Restored Forests Breathe Life Into Efforts Against Climate Change
LA
VIRGEN, Costa Rica — Over just a few decades in the mid-20th century,
this small country chopped down a majority of its ancient forests. But
after a huge conservation push and a wave of forest regrowth, trees now
blanket more than half of Costa Rica.
Far
to the south, the Amazon forest was once being quickly cleared to make
way for farming, but Brazil has slowed the loss so much that it has done
more than any other country to limit the emissions leading to global
warming.
And
on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have
been made in the past few months to halt the rampant cutting of that
country’s forests, backed by business interests with the clout to make
it happen.
In
the battle to limit the risks of climate change, it has been clear for
decades that focusing on the world’s immense tropical forests — saving
the ones that are left, and perhaps letting new ones grow — is the
single most promising near-term strategy.
That
is because of the large role that forests play in what is called the
carbon cycle of the planet. Trees pull the main greenhouse gas, carbon
dioxide, out of the air and lock the carbon away in their wood and in
the soil beneath them. Destroying them, typically by burning, pumps much
of the carbon back into the air, contributing to climate change.
Over
time, humans have cut down or damaged at least three-quarters of the
world’s forests, and that destruction has accounted for much of the
excess carbon that is warming the planet.
But
now, driven by a growing environmental movement in countries that are
home to tropical forests, and by mounting pressure from Western
consumers who care about sustainable practices, corporate and government
leaders are making a fresh push to slow the cutting — and eventually to
halt it. In addition, plans are being made by some of those same
leaders to encourage forest regrowth on such a giant scale that it might
actually pull a sizable fraction of human-released carbon dioxide out
of the air and lock it into long-term storage.
With
the recent signs of progress, long-wary environmental groups are
permitting themselves a burst of optimism about the world’s forests.
“The
public should take heart,” said Rolf Skar, who helps lead forest
conservation work for the environmental group Greenpeace. “We are at a
potentially historic moment where the world is starting to wake up to
this issue, and to apply real solutions.”
Still,
Greenpeace and other groups expect years of hard work as they try to
hold business leaders and politicians accountable for the torrent of
promises they have made lately. The momentum to slow or halt
deforestation is fragile, for many reasons. And even though rich Western
governments have hinted for years that they might be willing to spend
tens of billions of dollars to help poor countries save their forests,
they have allocated only a few billion dollars.
Around
the world, trees are often cut down to make room for farming, and so
the single biggest threat to forests remains the need to feed growing
populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the
means to eat better. Saving forests, if it can be done, will require
producing food much more intensively, on less land.
“For
thousands of years, the march of civilization has been associated with
converting natural ecosystems to crops that serve only man,” said Glenn
Hurowitz, a managing director at Climate Advisers, a consultancy in Washington.
“What’s
happening now is that we are trying to break that paradigm. If that
succeeds, it’s going to be a major development in human history.”
A Remarkable Comeback
Deep
inside a Costa Rican rain forest, white-faced capuchin monkeys leapt
through the tree tops. Nunbirds and toucans flew overhead, and a huge
butterfly, flashing wings of an iridescent blue, fluttered through the
air.
Ignoring
the profusion of life around him, Bernal Paniagua Guerrero focused his
gaze on a single 20-foot tree, placing a tape measure around the spindly
trunk and calling a number out to his sister, Jeanette Paniagua
Guerrero, who recorded it on a clipboard.
With
that, the tree, a black manú just over two inches in diameter, entered
the database of the world’s scientific knowledge. Its growth will be
tracked year by year until it dies a natural death — or somebody decides
to chop it down for the valuable, rot-resistant wood.
The Paniaguas and their co-worker, Enrique Salicette Nelson, work for an American scientist, Robin Chazdon, helping her chronicle a remarkable comeback.
Costa Rica: A Success Story
Costa Rica is considered a forest success.
Much of the country’s old-growth forest was lost from the 1940s to the
1980s, but then new policies stemmed the loss, and forests have regrown
to cover more than half the country. Serious threats persist, including a
boom in pineapple farming that gives landowners an incentive to cut
down recovering forest plots.
NICARAGUA
Liberia
COSTA RICA
San José
Limón
A large, intact forest area still exists in
Costa Rica, extending to the south and east into Panama. The dense,
natural forest remains unfragmented by roads and has not been used for
timber production.
PANAMA
David
Forest cover in 2000
Loss since 2000
Gain since 2000
50 miles
Cuatro
Rios, the forest they were standing in one recent day, looked, to a
casual eye, as if it must have been there forever. Trees stretched as
high as 100 feet, and a closed canopy of leaves cast the understory into
deep shade — one hallmark of a healthy tropical rain forest.
In
fact, the land was a cattle pasture only 45 years ago. When the market
for beef fell, the owners let the forest reclaim it. Now the Cuatro Rios
forest, near the tiny village of La Virgen, is a study plot for Dr.
Chazdon, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, who has become
a leading voice in arguing that large-scale forest regrowth can help to
solve some of the world’s problems.
Indeed, forests are already playing an outsize role in limiting the damage humans are doing to the planet.
