OSLO- The human race hard work to slow down deforestation should achieve more to deal with underlying causes such as increasing demand for crops or biofuels, widening from a UN focus on using trees to combat climate change, a study said on Monday.
It assumed a series of projects to care for forests had had limited success in recent decades – UN records show that 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forest have been gone every year from 2000-09, an area equivalent to the dimension of Greece.
The report by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) suggested that the present U.N.-led efforts to look after forests had too narrow a focus on endorsing trees as stores of carbon dioxide, the core greenhouse gas.
“Our findings recommend that disregarding the impact of forests on sectors such as farming and energy will doom several new global efforts whose aim is to protect forests and slow climate change,” said Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO panel and is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities. Trees saturate up carbon as they grow but discharge it when they burn or decay.
The IUFRO study said a key predicament was that deforestation, from the Amazon to the Congo, was often triggered by economic pressures far away. A popular worldwide brand of cookies, for example, makes use of palm oil grown on deforested land in Indonesia.
COMPLEXITY
IUFRO urged guidelines of “embracing complexity” to help out protect forests, plus educating consumers, rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all mechanism such as carbon storage.
It called for better efforts, for example, to aid indigenous peoples, whose livelihoods depend on healthy forests.
Among promising measures were amendments to the US Lacey Act, which makes it illegitimate to import lumber known to come from stolen timber.
Brazil, for instance, has enacted ways to tackle deforestation in the Amazon, it said.
The IUFRO report will be issued at UN meeting in New York this week marking the start of the UN’s International Year of Forests.
Almost 200 nations agreed at a assembly in Cancun, Mexico, last month to step up efforts to protect forests with a plan that is designed to put a worth on the carbon stored in trees, while helping home-grown peoples and promoting sustainable use.
Authors of the IUFRO study said that the UN plan, known as REDD+, was promising. “Our worry is that this won’t be enough,” Benjamin Cashore, a forestry specialist at Yale University and an IUFRO author, told Reuters.
He said that governments often simplistically placed too much of faith in the lastest idea, like carbon markets.
He said many past schemes had failed to brake deforestation, such as boycotts of several lumber in the 1980s by wealthy consumers, or an global tropical timber contract that wanted to unite producers and clients.
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