by crops from 2020.

King said a distinction should be drawn between different kinds of biofuels, some of which are more carbon-friendly than others. For example, biofuels from sugar cane in Brazil have 10% of the carbon footprint of traditional fuel, while maize-based fuels in America would have 80% or 90% of the footprint. He also has worries about the displacement of food crops by biofuel crops.

"There is enough evidence now that the White House having introduced to favour biofuels in the US has created quite a massive diversion of food crop products into biofuel production and hence pushed up prices of food, particularly in developing countries," he said.

The price of food in Britain rose three times faster than the level of inflation last year and major increases in the cost of wheat and other basic commodities have been partly attributed to biofuels. Meanwhile, vital rainforest in places such as Brazil and Indonesia is being cleared more quickly than ever to make way for new plant-based fuel production.

The views from the two British scientists came as a coalition of environmental and development groups wrote a joint letter to ministers warning their biofuels policy risked doing more harm than good. In a letter to the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, groups including Oxfam, the RSPB and Greenpeace called for her to put an end to the biofuels policy being introduced through a Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) until more was known about the impact of different forms of plant-based oil.

The government agreed last month that it would undertake a review of the biofuels sector to ensure "the full economic and environmental impacts of biofuels production are taken into account in the formation of UK policy beyond 2010". The study will be undertaken by the new Renewable Fuels Agency, which will report in the early summer, but Kelly made clear that, in the meantime, the RTFO would apply from the start of next month.

The review follows expressions of concern from Stavros Dimas, the EU's environment commissioner, the Royal Society and a parliamentary environmental audit committee. The last concluded that the possible risks outweighed the benefits and said both the UK and EU should scrap their targets until the green advantages of biofuels could be guaranteed.

Ministers have also been influenced by two studies highlighted recently in the US journal Science. In one, researchers calculated that converting natural ecosystems to grow corn or sugar cane to produce ethanol, or palms or soybeans for biodiesel, could release between 17 and 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels. Stephen Polasky from the University of Minnesota, one of the authors of the report, said: "Landowners are rewarded for producing palm oil and other products but not rewarded for carbon management. This creates incentives for excessive land-clearing and can result in large increases in carbon emissions."

Any retrenchment by government over biofuels will cause resentment within big business, which was opposed to the concept but has started to invest heavily.

The value of renewable power companies has soared over recent years. BP recently announced it might sell off part of its "green" energy business, while Shell has put up for sale its Infineum joint venture with ExxonMobil, which produces biofuels. But new British businesses such as D1 Oils, which produce "second-generation" biofuels, have been laying off staff, saying the increasing opposition to these fuels is undermining the business.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/25/biofuels.energy/print

Rethinking Amazon Conservation

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva opened September’s UN General Assembly debate with a call to bump up efforts to combat climate change. He pointed to Brazil’s environmental efforts, citing a three-year decrease of deforestation levels in the Amazon as an example. But, last week, the Brazilian government announced that deforestation levels experienced a marked increase in the last five months of 2007.

According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, as many as 2,700 square miles of rainforest, or two-thirds the annual rate, was destroyed between August and December. As Nature magazine’s blog notes, the deforestation rate increased rapidly over the five-month period, from 243 square kilometers in August to 948 in December.

The government followed news of the rise of deforestation—attributed rising food prices, soy planting, and cattle farming—with warnings of repercussions. Brazil plans to step up policing in areas of illegal logged as well as new measures that will target and fine farmers operating on illegally cleared land. Lula also pledged to cut farm credits for the 36 municipalities with the highest rate of deforestation. Defending the new legislation, the president argued that Brazil already had enough available land for soy, sugarcane, and cattle.

However, some warn that the new laws may do little to stop the rising degradation. Roberto Smeraldi, who directs Friends of the Earth in Brazil, told Reuters’ AlertNet that penalizing areas where deforestation has already occurred could simply push loggers and farmers into adjacent municipalities. Others say environmental laws are rarely implemented in the Amazon region.

With global meat consumption growing and an increased ethanol demand fueled by U.S. maize subsidies, food prices rose sharply in 2007; some Brazilian farmers have taken advantage of the price jump by farming in the Amazon. Yet, Dr. Daniel Nepstad, an expert on the Amazon rainforest based at the Woods Hole Research Center, explain in an interview, rising prices could provide opportunities for conservation through incentives for responsible land use.

Ranchers and soy farmers could “increase their access to expanding domestic and international markets and to credit, and lower the risk of losing their land to agrarian reform” if they engage in legal land-use practices, he says. An essay published by the Social Science Research Network examines top publicly-traded Brazilian companies and their role in promoting sustainable practices in the Amazon rainforest.

The latest issue of Americas Quarterly, hitting newsstands February 6, focuses on corporate social responsibility in the Western Hemisphere and includes a feature article by Regina Scharf about why Brazil leads the region in terms of corporate social responsibility. Learn more about Americas Quarterly by visiting the journal’s website.

http://www.as-coa.org/article.php?id=878