For
the entire geologic history of the earth, carbon in various forms has
flowed between the ground, the air and the ocean. A large body of
scientific evidence shows that the amount of carbon in the air at any
given time, in the form of carbon dioxide, largely determines the
planet’s temperature.
The
burning of coal, oil and natural gas effectively moves carbon out of
the ground and into the active carbon cycle operating at the earth’s
surface, causing a warming of the globe that scientists believe is more
rapid now than in any similar period of geologic history.
Though the higher temperatures are causing extensive problems, including heat waves and rising seas,
the increasing carbon dioxide also acts as a sort of plant fertilizer.
The gas is the primary source of the carbon that plants, using the
energy of sunlight, turn into sugars and woody tissue.
Scientific
reports suggest that 20 percent to 25 percent of the carbon dioxide
that people are pumping into the air is being absorbed by trees and
other plants, which keep taking up more and more even as human emissions
keep rising.
But
when people damage or destroy forests, that puts carbon dioxide into
the air, worsening the warming problem. Historically, forests have been
chopped down all over the planet. Now they are actually regrowing across
large stretches of the Northern Hemisphere, and the most worrisome
destruction is occurring in relatively poor countries in the tropics.
Scientists
concluded decades ago that deforestation must be stopped, both to limit
climate change and to conserve the world’s biological diversity. These
days, they are also coming to understand the huge potential of new or
recovering forests to help pull dangerous emissions out of the air.
“Every
time I hear about a government program that is going to spend billions
of dollars on some carbon capture and storage program, I just laugh and
think, what is wrong with a tree?” said Nigel Sizer, director of forest
programs at the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington. “All you have to do is look out the window, and the answer is there.”
Scientists
are still trying to figure out how much of a difference an ambitious
forest regrowth strategy could make. But a leading figure in the
discussion — Richard A. Houghton, acting president of the Woods Hole Research Center
in Massachusetts — has argued for turning some 1.2 billion acres of
degraded or marginally productive agricultural land into forests.
That
is an exceedingly ambitious figure, equal to about half the land in the
United States. But researchers say it would be possible, in principle,
if farming in poor countries became far more efficient. Some countries
have already pledged to restore tens of millions of acres.
Dr.
Houghton believes that if his target were pursued aggressively, and
coupled with stronger efforts to protect existing forests, the rapid
growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be slowed sharply or
possibly even halted.
That,
he believes, would give the world a few decades for an orderly
transition away from fossil fuels. “This is not a solution, but it would
help us buy some time,” Dr. Houghton said.
Finding an Effective Tactic
The
Amazon, spreading across nine countries of South America, is the
world’s largest tropical forest. The majority of the Amazon is in
Brazil, which for decades treated it as a limitless resource.
Sometimes
aided by United States government funding for development, Brazil
encouraged road construction that effectively opened the forest to
settlement, including illegal land grabs. Crews harvested select trees
for timber and then cut or burned the rest to make room for cattle
ranching and soybean farming.
Deforestation
was so rampant that by the middle of the last decade, 17 percent of the
Amazon had been cut, and millions more acres had been damaged.
Environmental groups worldwide sounded the alarm, as did indigenous and
traditional peoples whose ancestors had lived in the forest for
thousands of years.
Deforesting the World
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have destroyed or
badly damaged perhaps three-quarters of the world’s forests. This map
shows loss and gain of forest cover over the last decade, including
mechanical removal, fire and disease. Since the 19th century, forests
have been re-established across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere,
but in the tropics, they are still under broad assault.
Costa Rica
Indonesia
Researchers, led by a team at the University
of Maryland, used thousands of satellite images taken from 2000 to 2012
to track deforestation around the world.
Brazil
LOSS
GAIN
Change in tree cover since 2000 for every three degrees of latitude and longitude
in square miles
5,000
1,000
500
As
deforestation hit a peak in 2004, the Brazilian government came under
international condemnation, and it began trying to halt the destruction.
In 2006, environmental groups found a way to bring marketplace pressure
to bear.
Crops
grown on deforested land, notably soybeans, were being used to produce
meat for Western companies like McDonald’s, creating a potential
liability in the eyes of their customers. Greenpeace invaded McDonald’s
restaurants and plastered posters of Ronald McDonald wielding a chain
saw. That company and others responded by pressuring their suppliers,
who imposed a moratorium on products linked to deforestation.
The
Brazilian government used satellites to step up its monitoring, cut off
loans to some farmers in counties with high deforestation rates, and
used aggressive police tactics against illegal logging and clearing.
Brazilian state governments and large business groups, including some
beef producers, joined the efforts.
The
intense pressure resulted in a sharp drop in deforestation, by 83
percent, over the past decade. Moreover, the Brazilian ministry of
agriculture began to focus on helping farmers raise yields without
needing additional land.
Not
only were millions of acres of forest saved, but the carbon dioxide
kept out of the air by Brazil’s success also far exceeded anything any
other country had ever done to slow global warming. Norway put up
substantial funds to aid the effort, but otherwise, Brazil did it
without much international help.
With
so little money from abroad, the gains in Brazil are considered
fragile, especially if a future government were to lose interest in
forest protection. Daniel C. Nepstad,
an American forest scientist who has worked in Brazil for decades and
now heads a group called the Earth Innovation Institute, said, “We could
still see a huge slide backward.”
