Deforestation

Tree loss and its effect to well-being, society, and energy are the inevitable results of rapid economic breakthroughs. Civilization has to constantly adapt to change, and while economic modifications commence society has to deal with preexisting issues on environmental health decline. While Amy Chillag’s CNN Article provides facts, allusions and statistics, there are particular details in the article that needs to be considered...

 Brazil’s planned reconstruction of the BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) Highway
paralleling the Purus and Madeira rivers would give deforesters access to about half of
what remains of the country’s Amazon forest, and so is perhaps the most consequential
conservation issue for Brazil today.
 The highway route is essentially a lawless area today, and the lack of governance is a
critical issue in the battle over licensing the highway reconstruction project.
 The BR-319 upgrade would link the current “arc of deforestation” to central Amazonia,
allowing movement of deforestation actors to all forest locations with road links to
Manaus, while a planned BR-319 connecting road would open the vast forest area
between the BR-319 and the Peruvian border.
 The BR-319 Environmental Impact Assessment has many flaws, including ignoring
impacts beyond those adjacent to the highway. The EIA also contains passages
admitting to some disastrous project impacts.

In recent decades, climate change has been accelerated by anthropogenic activity and became a currently issue on global discussion. Due to the importance that Brazil has a global supplier of food, this article aims to verify the representativeness of the emissions in the Brazilian agribusiness and the different roles to be played in agriculture to reduce GHG emissions. As methodological approach, a literature review was realized based from 124 articles related to the keywords “climate change” and “agribussiness” in the database. Firstly, we analyses the history of international meetings on climate change, as the Meadows Report (1968), Brundtland Report (1987), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988), the United Nations Framework Convention (1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the Stern Report (2006) and Report GHF (2009). The situation created the need for targets to reduce GHG emissions for major world economies, as in the case of Brazil, where it is almost impossible to exc...

Fearnside, P.M. 2017. Brazil’s Politicians Unleash Illegal Loggers, Miners, and Land Thieves. Alert 18 June 2017. http://alert-conservation.org/issues-research-highlights/2017/6/18/brazils-politicians-unleash-illegal-loggers-miners-and-land-thieves

Networks of protected areas (PAs) form the backbone for biodiversity conservation worldwide. The effectiveness of protected areas has been studied and it has been shown that confounding factors, such as remoteness and accessibility , correlated with both presence of protection and extractive behaviors, affect the outcomes. We investigated the effectiveness of Madagascar's PA network in decreasing deforestation pressures, using a novel counterfactual methodology, accounting for distance to roads, rivers, major cities and altitude, slope and annual rainfall. The assessment was independently conducted for two different time periods, 1990–2000 and 2000– 2010, and for Madagascar's three major forest types. We found that PAs were effective to some extent in reducing deforestation and that some of this decrease can be attributed to the presence of PAs, not just to the confounding factors rendering the land assigned for protection less likely to be deforested. We found differences in PA effectiveness between the two time periods, and in general lower deforestation in the later time period has meant that the PAs have less pressures to resist. However, in the spiny forest, even if deforestation had overall diminished, the pressure on reference areas used to compare PAs seemed to have increased showing that PAs have indeed a mitigation effect and thus increased in effectiveness in the second time period. Our study highlights the alarming trend of what happens once enough forest has been lost in easily accessible areas and the pressures starts to spread to also more remote areas and lands comparable to PAs (remote and inaccessible).

Understanding the effect of anthropogenic disturbance, and its interaction with carnivores and their prey, is crucial to support the conservation of threatened carnivores, particularly in rapidly changing landscapes. Based on systematic camera-trap sampling of four protected areas in Riau Province of central Sumatra, we assessed the habitat occupancy and spatiotemporal overlap between people, potential carnivore prey, and four threatened species of medium-sized or large carnivores: Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Malayan sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), dholes (Cuon alpinus), and Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi). To assess spatial overlap of target species, we used single-species occupancy models and applied a Species Interaction Factor (SIF) to conditional two-species occupancy models. We also used kernel density estimation (KDE) to assess temporal overlap among these species. Our habitat use models showed that altitude (elevation) strongly influenced the occupancy of all large carnivores and potential prey species. Except for Sunda clouded leopards, the occurrence of large carnivore species was positively related to the spatial co-occurrence of humans (SIF > 1). In addition, we found that sun bears and dholes both exhibited high spatial overlap with tigers, and that sun bears alone exhibited high temporal overlap with people. Our findings contribute to an improved understanding of the contemporary ecology of carnivores and their prey in rapidly changing, southeast Asian landscapes. Such knowledge is important to the conservation and recovery of large carnivores in conservation hotspots that are increasingly dominated by humans across Sumatra, as well as globally.

