Step by step, and taking very small steps, Brazil is planning to end its practice of permitting more trees to be cut down than are grown each year, and it plans so to do by 2015. Brazil will be trying to end illegal logging and consult on a national plan how its forests should be managed.
In some ways the plan will not make too much difference as it is based around planting more trees than are cut down, but cutting a large old tree creates more emissions, especially if the tree is burnt, than the immediate effect of planting a small new tree.
Deforestation in Brazil creates three quarters of its greenhouse gas emissions. Brazil has not signed up to Kyoto and has no targets for greenhouse gas reductions.
Trees are a national resource for Brazil and they have them in abundance. They exploit them for their own economic benefit. This enables some people to prosper, others to earn wages to feed themselves and their families and for the country to attempt to develop itself into a wealthy country, like perhaps England, whose large deciduous forests were cut down five or six hundred years ago.
But development in the tropical rain forest causes damage to the local eco systems and to the people who live in the Brazilian forests. There are more species of plants and animals in any single hectare of tropical rain forest than there are in the whole of the United States and Canada.
Trees are also an international resource, holding huge stores of carbon and creating in places like Brazil an incredible variety of life forms many of which are used to improve human health and cure or alleviate illness. They should be preserved, because preserving them creates benefits for the whole of humanity, not least in helping the problem of climate change.
And that is why it must be right for the rest of humanity to help Brazil preserve these trees and forests without losing the economic benefits of the. The only way to do this is for the rest of humanity to make it more valuable for Brazil (and the other nations with large areas of forests) to preserve and enhance their forests, rather than crop them and turn them into temporary farmland. Providing such an incentive would not cost the world much, and may well be an important factor in saving it.
Filed under: carbon emissions, climate change, global warming | Tagged: Brazil, deforestation, forests | 2 Comments »