Brazil: An Improving Situation
Deforestation was rampant in Brazil until a
decade ago, but campaigns by environmental groups and the Brazilian
government slashed the rate of forest loss by 83 percent. That means
Brazil has done more than any other country in the world to slow the
emissions leading to global warming. It has received relatively little
financial help from richer countries.
GUYANA
VENEZ.
Forest cover in 2000
Loss since 2000
Gain since 2000
SURINAME
Manaus
BRAZIL
Natal
Salvador
Amount of deforestation in
the Amazon each year,
BOLIVIA
Brasília
in thousands of square miles
9
6
3
PARAGUAY
0
250 miles
'90
'96
'02
'08
'14
The Next Big Test
With deforestation somewhat under control in Brazil, Indonesia is becoming a big test of the environmental groups’ strategy.
Deforestation
is rampant there, with people chopping down even national forests with
impunity. The biggest reason is to clear land for the lucrative
production of vegetable oil from the fruit of a type of palm tree.
Just
a handful of companies sell the oil — used in a wide array of consumer
goods like soap, ice cream, confections and lipstick — into global
markets, and the environmental groups have been targeting these big
middlemen. Companies controlling the bulk of the global palm-oil trade
have recently signed no-deforestation pledges, and Indonesia’s
influential chamber of commerce recently threw its weight behind a
demand for new forest legislation in the country.
But
even if Indonesia takes strong action, there are fears that the gains
could prove fleeting. The economic incentive to chop down forests
remains powerful, and crackdowns on deforestation can just spur
profiteers to go elsewhere.
“Asian
companies are rushing into Africa and grabbing as much land as
possible,” said Mr. Hurowitz, of Climate Advisers. “That’s kind of
scary.”
Still,
with hopes running high that the world may finally be rounding a corner
on the deforestation problem, attention is turning to the possibility
of large-scale forest regrowth.
Dr.
Chazdon believes strongly in halting deforestation, but she says that
many of the plots of old-growth forest that have already been saved are
too small to ensure the long-term survival of the plants and animals in
them. Forest expansion onto nearby land could help to conserve that
biological diversity, in addition to pulling carbon dioxide out of the
air.
Indonesia: Still a Trouble Spot
MALAYSIA
Medan
Kuala Lumpur
MALAYSIA
Singapore
BORNEO
INDONESIA
SUMATRA
Indonesia is now the world’s hot spot for
deforestation, losing more forest each year than Brazil despite being a
much smaller country. The purpose of much of the clearing is to grow
palm oil for use in Western consumer products like ice cream and soap.
Companies and environmental groups have recently promised a bold new
crackdown.
Jakarta
Bandung
JAVA
Forest cover in 2000
Loss since 2000
Gain since 2000
250 miles
But
the strategy presents many challenges. It will require abandoning
marginal agricultural land, meaning the remaining farms will have to
become more efficient to keep up with demand for food, as well as a
growing demand for biofuels. And some scientists have warned that if the
strategy is poorly executed, agriculture could merely be pushed away
from forests into grasslands or savannas, which themselves contain huge
amounts of carbon that could escape into the atmosphere.
Costa
Rica, a “green republic” famous worldwide for its efforts to protect
forests, shows how difficult a forest restoration strategy can be in
practice.
Legal
protection is minimal for much of the forest that has grown there in
recent decades. The workers who help Dr. Chazdon track her plots often
see telltale signs of illegal hunting and logging, and they say the
authorities are lax about stopping it. “So many ugly things happen that
we just lose a little faith,” said Mr. Paniagua, one of the workers.
Moreover,
a wave of pineapple production to supply a growing world market is
sweeping the country, tempting many owners to reclear their land.
Growing Chinese demand, in particular, has raised the fear that “the
whole of Costa Rica will be paved in pineapples,” said Carlos de la
Rosa, director of La Selva Biological Station, a famed research outpost where Dr. Chazdon does much of her work.
But
for now, the second-growth forests of Costa Rica, covering roughly 14
percent of the land area of the country, at least show what may be
possible if the world gets more ambitious about tackling global warming.
Brazil, too, is beginning to see regrowth on a large scale in the
Amazon, and is spending millions to restore forests along its Atlantic
coast.
Decades
of watching the Costa Rican forests recover have taught Dr. Chazdon
that, at least in areas that still have healthy forests nearby to supply
seeds, the main thing human beings need to do is just get out of the
way. After all, forests were recovering from fires and other natural
calamities long before people ever came along to chop them down.
“The forests know how to do this,” Dr. Chazdon said. “They’ve been doing it forever, growing back.”
Correction: December 25, 2014
An article on Wednesday about conserving and restoring forests as a strategy to fight climate change referred incorrectly in some editions to the relative size of the Amazon forest. The Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the lower 48 American states; it does not cover more land than the lower 48 states.
An article on Wednesday about conserving and restoring forests as a strategy to fight climate change referred incorrectly in some editions to the relative size of the Amazon forest. The Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the lower 48 American states; it does not cover more land than the lower 48 states.
