http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0822-05.htm
Published on Wednesday,
August 22, 2001 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
When the Boughs Break
A New UN Report Confirms It: The Planet's Woodlands Are Disappearing
by Alanna Mitchell
Also See:
Forests
Face Global Extinction, Study Says
'Miraculous Transformation' in Attitudes Necessary or
the World Stands to Lose Most Closed-Canopy Ecosystems,
Toronto Globe & Mail 8/21/01
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0821-02.htm
Think of the forest and a fuzzy, nostalgic image comes to mind.
Those dappled forest floors. The chatter of birds. The damp
coolness that serves as a respite from the heat of the day.
The pungent smell of life.
It's not that Klaus
Toepfer hasn't felt all that. He is,
after all, the world's most senior environmental official
-- his title is executive director of the United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP) -- and he has spent his share
of time blissed out in the spiritual retreat of a woodland.
But his firm belief now -- and one that holds out a real
potential for saving the best of the forests that are left
-- is that the world's population must move beyond the
emotional response to forests and focus instead on a few
steely scientific facts.
The world's forests
are vanishing. A landmark report from
Mr. Toepfer's organization that came out with this week
has catalogued the losses globally for the first time:
Just 21 per cent of the Earth's land area is still covered
with healthy forests. Healthy means at least 40 per cent
of the forest's interlocking canopy is intact. And that
means the forest still works to support wildlife and watersheds.
Not only are we losing
these intricate ecosystems, but the
richest patches of remaining forest will vanish within decades
unless, as Mr. Toepfer put it, the world undergoes a "miraculous
transformation" in its attitudes. His report argues that
the
best strategy is to take aim at the best forests left, with
the fewest people around them, and save those.
The reason any of this
matters is not because we stand to be
emotionally poorer if these forests disappear, as Mr. Toepfer
explained when contacted by telephone in Nairobi late last night.
It's because humankind needs the remaining forests -- called
the lungs of the planet -- to perform a raft of pretty basic
services for sustaining life. Saving forests, he argues,
is a case of self-interest that will save humanity money
over the long term.
Healthy forests equal
healthy ecosystems. Healthy ecosystems
protect watersheds and soil and the DNA bank that has emerged
after 3.5 billion years of evolution on this planet.
Not only that, but
forests play an integral role in the
carbon cycle of the Earth: Trees absorb carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere and reinject it into the plant cycle.
Take away enough trees
and all those functions stop working.
Species die out. (Primates are under particular threat.)
Waters become fouled. Soil erodes. Carbon dioxide stays
in the atmosphere and alters climate patterns.
"These are assets
of the highest value to this generation
and future generations," Mr. Toepfer says. "There is
a huge
and important return on these assets."
The cost is not just
future misery, but the hard-cash expense
of trying to recreate all those biological services with machines,
assuming it would even be possible.
The challenge is to
understand all that and protect the planet's
forests. And in that, Canada has a unique and richly ironic role
to play.
Mr. Toepfer's report
found that Canada has the second-largest
area of canopied forests left in the world (behind Russia).
Some are among the world's only remaining frontier forests,
which means humans have not -- so far -- penetrated their
depths. Better still, Canada is the only G7 country with
vast tracts of forest remaining. Or, as Mr. Toepfer put it:
"Canada is the most important forested country in the G7."
The irony comes in
because Canada's wealth stems, in part,
from generations of turning forests into board-feet, shakes
and shingles and agricultural land. Now, having embraced
the lumberjack and the farmer as part of our national
identity, we're being called upon to be leaders and help
developing countries that still have forests left to stop
cutting them down. "Canada has an outstanding experience
and responsibility in this field," says Mr. Toepfer.
It's not actually as
ridiculous as it sounds. Canada
may have cut down millions of trees, but it has learned
a lot along the way about how to do it in a way that
can be sustained over time. We have some of the best
forestry and aquatics scientists in the world.
The president of UNEP's governing body is none other
than David Anderson, Canada's Environment Minister.
As well, we have a
healthy -- and occasionally vocal
-- middle class to pressure politicians on these issues,
public pressure being one of the key strategies contained
in the UNEP report.
Canada has also used
its economic prestige to help put
in place a couple of critical pieces of international
policy that could end up having a massive impact on the
world's forests. During the Bonn round of negotiations
on the Kyoto Protocol in July, Canada helped establish
the Clean Development Mechanism. This will allow developed
countries like Canada to gain credits against their own
carbon-dioxide emissions by preventing emissions somewhere
else in the world. That means investing in energy efficiency,
renewable energy and forests in other countries. All of
that could help trees.
Meanwhile, some developing
countries have launched their
own programs to preserve their forests. Backed by
primatologists from the University of Wisconsin and
the World Wildlife Fund, a group of landowners in the
tiny Central American nation of Belize decided in 1985
to leave a fringe of forest around farmers' fields
so that the Black Howler monkeys would have corridors
to move in. They also committed parcels of land to a
nature preserve, which has grown to about 5,200 hectares.
The local economy now benefits from ecotourism, and
local people report that deer are reappearing in the
area. Where 59 species of birds were recorded in 1989,
that number has risen to 250.
Belize's solutions
are piecemeal and depend in part
on North American support. But they signify a small
step toward seeing these remaining canopied forests
as an international good that all countries have
to bear in mind. Further down the road, the goal
is for the international community to establish
clearer rules for when such a forest can be cut
down.
Mr. Toepfer has a raft
of other innovative fixes.
Now that UNEP knows what forests are in the best
shape, it has launched programs in Africa and Indonesia
to protect the habitats of some of the endangered great
apes. The organization hopes to tap the growing thirst
among wealthy tourists to venture into the homelands
of the gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo and orangutan.
He suggests that rich
countries might pay poor countries
for keeping their forests intact. Developed countries
could send discounted lumber to those countries whose
rich virgin forests can still be preserved. He's also
considering a Debt-for-Nature swap that would see rich
countries cancel some foreign debts of developing countries
in return for protecting critical canopied forests that remain.
So far, such strategies
are pretty theoretical.
The good news is our newfound clear-headedness about
what is at risk. Preserving what's left of the planet's
forests is not an emotional issue. This is as practical
as the air we breathe.
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