All responsible for saving the rainforests

David Kaimowitz, Bogor

If you are reading this, chances are you're a member of the urban middle class. After all, "urban middle class" is probably a fair description of The Jakarta Post's readership.

And as a member of the urban middle class willing to spend five minutes reading an article about forests, chances are you are concerned about the future of the world's natural environment.

You are not alone in your concern. Strike up a conversation about forests with almost any urban middle class citizen -- particularly those living in the developed world -- and he or she will probably say saving the forests is important.

And there the conversation will end.

Because other than acknowledging forests are important, most John Citizens of the developed world are probably more inclined to think finding a solution is someone else's business, not theirs.

The fact is, if people living in developed nations don't make the survival of world's rainforests in the developed world their business, it will be "bad business" indeed. Not only for the rainforests, and not only for the developing nations, but also for themselves, their children and their children's children.

People in wealthy nations still don't realize that if we lose the rich biodiversity of the world's tropical forests or if we allow the millions of people who depend on forests to sink further into poverty, at some stage in the future this will affect their daily lives.

The increasing disappearance of the world's forests and their biodiversity will eventually mean a loss of one of the major sources of the chemical compounds needed to produce new medicines. Given the recent scares with SARS and avian flu, how much harder are we making life for ourselves if we no longer have the rainforest's genetic diversity to identify and research new chemical compounds and cures?

The people in developed nations must also wake up to how global warming will impact on their lives. As the world's forests disappear, the world's levels of carbon dioxide will escalate, leading to increased global warming and climate change. There is already evidence to suggest changes in the world's weather patterns will exacerbate the unpredictability and severity of droughts and floods and reduce the world's ability to grow the food it needs.

Then there are the millions, perhaps billions, of people living in coastal cities and island states. A report earlier this month says the sea level around Australia is rising 1.2 millimeters a year. This could lead to king tides, storm surges and flooding that affects millions of people and damages coastal property and infrastructure.

If global warming can do that to an island as big as Australia, what chance do the thousands of small islands spread across the Indonesian archipelago and the Pacific have? Already the Pacific nation of Tuvalu has secured New Zealand's agreement to accept an annual quota of its citizens as refugees. The people of Tuvalu say the rising sea levels are driving them out.

As the world's forests disappear there will be an increase in poverty that will also have serious implications for developed nations. The World Bank estimates some 240 million of the worlds rural poor depend in one way or another on forests. About two billion people use fuelwood and charcoal for cooking and heating. Rural households in developing countries collect and sell food or timber or make forest handicrafts to supplement their "$1 a day lifestyles". And industrial logging provides millions of full-time jobs and steady earnings for people in developing countries, especially in Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia.

If these forest-dependent people are allowed to fall into ever worsening poverty, it will be the developed nations who will have to rescue them through tax-payer funded aid programs. Or, as we are already seeing, the world's poor will come to the developed countries looking for work, often through illegal immigration and people trafficking, along with all the social problems that implies.

As forests shrink smaller and smaller, people living in and around them won't give up their lands easily. Already many forests around the world have become battlegrounds where government troops, rebel forces and indigenous populations fight each over forest timber -- timber that often ends up as garden furniture in the developed world. And when there's armed conflict in the developing world, it's generally the governments of the developed world who are called on to assist, often at considerable human and economic cost.

So, if you have read this far, hopefully you'll agree the future of the forests are just as important for the developed world as they are for the developing world. Hopefully you'll also agree forests are important for the world's wealthy and middle classes -- and even more important for the millions of poor people who depend on them.

Hopefully, too, you will make the future of the forests your business. Because, in the five minutes it's taken you to read this, 30 soccer fields of Indonesia's tropical forest just disappeared.

The writer is Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).