For years, environmentalists have been raising the alarm about deforestation. But even as forests continue to shrink in some nations, others grow — and new research suggests the planet may now be nearing the transition to a greater sum of forests.
A new formula to measure forest cover, developed by researchers at The Rockefeller University and the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with scientists in China, Scotland and the U.S., suggests that an increasing number of countries and regions are transitioning from deforestation to afforestation, raising hopes for a turning point for the world as a whole. The novel approach, published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks beyond simply how much of a nation’s area is covered by trees and considers the volume of timber, biomass and captured carbon within the area. It produces an encouraging picture of Earth’s forest situation and may change the way governments size up their woodland resources in the future.
Read more: http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=549
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
More at The Australian:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20754913-1702,00.html
Jennifer “Rather than defining it simply as the area covered with trees, the scientists also considered how big the trees were – how many of them were large enough to be considered timber, also known as growing stock – how thickly they grew and how much atmospheric carbon was tied up in them” is a key statement and is the basis for my concern about mono crops. Trees feed on other trees. Big trees become giants.
The Australian report goes on “As well, the scientists took into account the amount of organic material, known as biomass, present in the forest” In my book this is about soils root mass and buttress as well as canopy. Native forests in Australia take a long time to reach their maximum after clear falling. Instead we get a crop of regrowth with spindles that remain fire prone for decades. No one has developed a safe method of refining the often very thick regrowth with fire.
Conservation of forests an indicator of economic health?
“.. “The United States is doing quite well, but we’ve done quite well for a period of time,” said co-author Roger Sedjo of the Washington-based group Resources for the Future. “Our forests have been more or less stable for the last 100 years.” Other countries made the transition much earlier: Denmark’s shift came in 1810, France in the 1830s, Switzerland in the 1860s, Portugal by 1870, Scotland in the 1920s and European Russia in the 1930s.
Mr Sedjo said the transition often came when countries began to prosper, and were better able to put policies in place that preserved forested land. Almost every country with a per capita gross domestic product over $US4600 has moved to reforestation, the study found…”
The US has some interesting cases where EnVIronmentaL activists halted logging despite widespread claims that preventing largescale logging would cause economic ruin, unemployment and local townships would collapse. The results and economic analysis showed that the towns prospered far more from ongoing natural uses & recreation than they did from logging that same area. (Once the conservative anti-environmentalists were shown to be overly pessimistic and make exaggerated claims of economic ruin.)
Some US water catchment areas also realised it was cheaper to set land aside and pay landowners for reforestation and protection than build technological work arounds. A step forward in pricing ecological services.
Pinxi, a step forward in pricing ecological services requires a step backwards to a time when locals did everything based on age old wisdom. Davey G also notes we have lost the gentle art of sustainability. Fire in the right hands through history is how we got where to we are but quite recently some one got greedy.
There are no short cuts pinxi. Every one thinks all resources come via a tap. Until each one of us can live hand to mouth again the simple truths elude us.
I owe a great deal to weather beaten wise lady in a native tree nursery this gem for starters; most Australian natives (all species) need two thirds of their development to remain below ground level to survive to a great maturity in this country. Trees also need other trees. Another recent thread looks at dieback, something I’ve watched for years.
I went back to the coast last week for another look at how forests make it through living out on exposed rocks. Roots are visible everywhere. A few ancient forest trees remain. Fire can be deadly in such an environment. How did tribal communities run their fires in a sea breeze?
My blonde guru left a clue, in her old nursery with hundreds of native types for me to play with we could both experiment with what grew where. Regardless of what we tried root systems were the key to stability but odd things flourished. In turn they were each consumed by something. Every destructive cycle was followed by a wild recovery. Only some things disappeared.
Before forestry schools we had artists who captured those early wild forest frontages. Strange twisted trunks were a feature in many illustrations. Purity of land cover type and form is a nonsense in much of this country.
Forest areas also benefit where farming areas are assured; quid quo pro
“Why are the forests returning? Co-author Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station noted a set of events that seem to feed on each other. When countries protected forests, they could grow. At the same time, when farmland was preserved, farmers were less likely to encroach on forests, Mr Waggoner said. In Europe, timber imports, energy technology, and economic development that sent country people to the cities also played a role, Mr Waggoner said. As farm technologies improved, farming concentrated on fertile lands and left marginally fertile forests alone, even as urban migration depleted rural populations. ”
So it takes a European scientist to drum up media interest in what farmers have been talking themselves blue in the face about for decades to no effect.
The irony in the data is that the greatest revegetation events have taken place over a period when the right to remove trees was absolutely uncontested. The major revegetation of the NSW North Coast took place from 1950 to 1990.