... Ambiental, Biodegradación, Restauración Ecológica, Conservación y Protección Ambiental, Ecosistemas, Botánica, Micología, Botánica, Microbiología, Ecología, Tecnología, Política Agraria, Política Ambiental, Ingeniería Sanitaria, Industria Agropecuaria, Alimentos y Bebidas ...

HIGHLIGHTS • Database attractiveness is independent of data quality. • Global forest products databases have different levels of quality. • Since many data users are not data professionals or statisticians, the quality of a database is not the decisive factor. • A combination of technical, political and developmental factors can explain the increasing discrepancy between the African export and Chinese import forest products trade data. • Global forest statistics providers may be motivated to put more effort into improving database attractiveness and related incentives rather than quality. SUMMARY What drives discrepancies and inconsistencies in global forest statistics? The use of global statistics has influenced academic research and sectoral policies of forest ecosystems since the first global forest assessment was conducted in 1948 or even earlier. Very little work has been done to provide a comprehensive analysis of the governance structure and the quality of predominant international forest databases. Furthermore , very little is known about the attractiveness and/or repulsiveness of global forest statistics platforms to scholars, policy-makers and other users. To reduce knowledge gap, this article examines the governance structure and strategies of three major databases which provide data on global forest products trade including timber export/import flows data, namely FAOSTAT, the United Nations Comtrade, and Chatham House's Resource Trade Earth. This paper uses conceptual and theoretical frameworks of data governance and nudge theories are used to study the production, quality, attractiveness and repulsiveness of global forest statistics and the related platforms through research on a qualitative and quantitative methodological approach. The main findings show that among the above three data platforms, only Comtrade received first-hand data directly from UN producing member states' offices, while the other organisations depend on Comtrade, transform secondhand data. More importantly, the article reveals that the levels of quality and attractiveness of the forest databases in our study are unequal and that database attractiveness is not based on quality. As a result, global forest statistics providers may be motivated to put more effort into improving database attractiveness rather than quality, which is more challenging. Consequently, it is likely that the governance structure and strategies reported in these databases can substantially affect the reliability of numbers used in academic research and policy-decisions since they are generated from the related global forest statistics. Gouvernance des statistiques forestières globales: étude de cas du commerce des produits forestiers entre Afrique Sub-Saharienne et Chine Y. ZHAO, Y.M. KROTT et S. ONGOLO Quelles sont les causes des écarts et incohérences observées dans les données statistiques globales sur les forêts? l'utilisation des données statistiques globales exerce une influence sur les travaux de recherche académique et les politiques publiques sectorielles relatives aux écosys-tèmes forestiers, au moins depuis le premier rapport de l'état globale des forêts publié en 1948. Très peu d'études ont été conduites pour fournir une analyse approfondie sur le système de gouvernance et la qualité des bases de données majeures de production des statistiques globales forestières. De même, il existe assez peu de connaissance sur l'attractivité et/ou répulsivité des plateformes globales des données statistiques forestières pour les chercheurs, décideurs politiques et autres usagers de ces données dans la société. Afin de réduire ce manque de connaissance, cet article examine le système de gouvernance et les stratégies de trois bases de données majeures qui fournissent des données quantitatives sur le commerce global des produits forestiers y compris les flux d'exportation/importation des grumes de bois: il s'agit de FAOSTAT, la base de données Comtrade des Nations Unies et Resource Trade Earth de l'organisation Chatham House. Le cadre conceptuel et théorique de cet article mobilise la théorie de la gouvernance des données et la théorie du 'coup de pouce' afin de questionner les processus de production, la qualité, l'attractivité et/ou la répulsivité des données statistiques globales sur les produits forestiers et des plateformes qui y sont associées. L'approche

