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#deforestation
animentality · 1 year
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reasonsforhope · 2 months
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The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think
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You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.
That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.
Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.
That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.
Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...
More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.
It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.
Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.
There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.
Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.
-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024
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spaghettioverdose · 1 year
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what’s ikea doing in romania?
Illegal deforestation of our ancient forests
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(The author does incorrectly call Romania a Soviet state when we were only part of the Warsaw Pact instead)
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The article talks about how those journalists and environmentalist were attacked by 15 armed thugs and the police response (of basically letting the attackers go) as well as Romanian forests make up the vast majority of old-growth forests left in Europe
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But Ikea is not the only one doing it
This article talks about Austrian companies doing the same illegal deforestation
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And it gives a better picture of how much forest is lost per year
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sugas6thtooth · 2 months
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Congo: People care more about animals than their fellow humans & "Eco"-warriors.
KEEP YOUR EYES ON CONGO!!!
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unbfacts · 6 months
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KNOW MORE
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mindblowingscience · 6 months
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A Scottish research team believe they may have produced the "holy grail" alternative to palm oil. It is estimated that almost half of all food and cosmetic products on supermarket shelves contain palm oil. The huge demand has led to significant deforestation in areas where oil palm trees can grow near the equator. Food experts at Queen Margaret University (QMU) in Edinburgh say their new 100% plant-based ingredient is 70% better for the environment. And with 80% less saturated fat and 30% fewer calories, they are also hailing PALM-ALT as a significantly healthier option. Catriona Liddle, one of the lead developers on the QMU team, said: "It's the holy grail to replace it and still have exactly the same end result in product - to taste the same and have the texture the same - and we've done that.
Continue Reading.
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nutnoce · 2 months
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Half the land earmarked for regeneration by the 34-country African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) is in savannah or other non-woodland areas, says a paper published in Science on Thursday.
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“There is a vast area of non-forest across Africa that is earmarked for restoration, principally through tree planting,” said Catherine Parr, a co-author of the paper and an ecologist at Liverpool, Pretoria and Witwatersrand universities. “The focus solely on forests and trees is highly problematic for these non-forest systems.” The AFR100 project seeks to restore at least 100mn hectares of degraded land — an area the size of Egypt — in Africa by 2030, with big plans in countries including Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. The initiative’s backers include the German government, the World Bank and the non-profit World Resources Institute. But about half of the approximately 130mn hectares that African countries have committed to restore through AFR100 is earmarked for non-forest ecosystems, principally savannahs and grasslands, according to the paper.
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The dispute over the research highlights growing friction over pledges by philanthropists and corporate leaders to plant a trillion trees worldwide. These ambitious plans face obstacles including potential shortages of available land suitable for planting. Other questions concern how effective newly planted trees are at locking in significant amounts of carbon dioxide — and how vulnerable they are to risks such as forest fires. “There’s such a big focus at international level on deforestation, but the level of sophistication and understanding about ecosystems writ large is really low,” said Alex Reid, a policy adviser on nature and finance at Global Witness, a non-profit group.  Some scientists and conservationists argue that it is better to focus on preventing deforestation, by creating incentives to retain woodland areas. Greenhouse gases released by deforestation make up about 11 per cent of global emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
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acti-veg · 10 months
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‘This loss of cultural memory, this great forgetting that we once had rainforests, is almost as heartbreaking as the loss of the forests themselves. It points to a phenomenon that ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: society’s ability to grow accustomed to environmental losses.
What appears to us today as a ‘green and pleasant land’ is, in reality, a desert compared to the glory of what once existed. There were giants on the Earth in those days. If we are to stand any chance of restoring our lost rainforests, we first need to remember we once had them.’
-Guy Scrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain
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ireton · 5 months
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Hawaii - "Government Officials Contradict Own Citizens" Accounts on Maui Fire Disaster.