And the suggestion by the authors that it was the “protection” of forests that produced their expansion is plain BS.
There is hardly a single forest owning farmer in Australia who would now, knowingly, allow his forest to expand in the way they did in the past.
The asset they once valued as a long term investment is now seen as a liability and major risk, if not an instrument of oppression. Trees are now a major pain in the ass and a vector for every kind of dead$hit imaginable. Those who have been betrayed have very long memories. They will not make that mistake again.
So one shouldn’t go imagining that this recorded “trend” will continue with any strength. This regrowth is all you are ever going to get as some very, very fine minds in the rural community are now giving some serious thought to the miriad ways in which nature can be assisted to kill trees the community no longer deserves.
To walk into a period of potentially serious climate change after squandering the goodwill of the key custodians of forest health will go down as one of history’s dumber stuff ups. I guess we make our own beds and must then lay in it.
Can I suggest people GOOGLE Waggoner Ausubel and read other work by these superb scientists on industrial ecology.
The use of the term Forest Transitions of course, is to draw attention to the analogy with Demographic transitions. Yes wealth can have good inintentional effects like – increases in literacy , using birth control, and burning natural gas (or using uranium as in France and Sweden) instead of wood kindling to stay warm, sparing the forrest .
I think one very general message they have is:
Economic growth is not necessarily bad for the environment.
It’s an interesting take, but one which many people dismiss, wrongly I’d say, right from the start.
And personally I think Motty’s reading this a bit wrongly too. It’s actually good news. Not a bad journal too.
rog & detribe link economic growth to environment. The theory for this is the environmental Kuznets curve. It applies in some specific situations, particularly for pollutants with localised effects, but there is no clear relationship across various environmental impacts and certainly not for well dispersed pollutants, energy consumption & GHGs or footprint area. If it’s just a national measure, then it does it allow for environmental impacts being exported?
And then there’s the whole chicken and egg argument: some studies have shown that healthier environments support more economic development, but no clear evidence of the reverse.
There is no clear basis on which to claim that economic growth leads to environmental improvements although commonsense sense this should be the case except where irreparable damage occurs.
Problem is that developing nations are stuck on a treadmill of perpetual motion trying to reach the peak of the curve. Meanwhile other pressures interfere, such as WTO trade barriers, IMF restrictions, markets changing more rapidly than local economies can undergo structural change, volatile commodities, fickle investments, profit repatriation, population growth, growing income inequality etc.
A final note of semantics for detribe is that to make your point, you may wish to distinguish between economic growth and economic development. Both have implicit values but ec dev is also explicit about value-based objectives such as human rights.
Detribe may be right about Motty but let’s not get too carried away. Some of this stuff on the web is just self promotion in academia and IMHO pure science won’t get us far. Hardly any of the www info is directly applicable to Australia in drought. I don’t see anyone out there with a official bundle of fire sticks yet.
When I googled I found this beaut set of diagrams, stump based pie charts including “skin head earth” 2050 versus the “great restoration”. Their recipe is hardly applicable outside the USA. I bet they never factored in what the fine US folk source beyond their boarders or the sea level beyond 2050.
BTW Greening Australia are knocking back volunteers for programs in my region this weekend.
Quote “Over 120 people have RSVP’d for Saturday, which is fantastic. A big thank you to all who have RSVP’d. With so many keen volunteers, we are looking to propagate over 20,000 plants”.
Motty; that’s a good sign.
Well Pinzi,
I’d make the point that in the real world there is actually a logical basis for believing economic wealth enables better environmental stewardship (call it commonsense by all means).(I know we’re getting a deja vu feeling)
For a start, many environmental initiatives cost money to implement, and sustainablity research also costs money. Wealth assists this investment. Bill Gates for example, is lucky he has billions to use on philanthrpy, and I’m glad he support the Golden Rice and other micronutient innitiatives. Its a pity the Eoropeans don’t support their own scientists on that project though. Furth, IPCC research for instance is supported by western wealth resources; poor people also probably have fewer choices, that’s why African trees are used by poor people to cook and keep warm. Carbon trading needs wealthy agencies and market mechanisms to be carried out, and a non-corrupt infrastructure found largely in richer countries. Several books have been written on the whole topic, so there is indeed a basis for the argument : perhaps you just disagreewith it, of think its missing other aspects.