In 2019 Brazil recorded the highest wildland fire occurrence South America has seenfor the last 15 years. Added to the Amazon, the Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) faces changes in fire regimes. Climatic changes and the recent weakening of environmental law enforcement are factors, but historic and large-scale trends and drivers of fire regimes must be analyzed. We discuss ecological and policy drivers of recent changes in fire regimes in the Cerrado, in order to highlight management strategies. The Cerrado has evolved with natural fires and anthropogenic fires are also common for millennia. In the past 50 years, wildfires tend to be concentrated in the late dry season and to occur every two / three years, causing serious damage in fire-sensitive vegetation. Apart from climatic variations, the drivers of wildfires are deforestation and fire suppression policies. Nearly half of the original vegetation of the Cerrado biome has disappeared largely due to agribusiness expansion. Fire is associated with deforestation in two ways: vegetation conversion to monocultures, and lack of fire management in the remaining native vegetation. Indeed, the attempts to exclude fires from this fire-prone ecosystem disrupted traditional fire management. Fire suppression policies lead to increased wildfire risks due to fuel load and the multiplication of sources of ignition (conflicts, roads). The recent advances in Integrated Fire Management in protected areas in the Cerrado are evident. However, the recent budget cuts by the Brazilian government in environmental management and research undermine the chances of decreasing occurrences of wildfires in this biodiversity hotspot.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the role of law enforcement on deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon in the last 10 years compared with the influence of economic and political factors. In order to achieve this, political discussions, several economic indicators and law enforcement methods were analysed and compared with deforestation rates over time. The findings revealed that the economy and politics still affect, in some degree, deforestation rates in the Amazon region, however, the study showed that new law enforcement methods and the new policy of repression of loggers has proven to be effective in reducing the effect of high prices of agricultural products on forest destruction, which led deforestation rates to reach their lowest level since the Amazon started to be monitored in 1988.

The role of different agroforestry systems in the conservation of plant diversity and forest structure has not been directly compared in many agricultural dominated landscapes. In this study, we investigated tree diversity and forest structure in a complex agroforestry landscape traditionally grown for cocoa and mixed food crops and compared these to the natural forest in southeastern Ghana. The study

Les forêts du monde jouent un rôle essentiel pour l’atténuation du changementclimatique, le maintien de la biodiversité terrestre et le cycle global de l’eau. Pourtant, leur protection ne fait l’objet d’aucune convention internationale spécifique car une telle ambition se heurte au principe de souveraineté des Etats sur leurs ressources forestières.

Dans cette nouvelle étude de l'Ifri - Institut français des relations internationales, Alain Karsenty explore la « géopolitique des forêts » à travers la multiplication des initiatives internationales cherchant à promouvoir une meilleure articulation entre gestion des ressources domestiques et préservation des services écosystémiques globaux.

Les certifications de bonne gestion forestière, les projets de compensation carbone et autres stratégies de lutte contre la déforestation importée créent aujourd’hui un empilement de consensus institutionalisés dont le degré de sophistication va croissant. Pour chacun de ces instruments, l’auteur décrypte le jeu d'acteurs et analyse l'intérêt mais aussi les limites, en particulier concernant la prise en compte des questions d’économie politique.

Enfin, il propose cinq axes de travail pour faire converger ces initiatives et lutter efficacement contre la déforestation.

By reflecting on how agricultural development and conservation policies have greatly changed in focus, methods, goals and sensibility in the last decades, and through the analysis of the implementation of recent programme Sembrando Vida in the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico, this dissertation reflects on the aims, narratives and limits of a contemporary rural development programme. The insights of this writing stem from an understanding of agricultural production and conservation as two aspects of the same issue: the sustainable management of the territory. This is coupled with a conception of the indigenous farmers’ condition that rejects essentializing characterization and dichotomies, and tries to expose how local attitudes towards agricultural innovation, government intervention and conservation are situational and ultimately reflect a strive for prosperity in a set of asymmetric dynamics through which they have historically been penalized. In this framework, I will show how the premises and success of the programme Sembrando Vida are closely related to state subsidies and adaptation to new agricultural technologies, as well as to pressure of environmental conservation and processes of environmentality.