7 Nov 2023 In the aftermath of the devastating August fire that claimed over 100 lives in Lahaina, Maui, an independent journalist partnered with Project Veritas to investigate the claims of Lahaina residents who shared their water and electricity was not functioning on the morning of the deadly fire. This journalist held meetings with multiple representatives from the Maui mayor’s office and the governor's office, all of whom clung to the official narrative that the water supply had not been interrupted. As the historic town of Lahaina continues to grapple with the devastating aftermath of these fires, community members continue to raise questions about the government’s emergency response.
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odinsblog · 1 year
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Tesla, plus French and German companies, all linked to massive nickel mining plans
A unique uncontacted tribe could be wiped out by a massive Indonesian project to produce nickel for electric car batteries.
A vast mining scheme on the island of Halmahera is part of Indonesia’s plan to become a major producer of electric car batteries – a plan into which Tesla and other companies are pouring billions of dollars.
But nickel mining is set to destroy vast areas of the forested interior of Halmahera. These forests are inhabited by 300-500 uncontacted members of the Hongana Manyawa tribe. If mining goes ahead as planned, they will not survive the destruction.
The Hongana Manyawa – which means ‘People of the Forest’ in their own language - are one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in Indonesia.
They now face the threat of seeing their land, and everything they need to survive, destroyed by corporations rushing to provide a supposedly ‘sustainable’ lifestyle to people thousands of miles away.
(continue reading)
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nerdwithapoll · 4 months
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Edit: That was supposed to say “how you VIEW the environment.” Sigh
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reasonsforhope · 2 months
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"In a bid to slow deforestation in the Amazon, Brazil announced Tuesday [September 5, 2023,] that it will provide financial support to municipalities that have reduced deforestation rates the most.
During the country´s Amazon Day, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also signed the creation of two Indigenous territories that total 207,000 hectares (511,000 acres) — over two times the size of New York City — and of a network of conservation areas next to the Yanonami Indigenous Territory to act as a buffer against invaders, mostly illegal gold miners.
“The Amazon is in a hurry to survive the devastation caused by those few people who refuse to see the future, who in a few years cut down, burned, and polluted what nature took millennia to create,” Lula said during a ceremony in Brasilia. “The Amazon is in a hurry to continue doing what it has always done, to be essential for life on Earth.”
The new program will invest up to $120 million in technical assistance. The money will be allocated based on the municipality´s performance in reducing deforestation and fires, as measured by official satellite monitoring. A list of municipalities eligible for the funds will be published annually.
The resources must be invested in land titling, monitoring and control of deforestation and fires, and sustainable production.
The money will come from the Amazon Fund, which has received more than $1.2 billion, mostly from Norway, to help pay for sustainable development of the region. In February, the United States committed to a $50 million donation to the initiative. Two months later, President Joe Biden announced he would ask Congress for an additional $500 million, to be disbursed over five years.
The most critical municipalities are located along the arc of deforestation, a vast region along the southern part of the Amazon. This region is a stronghold of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who favored agribusiness over forest preservation and lost the reelection last year.
“We believe that it’s not enough to just put up a sign saying ‘it’s forbidden to do this or that. We need to be persuasive.” Lula said, in a reference to his relationship with Amazon mayors and state governors.
Lula has promised zero net deforestation by 2030, although his term ends two years earlier. In the first seven months of his third term, there was a 42% drop in deforestation.
[Note: For context, Lula's third term as president started January 1, 2023. It was not continuous with his first two terms, when he was president from 2003 to 2010. Lula's third term has been a historic and desperately needed reversal of the anti-environmental, etc. policies of Bolsonaro, whose term ended at the end of 2022.]
Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with almost 3% of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform managed by World Resources Institute. Almost half of these emissions come from deforestation. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, Brazil committed to reducing carbon emissions by 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030."
-via AP, September 5, 2023
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witchofthewest17 · 3 months
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Logged forest in coastal Oregon
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entheognosis · 1 month
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mapsontheweb · 3 months
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The illegal activities in Amazon forest
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