But Im not saying either that wealth is necessarily linked to better environmental stewardship. Waggoner’s paper’s says the same too. But even the worser outcomes in the paper are not uniformly bad: Brazil and Argentina are a bread basket for much of the world and much more naturally productive than say arid parts of Australia, so they take stress off a lot of other regions when they export agricultural produce, and the net benefit globally might be beneficial despite damage ins America. One way you cam look at it they are exporting virtual water to places (like Indis) that need It.
As far as semantics Pinks, I don’t see a need to exclude welfare effects from economic growth, they can be costed (as in the Golden Rice study in the other thread ), but I do also see ecomomic growth as an enablng factor (through infrastructure provision , (such as phone and internet access) for more strictly value based outcomes such as human rights.
You mention trade barriers and WTO. Perhaps you could also add, on the other side of ledger, the trade barriers WTO overcome,and the jobs denied by economic protectionism to poor countries, as that’s one of their main objectives.
For Pinksy: I book I bought once as a pdf over the net
The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy (Hardcover)
by Jack Hollander “Nearly everyone cares about the environment…” (more)
http://www.amazon.com/Real-Environmental-Crisis-Affluence-Environments/dp/0520237889
Key Phrases: environmental pessimism, other affluent countries, renewable technologies, United States, United Nations, Clean Air Act
(4 customer reviews)
List Price: $35.00
I am not convinced that more forest is necessarily a good thing. I lived in Europe for a few years, and there was a patch of, supposedly, near pristine European oak forest. It was horrible. An impenetrable jungle of brambles, stinging nettles etc. You would need a sharp machete to travel a few hundred metres in a day. No wonder my ancestors chopped much of it down, and created a lovely mosaic of pastures and copses. They used fire too – much of the Pyrenees and Massif Central are landscapes created by astute use of fire (brulage). Yuppies from Paris think it’s natural, and try to stop the locals burning. Quels idiots!
“I don’t see a need to exclude welfare effects from economic growth, they can be costed”
Are you talking real welfare or economic theoretical welfare? Real welfare, in terms of impact on widespread poverty is difficult to assess and more difficult to cost. You’d be aware of the many different manifestations and definitions of poverty, including definitions by the poor themselves. Poverty is resource intensive to assess and hard to make valid comparisons, plus there’s a considerable time lag in appropriate measures becoming available.
As you already know detribe, I think economic development is crucial for poor countries. However there’s many a grave danger in assumptions and simplistic generalisations about economic growth. They’re usually followed by extrapolations of free markets as a panacea. (I have a reasonably balanced view of economic growth and international institutions but no point telling ppl how to suck eggs, I just draw attention to the aspects that suffer from lack of consideration here.)
Although you appreciate the difference it’s importance to emphasise the importance of ensuring development, not just economic growth, for those who are prone to errors of generalisation, simplification and some free market assumptions that may be applicable to 1st world but not 3rd world socioeconomic situations.
Davey you’re highly evolved. Your learned ancestors preferred clear open spaces to see the toothed clawed predators coming.
We mustn’t be fooled by this article which states that forests are increasing.
Yes, it’s true in Ukraine and Spain, maybe even in the US, but on the wrong side of the graph are Indonesia, Brazil , Philippines.
But are forests forests – what exactly is increasing – hordes of same age cohort conifers?
What’s the biodiversity doing in these new systems.
How well do complex systems regenerate?
If it’s North America sounds like the pine beetle will munch through the stands anyway.
And what of climate change and fire?
Will these new benefits be lost to massive conflagrations?
On the wrong side of the graph are also Madagascar and Kongo. It is also important to notice what kind of forest are increasing or decreasing, especially important are the so called hot spots, where there are concentrated biodiversity.
Forest deniers!
Luke is back.
The good thing about our modern civilization, the Yanks sent us elvis x 3 (air cranes) this summer and we sent them our top fire fighters for their peak bushfire season.
But it’s all negated by the fact our CFMEU want to keep on digging up coal. For them carbon trading has suddenly become a useful campaign tool. Logging too for the CMFEU must go on at any price. Given that we are such a rich country, what hope has the world’s poorer countries got of getting us out of the drink?
Lets get real here, nobody looks like giving up anything yet.
And so Anne Noveck where are the data!
“We mustn’t be fooled by this article which states that forests are increasing.
Yes, it’s true in Ukraine and Spain, maybe even in the US, but on the wrong side of the graph are Indonesia, Brazil , Philippines”.
The DATA!
Loius of all people demands substantiation?
Don’t get sucked into this line of argument Anne. These guys are forever arguing over trunk size.
First you form an opinion, then you find the data.
Well if you’re not allowed to Google what can one do?
Greening Australia? 20,000 trees? Another landscaping publicity wank like Angry Anderson’s million trees on the Hay Plain that had a greater than 90% failure rate.
