Half of Amazon could be gone by 2030
More than half of
the Amazon rainforest could disappear or be damaged by
climate
change and deforestation by 2030, a new report warns.
By
Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 3:01am GMT
06/12/2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=CSTIMKGVWZJ0PQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/earth/2007/12/06/eaamazon106.xml
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At
the same time the clearing of forests to make way for crops and
livestock could release almost 100 billion tonnes of CO2 - the
equivalent of more than two years of total global greenhouse
gas emissions.
Logging trucks parked alongside the
Interoceanica highway. Peru
Logging trucks on the
Interoceanica highway in Peru
The destruction would threaten
one of the key influences on helping keep
the global climate
cool, according to the WWF report.
It warns that the future
of the Amazon is on a knife-edge and if logging
and the spread
of farming is allowed to continue unchecked - fuelled by
world
demand for soya, biofuel, and meat - the forests will be caught up
in a vicious spiral of slash and burn leading to a dramatic
reduction in
rainfall.
The report, The Amazon's Vicious
Cycles: Drought and Fire in the
Greenhouse, was released to
coincide with the Bali climate summit.
WWF used the report's
findings to call for measures which would reduce
cattle
ranching and farming and expand protected areas.
Dan
Nepstad, Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in
Massachusetts, and the report's author, said: "The
importance of the
Amazon forest for the globe's climate cannot
be underplayed.
"It's not only essential for cooling
the world's temperature but also
such a large source of
freshwater that it may be enough to influence
some of the great
ocean currents, and on top of that it's a massive
store of
carbon."
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The report claims that
changes already under way in the Amazon are much
further ahead
than had been predicted and will lead to extensive
conversion
and degradation over the next 15-25 years.
As much as 55 per
cent of the forests could be lost or damaged by
agriculture and
livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging.
An
ecological tipping point would be reached when a combination of all
these factors would reduce pristine rainforest to fireprone
brush with a
consequent loss of biodiversity and the chances of
conserving the forest
greatly reduced.
Forests that burn
are more susceptible to further burning because the
loss of
trees allows more sunlight to reach the forest interior, drying
dead leaves and branches on the forest floor.
The loss
of the Amazon forests could speed up global climatic
disruption,
influencing the amount of rainfall in far-flung places
around
the planet.
Some models indicate that rainfall could decline
in India and Central
America, and that less rain may fall
during the crop growing season in
the grain belts of Brazil and
the United States of America.
Loggers with illegally
cut, highly quoted cedro trees in Peru
Loggers with
illegally cut, highly quoted cedro trees in Peru
If the
trends continue important eco-regions of the Amazon, such as the
Maranhão babaçu forest, the Marañon dry
forest and the cloud forests of
Bolivia would be lost and many
species of animal, including several
primates, will lose more
than 80 per cent of their forest habitat over
the next few
decades.
Beatrix Richards, head of forests at WWF-UK. said:
"The Amazon is on a
knife edge due to the dual threats of
deforestation and climate change.
"Developed countries
have a key role to play in throwing a lifeline to
forests
around the world.
"At the international negotiations
currently underway in Bali
governments must agree a process
which results in ambitious global
emission reduction targets
beyond the current phase of Kyoto which ends
in 2012. Crucially
this must include a strategy to reduce emissions from
forests
and help break the cycle of deforestation."
The report
called for a bold new conservation strategy for the Amazon
which
would avoid the tipping point and allow the forests to rapidly
regrow.
Freed from the slash and burn policy and properly
protected, the Amazon
would return to closed-canopy forest and
would recover its rainfall
stabilisation role within 15
years.
The report concludes: "There is still time to
lower the risk of
widespread forest degradation and the
acceleration of global warming
that it would stimulate.
"All
opportunities to govern Amazon frontier expansion must be seized.
One of the most promising approaches to the large-scale
conservation of
Amazon forests is to compensate tropical
nations for their reductions in
heat-trapping gas emissions
from tropical forests."
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