eq11@rmg on deforestation

What we can do to protect the forest

Changing the law:

If  national laws  forbade to cut down trees it would be one of the easiest steps to stop deforestation. Much wood is illegally cut down by companies in Indonesia because the wood in this primeval forest is old and precious. One solution therefore is that the countries with a lot of rainforest adopt new laws to stop the illegal deforestation.

A second solution could be  that countries prohibit the import of wood which was lumbered from protected regions. Just one tree has a value of up to 6000$ which makes this illegal trade of wood very attractive for companies and individuals. 

Difficulty of changing and enforcing laws:

The problem of changing the law is that a new statute often takes a long time until it becomes a law . One more problem is the enforcement of the new law, which is very expensive for the state, because huge areas are hard to control. Moreover in many poore countries the natural resources are often the only way to earn money – especially by exporting wood or agricultural products – and thus reduce the national deficit.

(Julian)

Reforestation: 

CC-licence, WP-user Lamiot

Reforestation is more or less the opposite of deforestation. But it is not only the process of planting trees in areas , where trees have been cut down by humans or have been destroyed by natural disasters like volcanic eruption , flooding or fire. Reforestation is also the restocking of existing forests which have been depleted.

Why is reforestation important?

There are some main reasons why planting trees is important. First of all by reforestation the natural habitats of a lot different kinds of animals can be saved and rebuilt. For example the habitat of the African chimpanzees which number decreased in the last 50 years from about 1.5 million to 300.000 which is a result of the destruction of their living space , could be rebuilt.
Moreover trees turn CO2 into Oxygen by photosynthesis, so the CO2 level could be balanced. By balancing the CO2 level reforestation leads to a mitigation of global warming because the more trees there are, the more CO2 could be converted and stored in trees. Finally trees improve the quality of the air by filtering out pollutions like dust. So all in all reforestation helps to preserve and recreate a livable environment.

Difficulty of reforestation:

There is only one big difficulty of reforestation . Reforestation happens only very slowly or not at all if the area has been cleared for a long period of time or completely. If this is the case there is a high risk of erosions which carry away the nutritious ground and suitable seeds . This problem mostly occurs in the tropical rainforest , where the continual rain wash away a lot of ground in cleared areas . As a result the complex ecosystem can not regrow.

Even if reforestation is possible,  it takes about 100 years for  a completely cleared are to recover and become the rainforest it was. http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html

(Moritz)

Recycling:

Recycling is a very easy thing everybody of us could do without having any extra costs.

In Indonesia, the paper production is the main reason for deforestation, even though it wouldn’t be necessary, if everybody used recycled paper.

Using recycled paper not only saves the Rainforest, it  also saves nearly 70% energy.

In 2007, the Germans collected over 15.3 Million tons of paper, to produce new paper out of it.  The production of recycling-paper has increased over the last years. Even the demand of recycled-paper soared.

If you support the production of recycling paper, the royal Sumatra-Tiger could roam through his old Kingdom again.

Moreover, aluminium recycling could also help to save the rainforest, as the areas where they used to be are now turned into reservoirs  behind dams built to provide power for aluminum mining and smelting.
Aluminum is mainly used for one-way cans for beverages. In the U.S.  enough aluminum cans are thrown away  to build 4 times the the US fleet of commercial airplanes each year.

(Kilian)

Commercial Forest Plantations:

The main goal of the commercial forest plantations is to expand the supply of the Industrial timber by developing forest plantations. A second goal is to contribute to  the greening of the country. Thus it is hoped that the pressure on timber extraction from natural forests will be reduced. There are  four objectives: One is reducing rural poverty by creating employment. Another objective is the restoring of the degraded forest areas. To reduce the wood shortage is also an objective.  Finally, the improving of the environmental quality  is an objective, too.

A problem with this approach, however, is that these plantations are usually monocultures that cannot (fully) replace the original forests in terms of biodiversity and the ability to prevent flods and erosion. Still, these plantations can at least  help to save the remaining rainforests.

(Wudy)

Stop Cut and burn:

CC-licence, WP-user DirkvdM

Cut and burn is a way to create space for farming and stock breeding or to build streets or pipelines by burning big areas with fire, but it´s not really safe, because it´s often uncontrollable and then too much forest is burned.

For example in the year 1998  an area with the size of  Belguim burned down in Brazil.

Big clouds of smoke, which are caused by many fires, lead to health problems and are also very dangerous for the animals and people, which live near these areas. Moreover,  a lot of ashes and CO2 are rereased into the atmosphere.
Not only animals die, but also  the plants, when the nutrients are lost, because the burned area is always under direct sunlight and soil erosion as the there are noo roots and so the ground is loose, once the trees have been burned.

An alternative treatment to make the ground substrate better, is to burn with char so the nutrients can better be bound – but the original forests will still take about one hundred years to grow back – if this happens at all.

(Fabio)

Stop import of tropical woods:

People in industrialized countries should stop buying furniture made out of tropical woods which leads to a reduction of cutting down special, valuable trees. There is, however, some difficulty of boycotting tropical furnitures, as though it seems simple, the mass of consumers want to have the robust wood from the rainforests  and don’t want „plastic“ furniture, which seems unnatural, cheap or even less eco-friendly, because plastic materials are produced from oil.

Here special reforestation programmes or commercial plantations just for the furniture industry might be helpful.

Increasing  agricultural productivity

There may be ways to use less land to produce more crps and beef .g. in Brazil, although one has to be careful not to just do this by e.g. using more  fertilizers or weedkillers. But leading scientists believe that it is possible to increase production and still save the Amazone by more intelligent and controlled land use in Brazil (cf http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/466554a.html).