Getting down to the roots of deforestation

By Susilo

JAKARTA (JP): Left to its own devices, the Earth would be a forested planet. If our ancestors had never descended from them, trees would still cover about half the planet's surface. Now, less than a quarter of the world's original forest remains, most of it gone during the past 50 years. Every week another 400,000 hectares disappear and the rate of destruction has doubled over the past decade. As the trees fall, valuable topsoil has eroded away, water supplies have become disrupted and the climate is beginning to change.

Repeated international attempts to slow down, let alone reverse, global deforestation have ended in failure -- most notably the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. But the other initiatives that have been launched by the United Nations and environmental groups are serious attempts to get a grip on the growing crisis.

Last month, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development held the biggest international meeting on "combating deforestation". The UN's member nations formulated the most detailed assessment ever compiled of the state of the world's forests. And throughout the year environmental groups will launch a worldwide scheme for labeling wood from forests that are managed non-destructively.

At present, only a tiny portion of the world's timber comes from such sustainable sources. The consumers in industrialized countries, however, have shown that they are willing to pay more for wood from managed forests. It will give an incentive for conservation. What they need is a label to identify which wood comes from sustainable managed forests. Such an incentive, however, becomes insignificant compared to the ones furnished by history and basic human survival.

"Forests precede civilization" runs the old saying, "desert follow." The site which was a city state of the Mesopotamian civilization, is now a bump in the sand; its soils, which 4,000 years ago produced crops, were destroyed by deforestation. Similarly, the deserts of North Africa were once the breadbasket of ancient Rome; this region's rich forests provided Hannibal his elephants.

While Christopher Columbus said he had "never behold so fair a thing" as the forest that wrapped the mountains of Haiti, today those hillsides are bare, the soil washed away after the trees were cut down. Nearly 40 percent of country's population suffer from malnutrition. This is similar to Ethiopia's famine that followed the deforestation of once fertile highlands that had supported agriculture for thousands of years. In the past 50 years 90 percent of the country's trees were lost.

Studies show that deforested hills disappear 500 times as fast as those with trees. Furthermore, land covered with trees and other plants also absorb 20 times more rainwater than bare earth. The leaves break up the impact of raindrops, and their roots allow water to perforate the ground. Without trees, floods become more frequent and ground water supplies dry up. In India for example, 60 million hectares of land is vulnerable to flooding, twice the area threatened 30 years ago. Yet water shortages in villages near logging sites have more than trebled in the past 20 years. In addition, two-fifths of the world's people depend on the forest cover of mountains for stable water supplies.

Main cause

Indiscriminate logging is a factor in our changing climate. Forests regulate the climate, generating rainfall and absorbing carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming.

The majority of the planet's plant and animal species depend on forests. Tropical forests, only 6 percent of the plant's area, shelter half of its species. As the trees are felled, the rate of extinctions has accelerated to approximately 10,000 times the natural rate, threatening a biological destruction similar to that which swept away the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ominously, the diversity of plant life -- which survived earlier mass extinctions -- has been the first to suffer.

As species disappear, they take with them genes, pharmaceutical compounds and other chemicals of incalculable potential. An extract from the rosy periwinkle has increased the chances of the child surviving leukemia fourfold to 80 percent, yet this discovery occurred just before the plants habitat in the forests of Madagascar was destroyed.

The Pacific yew, close to extinction because it was routinely burnt as a weed as North American forests were felled, has been found to contain an important cancer fighting drug called taxol. Drugs from forest products already earn over US$100 million a year, but species that are potentially many times more valuable are being destroyed.

The above illustrations show that forests are far more valuable standing. Another study showed that preserving tropical forests that protect valuable watersheds will provide benefits 25 times greater than those gained from destroying them. Similarly, a study in the Peruvian Amazon, concluded that sustainable harvest of the forest for fruit and latex (natural rubber) was nine times more valuable than felling it for timber.

The fate of tropical forests have become a center of concern in developed countries because half of tropical forests have been cut down this century, and if current rate of destruction continues, these forests will no longer exist by 2025. Ironically, these developed countries have an even worse record. The temperate rain forest of Northwest America, one of the most productive ecosystems, is cut down and even faster than its tropical counterparts.

Worldwide, only one hectare of tropical trees are planted for every 10 cut down. In Africa this ratio is close to 1:30. Some of the temperate forests are replanted, and in some rich countries the tree cover is increasing. But while it is much better to replant than not, the new forests bear little resemblance to the ones they replace. They have none of the ecological richness of the original forests, and they are not as good at safeguarding soil and water. The countries that do replant claim to be practicing sustainable forestry. Finland, for example, is often held up as a model despite the fact that only 3 percent of its original forests remain and hundreds of species are at risk.

The International Tropical Timber Organization, representing the trading countries, has optimistically agreed that all trade should come from sustainable sources by the year 2000. There is, however, no chance of that being achieved. Equally discredited is a Tropical Forest Action Plan launched in 1985 to coordinate international aid for more rational forestry. And effort to secure a treaty binding both temperate and tropical forestry at the Earth Summit got nowhere.

But concern for forests has grown since the 1992 summit. The third annual meeting of the Commission for Sustainable Development devoted much of this issue. Countries drew up inventories of the state of their forests and formulated proposals for sustainable use: there were no fewer than eight international initiatives to draw up criteria for sustainable forestry.

On a more practical level, environmental groups have banded together to form the Forest Stewardship Council which has over the past two years been identifying examples of sustainable forestry. So far 800,000 acres of forest in places as far apart as Europe and the Pacific islands, have met the strict standards of this organization. Woods from these sources will soon be identified with a logo. Several countries including, Switzerland and the Netherlands, have said that they will only imports from sustainable sources by the end of this year.

Susilo, and environmental observer, is a graduate of the University of Melbourne, Australia.