Call for new action on deforestation
Source: Agencies |
January 25, 2011, Tuesday
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WORLD efforts to slow deforestation should do more to address underlying causes such as rising demand for crops or biofuels, widening from a United Nations focus on using trees to fight climate change, a study said yesterday.
It said a series of projects to protect forests had limited success in recent decades - UN figures show that 13 million hectares of forest were lost every year from 2000 to 2009, an area equivalent to the size of Greece.
The report by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations suggested that the current UN-led efforts to protect forests had too narrow a focus on promoting trees as stores of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
"Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact of forests on sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any new international efforts whose goal is to conserve forests," said Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO panel and a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human -activities. Trees soak up carbon as they grow but release it when they burn or decay.
The IUFRO study said a key problem was that deforestation was often caused by economic pressures far away. A popular global brand of cookies, for instance, uses palm oil grown on deforested land in Indonesia.
IUFRO urged policies of "embracing complexity" to help protect forests, including educating consumers, rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all mechanism such as carbon storage.
It called for better efforts, for -instance, to aid indigenous -peoples, whose livelihoods might depend on healthy forests.
Among promising measures were amendments to the US Lacey Act, which makes it illegal to import wood known to come from stolen timber. Brazil, for instance, has enacted procedures to tackle deforestation in the Amazon, it said.
The IUFRO report will be issued at UN talks in New York this week marking the start of the UN's International Year of Forests.
Almost 200 nations agreed last month to step up efforts to protect forests with a plan that aims to put a price on the carbon stored in trees, while helping indigenous peoples and promoting sustainable use.
Authors of the IUFRO study said that the plan, known as REDD+, was promising. "Our worry is that this won't be enough," Benjamin Cashore, a forestry expert at Yale University and an IUFRO author, said.
It said a series of projects to protect forests had limited success in recent decades - UN figures show that 13 million hectares of forest were lost every year from 2000 to 2009, an area equivalent to the size of Greece.
The report by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations suggested that the current UN-led efforts to protect forests had too narrow a focus on promoting trees as stores of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
"Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact of forests on sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any new international efforts whose goal is to conserve forests," said Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO panel and a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human -activities. Trees soak up carbon as they grow but release it when they burn or decay.
The IUFRO study said a key problem was that deforestation was often caused by economic pressures far away. A popular global brand of cookies, for instance, uses palm oil grown on deforested land in Indonesia.
IUFRO urged policies of "embracing complexity" to help protect forests, including educating consumers, rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all mechanism such as carbon storage.
It called for better efforts, for -instance, to aid indigenous -peoples, whose livelihoods might depend on healthy forests.
Among promising measures were amendments to the US Lacey Act, which makes it illegal to import wood known to come from stolen timber. Brazil, for instance, has enacted procedures to tackle deforestation in the Amazon, it said.
The IUFRO report will be issued at UN talks in New York this week marking the start of the UN's International Year of Forests.
Almost 200 nations agreed last month to step up efforts to protect forests with a plan that aims to put a price on the carbon stored in trees, while helping indigenous peoples and promoting sustainable use.
Authors of the IUFRO study said that the plan, known as REDD+, was promising. "Our worry is that this won't be enough," Benjamin Cashore, a forestry expert at Yale University and an IUFRO author, said.
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