Life is hanging by a thread
BY JANE GOODALL
Recently the International Panel on Climate Change issued a report
predicting an alarming array of impacts of climate change around the globe,
including drought, floods, lower crop yields, threatened food security, wildfire
and ocean acidification. It seems that no living thing in this web of life we
are a part of will be unaffected by climate change.
As a primatologist, I am particularly concerned by the prediction that 20
percent to 30 percent of species will face increased risk of extinction.
We know that a majority of the world's species live in rainforests, from many
flagship species like elephants, tigers and chimpanzees to smaller species like
insects and algae. Some play a role in curing human diseases, or may in the
future.
These forests are threatened both by large-scale commercial exploitation and by
rapidly increasing numbers of poor people who are destroying the forests to make
charcoal or to open the land for subsistence agriculture. Some of the other
effects of climate change predicted by the IPCC, such as drought and food
insecurity, will only exacerbate the plight of these people.
A relatively new danger to these forests is the growing enthusiasm for biofuels.
In Africa, Asia and Latin America, forest blocks that were previously reserved
for conservation or sustainable forestry are being converted to sugar cane and
palm oil plantations, whose output will be used as fuel for ethanol or biodiesel
plants.
The irony of cutting down forests for biofuels is that forests store a
significant fraction of the world's stocks of carbon. If these carbon-capturing
trees are felled and burned -- whether as firewood or to clear land -- the
oxidation of their carbon will release billions more tons of carbon dioxide.
The tropical rainforests of Africa, Latin America and South Asia are
particularly important in this regard.
Tropical deforestation contributes 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere annually, compared to approximately 6 billion tons from burning
fossil fuels. Saving these forests would not only prevent the release of carbon
currently stored in them, but it also would allow them to continue absorbing
carbon in the future.
While population pressures cannot be quickly reversed, nor the businesses of
logging and mining phased out, there is much we can do to save these forests.
The core of a successful strategy involves working not only with national
leaders, but also, and most important, with local people to raise living
standards, especially in the areas near the forest preserves. By providing
technical assistance to farmers to raise their incomes, education to young
people, healthcare to families and economic investments in ecotourism, these
rural communities can become the custodians of the forests, not their
destroyers.
These strategies have other benefits as well: They promote local stability and
security. Rural prosperity, education and effective public-health systems serve
as natural defenses against outbreaks of pandemic disease, war, terrorism and
political instability. By working with local people to save forests, we help to
create stable communities that will surely improve global security.
The governments of the United States and other developed nations bear a special
responsibility to promote these programs. Not only are Western nations the
greatest consumers of oil, timber and other carbon-generating industries, they
have the wealth to bring about change in poor developing countries. Relatively
small increases in aid directed toward rural community development, especially
through microcredit programs, can have an extraordinary impact on saving
wilderness areas, including forests, and the array of life forms they sustain.
Only a few centuries ago, each of the developed nations on the continents of
Europe, Asia and North America destroyed their own forests and many of the
species inhabiting them in an unsustainable scramble toward wealth. Now only
remnant forests remain on those continents.
The developed nations have an opportunity to enable developing nations to avoid
making the same mistakes. By investing more in environmentally sustainable
development, we can save valuable species, help prevent the escalation of global
warming, and increase global security. Helping to preserve the forests of
developing nations is in our interests, as well as theirs.
Jane Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a U.N.
``Messenger of Peace.''
©2007 Jane Goodall
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Judy Reed
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