Australia puts $200M toward rainforest conservation
Australia puts $200M toward rainforest conservation
mongabay.com
March 30, 2007
Australia has committed A$200m ($160m) to global forest conservation efforts to help fight illegal logging and slow global warming. The fund is one of the largest ever established by a government for reducing tropical deforestation.
The new fund, known as the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate, aims to cut deforestation rates and promote reforestation schemes. The Australian government said the fund will primarily target developing countries where forest loss is the worst, like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
Globally deforestation contributes about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. About half of this comes from Indonesia, where burning and destruction of carbon-dense peatlands, often for the establishment of oil palm plantations, releases large amounts of carbon dioixde into the atmosphere. Slowing forest loss would effectively cut some of these emissions.
“Reducing deforestation, planting new forests, and investing in sustainable forest management practice are among the best ways to reduce global emissions now,” the Australian government stated in a release.
The new plan is moving in the direction of a proposal put forth by a coalition of developing countries at climate talks in 2005. The coalition, led by Papua New Guinea, called on the world’s industralized countries to fund forest conservation efforts to offset carbon emissions. The plan was widely priased, winning acclaim from the U.N., the World Bank, and conservation biologists. Earlier this year, Indonesia said if would be interested in joning the coalition.
 img src=https://photos.mongabay.com/06/0731.jpg> Logging in Gabon. |
The United States has so far held back on such initiatives. Conservation groups report that despite claims that it is actively supporting the Tropical Forest Conservation Act, a program that promotes conservation efforts in developing countries, the Bush Administration has actually underfunded the program over the past two years. The Tropical Forest Group, an environmental advocacy group based in Santa Barbara, California, reported last year that the administration had committed only $24 million of the stated $70 million per year into saving tropical forests.
Meanwhile, Britain last week annouced it would provide $100 million for conservation efforts in the Congo basin.
Tropical deforestation continues
According to U.N. data, tropical deforestation rates increased 8.5 percent from 2000-2005 when compared with the 1990s, while loss of primary forests expanded by almost 24 percent over the same period. Overall, the U.N. estimates that 10.40 million hectares of tropical forest were permanently destroyed each year in the period from 2000 to 2005, an increase since the 1990-2000 period, when around 10.16 million hectares of forest were lost. Among primary forests, annual deforestation rose to 6.26 million hectares from 5.41 million hectares in the same period.
On a broader scale, U.N. data shows that primary forests are being replaced by less biodiverse plantations and secondary forests. Due to a significant increase in plantation forests, forest cover has generally been expanding in North America, Europe and China while diminishing in the tropics. Industrial logging, conversion for agriculture (commercial and subsistence), and forest fires — often purposely set by people — are responsible for the bulk of global deforestation today.
