Brazil and good news on deforestation

One of the hard things to make students understand is how to protect biodiversity. The usual answer we get is do not hunt endangered species, etc. What they fail to grasp is that the major way is to prevent habitat loss, especially by establishment of bioreserves and preventation of deforestation.

That is why I find this article to be interesting. It shows the effect of policies in Brazil in combating deforestation.

What has been happenning? In the last ten years, the amount of deforestation per year has been declining steadily. It is now only 70% of what it was in 2004.

The authors identify the following factors leading to this reduction: monitoring, frontier goverance, government policies, new protected areas, pressure from environmental groups, and macroeconomic trends. It points out that it was the combination of these things not any one specifically.

One interesting thing is that Brazil does not only establish national parks, but also has other "strict protection areas": sustainable use areas, indigenous territories (where large scale logging and plantations are not allowed), and agarian reform settlements.

One conclusion of the article is that in order to keep continuing this trend of reduced deforestation, farmers, ranchers, and other land users must be given further incentives.

This a good example of what is really neccessary for progress in reducing deforestation and therefore protecting biodiversity. Now if others would take this seriously.

COP-19 A Disaster

I usually give a review of the big annual climate change conference - well here it is, albeit a couple of months late!

The 2013 edition was COP-19 held in Warsaw, Poland. The big news from COP-19 was the walk out by many activists from the meeting in protest of the slow pace of the negotiations.

The meeting  came just after two major reports on global warming. The first was the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A new report comes out every 4 years, and it now states that there is a 95% probability that humans have caused global warming. The other was a report by the International Energy Agency which states that the current path would lead to an increase of global temperatures from between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees, far above often stated goal of 2 degrees.

The one thing that came out of the meeting were the bad actors, especially Poland (the hosts), Australia, Canada, and Japan. Poland had a meeting with coal industry representatives the same time that the COP meeting was going on. Poland (and Australia) have a big coal industry and therefore want to protect a dirty and corrupt industry. Australia had just elected a new government led by a prime minister who is a climate denialist and who has dismantled many environmental agencies. His government has also proposed a huge coal port in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.

Canada also has big interest in dirty fossil fuels in the form of tar sands. Japan has announced that its carbon emissions will rise instead of falling (there original pledge was a 25% reduction over 1990, now they have announced a 3% increase over the same baseline)

All of these countries, and many others, have used the economics mantra as an excuse for having taken these positions. In reality it is because fossil fuel and other companies control the governments and are often the ones formulating policy.

Probably the best example of this is the so-called "loss and damage issue", discussed at COP-19. This is where developed countries would pay less developed countries for the losses due to damage from climate change. The developed countries, while agreeing to the concept, are not willing to give any money to it, citing the "recession". Yet these countries can give out huge subsidies to the fossil fuel industries.

Other issues where essential no progress was made include equity and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV).

The one good thing that did come out of the meeting was the continued commitment to REDD+ (reduction in emissions from deforestation and degradation plus reforestation). The program is designed to help countries keep their forests and therefore their stores of carbon. See this article by the World Resources Institute.

Finally, I also note that since COP-19, very little additional progress has been made. I new agreement to replace Kyoto is to be finished by next year, but I do not think that we will have anything but a watered-down agreement that will do nothing to stop global warming. We need to have global action to get athything done.