We have Flying Foxes in Byron Shire that would have propagated that many trees in a lifetime of turds. Pity they were mostly Camphor Laurel.
Pinxi,
Trunk size? What elephant or car?
One could Lookle and dredge …….Phillies?
Hi Louis,
I found an article about this issue on an Norwegian site, forskning.no. They had also an graph on deforestation and reforestation:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7041/2254/1600/Forest%20ID%20graph.jpg
This site is really interesting, especially if you are interested in whaling.
Some articles are about the Bowhead, and discussing if it is appropriate to allow a bowhead quota in the US aboriginal bowhead hunt…
In case readers are wondering about Ian’s foxes and their strike rates, all our natives have a natural high failure rate. For eucalypts and other hardwoods it’s down round 1 > 5%. Wattles do a bit better at times.
Gavin “all our natives have a natural high failure rate”?
Mulga seed off the tree has about 5% germination. Boiling water for a minute lifts this to 90+%, as it breaks the hard seededness. As does a fire.
So, with appropriate rain, the fire which can kill growing mulga trees can also result in even-aged mass germinations and establishments.
Ian Beale: I reckon your observation with boiling water etc is the very basis of one line of work at Greening Australia however they also do direct seeding on farms.
However IMHO “even-aged mass germinations” eventually pose a significant “crop” fire threat if left unattended for too long.
In a maturing ‘forest’ lyre birds, apostle birds and others keep the floor clean of seedlings by constantly turning over the litter. In that case its the ‘biodiversity’ that is maintaining plant failure.
Many species are germinated by fire and/or smoke; the heat cracks the seed casing and it germinates in a bed of potash that is free woody weeds and also free from those pesky birds.
Some Nyoongars say that current big fires either incinerate the seed bank altogether, or, in milder areas, promote too massive a germination. It may look spectacular, but the seed bank may be near exhausted in one hit. If a dry spring follows, nearly all that cohort dies. Better to have lots of little fires, and keep patches of seedbank in reserve.
The fact is, 20,000 regrowth trees can fit on only half a hectare. It is happening all over the country while GA spends buckets planting in places that could be naturally regenerated much cheaper and with none of the boorish self congratulation for their claimed planet salvation. Wonk city stuff.
Where there are forests expanding there interesting in using them for fuel:
Renewable Fuels May Provide 25% of U.S. Energy by 2025
By JOHN J. FIALKA WSJ Online
November 13, 2006; Page A10
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116337967603521181-fM8J3J208IF5oyMrPDnSNjC6ncA_20071113.html?mod=blogs
WASHINGTON — A new Rand Corp. study showing the falling costs of ethanol, wind power and other forms of renewable energy predicts such sources could furnish as much as 25% of the U.S.’s conventional energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense.
A second renewable-energy report soon to be released by the National Academy of Sciences suggests wood chips may become a plentiful source of ethanol and electricity for industrial nations because their forested areas are expanding, led by the U.S. and China.
Because use of renewable fuels to replace oil and cut emissions of carbon dioxide is an area on which Congress’s coming Democratic leadership and the Bush administration agree, the studies are likely to hasten efforts to increase production incentives next year, either in a new energy bill or a farm bill. (See related articles.1)
“We hope it will help policy planners rethink the context,” said Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition, a foundation-funded bipartisan group. The coalition sponsored the study by Rand, a nonprofit research group known primarily for defense studies.
The Rand study concludes that because prices for gasoline, natural gas and coal are likely to remain high, their cost advantage over renewables will erode, furthered by the hope that ethanol from farm wastes will be available by 2020.. ..continues at link
The increasing demand for bio fuel will soon make our forests to decrease dramatically I guess…
I opened my paper this morning and saw that the demand for forests for pellets and ethanol was huge in Sweden.
The demand for bio fuel makes also the price for pulp higher( the base for Swedish forestry).
The idea that forest use must always be equated with deforestation is incorrect. The essence of conservation is wise use, where extraction from the forest is balanced by new growth through reforestation and protection. Individual trees may be cut down and new trees established, but the forest goes on. If this is properly handled, all of the other elements of the forest (fauna, understorey, landscape, water) are also conserved and will go on forever. Unfortunately “conservationists” do not understand this, which is why they oppose any forest use involving extraction of timber, or proposed extraction of biomass for electicity generation or biofuels.
That fact may be misleading because the lungs of are planet and the area’s most important to wildlife the rainforest are not expanding they are doing the opposite.
If you would how us a map of these expanding forest I bet none of it is in the 3rd world countries or the rainforests where the most important work needs to be done.