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Research finds no convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests - need for better monitoring
Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds. This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography and one of the world's leading experts on tropical deforestation. From his findings, Dr Grainger concludes that the lack of apparent decline in tropical moist forest area could suggest that deforestation is being offset by natural reforestation at a higher rate than previously thought. However, to understand what is really happening on the ground, the scientist calls for the establishment of a World Forest Observatory that uses the latest satellite tools to monitor the situation.Every few years we get a new estimate of the annual rate of tropical deforestation, says Dr Grainger. These assessments always seem to show that these marvellous forests have only a short time left. Unfortunately, everybody assumes that deforestation is happening and fails to look at the bigger picture – what is happening to forest area as a whole - he argues.
In the first attempt for many years to chart the long-term trend in tropical forest area, he spent more than three years going through all available United Nations data with a fine toothcomb – and found some serious problems.
The errors and inconsistencies I have discovered in the area data raise too many questions to provide convincing support for the accepted picture of tropical forest decline over the last 40 years. Scientists all over the world who have used these data to make predictions of species extinctions and the role of forests in global climate change will find it helpful to revisit their findings in the light of my study. - Dr Alan GraingerDr Grainger does not claim that tropical deforestation is not occurring, as there is plenty of local evidence for that. But owing to the lack of frequent scientific monitoring, something for which he has campaigned for 25 years, we cannot use available data to track the long-term global trend in tropical forest area with great accuracy.
The picture is far more complicated than previously thought. If there is no long-term net decline it suggests that deforestation is being accompanied by a lot of natural reforestation that we have not spotted. - Dr Alan GraingerThe expert first examined data published every 10 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) since 1980 - the Global Forest Resources Assessments. These cover all forest in the humid and dry tropics and appear to indicate decline. FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000, for example, showed that all tropical forest area fell from 1,926 million hectares to 1,799 million hectares between 1990 and 2000. Ten years earlier, however, FAO’s previous report said that tropical forest area fell from 1,910 million ha to 1,756 million ha for the same 90 countries between 1980 and 1990:
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: forests :: deforestation :: rainforest :: biodiversity :: earth observation :: FAO :: Owing to corrections to the earlier study, the 1990s trend was just like a 're-run' of that in the 1980s, says Dr Grainger. The errors involved in making estimates for forest area could easily be of the same order as the forest area reported cleared in the previous 10 years. Even if you take enormous care, as FAO does, the expert argues that large errors are inevitable if you produce global estimates by aggregating national statistics from many countries. This has important implications for the many scientists who rely on FAO data.
Since errors in national statistics are higher for forests in the dry tropics than for forests in the humid tropics, in places near the Equator such as Amazonia, Borneo and the Congo Basin, he repeated the process just for tropical moist forest, with a different set of data, in the hope it would give a clearer picture. This time he found no evidence for decline since the early 1970s. Indeed, while his own estimate in 1983 of tropical moist forest area in 1980 was 1,081 million hectares, the latest satellite data led to an estimate of 1,181 million hectares for the same 63 countries in 2000.
We would expect to see some increase in estimates as we use more accurate satellite sensors. This is even apparent in FAO’s data. It is sad that only in the last 10 years have we begun to make full use of the satellite technology at our disposal. - Dr Alan GraingerDespite the large errors attached to present estimates, the lack of apparent decline in tropical moist forest area suggests that deforestation is being offset by natural reforestation at a higher rate than previously thought. Dr Grainger uses data from FAO’s latest report, published in 2006, to show that in a few countries, such as Gambia and Vietnam, forest area has actually expanded since 1990, as the reforestation rate has exceeded the deforestation rate. He believes that a rise in natural reforestation is a logical precursor to this switch from net deforestation to net reforestation. It has already been the subject of studies in Brazil, Ecuador and India, but available data are too poor for us to be sure of its exact scale worldwide.
To give us more reliable data Dr Grainger says we need a World Forest Observatory to monitor changes in forests in the tropics and elsewhere.
What is happening to the tropical forests is so important, both to the peoples of tropical countries and to future trends in biodiversity and global climate, that we can no longer put off investing in an independent scientific monitoring programme that can combine satellite and ground data to give a reliable picture. A World Forest Observatory would bring together existing research teams in Europe, the USA and elsewhere and ensure they are properly funded to continue mapping tropical forest at least every five years. It could also undertake a massive project to analyse all available satellite and other data from the past and reconstruct the trend in tropical forest area since 1970. Only then will we really know what has happened to tropical forests over the last 40 years. - Dr Alan GraingerDr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds, is an internationally-renowned expert on tropical deforestation, having studied the issue since 1978. He is the author of numerous scientific papers and two overview reports, the first published in The Ecologist magazine in January 1980, followed by a book, Controlling Tropical Deforestation, published in 1993. He gained his doctorate the University of Oxford in 1987 for producing the world's first global computer simulation model of the tropical forests.
References:
Grainger, A. "Difficulties in tracking the long-term global trend in tropical forest area", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 7-11, 2008.
University of Leeds: No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests - January 8, 2008.
Eurekalert: No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests - January 7, 2008.
FAO - Forestry: Global Forest Resources Assessment homepage.
BBC: 'No clear trend' in forest loss - January 8, 2007.
Mongabay: Is tropical deforestation really occurring? - January 8, 2007.
posted by Biopact team at 1:22 AM
2 Comments:
Indigenous people have been burning the rain forests as long as there have been indigenous people. Hence the 10% of the Amazon that's Terra Preta.
Rain forests have been growing back for the same amount of time. The land is only marginally fertile, and then only for a few years. After that it's time to move on, and let nature do her thang. Who'd a thunk it?
Well, the problem is that there was a time when these indigenous people as well as our own forefathers (indigenous people in Europe) lived on a planet that counted less than a billion people and that had no globalised economy.
With 6 billion people and a large part of them wanting to enjoy opulent diets and consumer habits, the situation changes dramatically.
Also, there is not enough research to feel comfortable about any potential natural reforestation. We don't know for sure whether this is happening, nor do we know what happens to the biodiversity in these new forests. In all likeliness it takes much more than a few hundreds of years to build up biodiversity, let alone new species to emerge.
So the fact that we don't have enough monitoring capacity does not mean we can just continue to slash highly biodiverse forests, thinking they will regrow by themselves.
An aim has to be a radical slowdown and big investments in better monitoring. This is in the interest of all, don't you think?
Moreover, once we have protected rainforests for good (e.g. through REDD), the bioenergy community can finally begin to produce fuels and products in a more comfortable way.
A handful of bad biofuels (e.g. palm oil on peatlands in Indonesia) is creating bad press for all others that are more sustainable.
Best,
Jonas
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