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posted by janrinok on Monday November 04 2019, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the wooden-you-just-know-it... dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new study in the journal Science Advances says that carbon impacts from the loss of intact tropical forests has been grossly underreported.

The study calculates new figures relating to intact tropical forest lost between 2000-2013 that show a staggering increase of 626 percent in the long-term net carbon impacts through 2050. The revised total equals two years' worth of all global land-use change emissions.

The authors of the study, from WCS, University of Queensland, University of Oxford, Zoological Society of London, World Resources Institute, University of Maryland, and University of Northern British Columbia, found that direct clearance of intact tropical forests resulted in just 3.2 percent of gross carbon emissions from all deforestation across the pan-tropics. However, when they factored in full carbon accounting, which considers forgone carbon removals (carbon sequestration that would occur annually into the future if cleared or degraded forest had remained intact after year 2000), selective logging, edge effects and declines of carbon-dense tree species due to overhunting of seed-dispersing animals, they discovered that the figure skyrocketed by a factor of more than six times.

Said the study's lead author Sean Maxwell of WCS and the University of Queensland: "Our results revealed that continued destruction of intact tropical forests is a ticking time bomb for carbon emissions. There is an urgent need to safeguard these landscapes because they play an indispensable role in stabilizing the climate."

According to 2013 estimates, 549 million acres of intact tropical forests remain. Only 20 percent of tropical forests can be considered "intact," but those areas store some 40 percent of the above-ground carbon found in all tropical forests.

The authors say that intact forest retention rarely attracts funding from schemes designed to avoid land-use and land cover change emissions in developing nations.

Notably, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) approach enables developing countries to receive financial incentives for enhancing carbon stocks, or avoiding the loss of carbon that would otherwise be emitted due to land-use and land cover change. Among other activities, REDD+ covers support for conservation of forests not under immediate threat, and was formally adopted by parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008 at the 14th Conference of the Parties in Poland. Since then, however, financial support and implementation has predominantly focused on areas with high historical rates of deforestation (i.e. 'deforestation frontiers'). This is widely believed to deliver more immediate and more clearly demonstrable emission reductions than conserving intact forest areas. The latter tend to be treated as negligible sources of emissions as a result of the short timescales and conservative assumptions under which REDD+ operates -- assumptions which the present study suggests are causing key opportunities to be missed.

Journal Reference:

Sean L. Maxwell, Tom Evans, James E. M. Watson, Alexandra Morel, Hedley Grantham, Adam Duncan, Nancy Harris, Peter Potapov, Rebecca K. Runting, Oscar Venter, Stephanie Wang, Yadvinder Malhi. Degradation and forgone removals increase the carbon impact of intact forest loss by 626%. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (10): eaax2546 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax2546


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 04 2019, @01:26PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 04 2019, @01:26PM (#915699) Journal

    OK, I agree that it's not necessarily "gone forever", or I wouldn't be advocating for people to plant trees. And, I've seen that (or a similar) article about the terra preta in the Amazon. Still - we have huge deserts in several parts of the world, that man has either created, or made worse.

    The Sahara, for instance, was supposedly created by man. If not created, then enlarged and worsened by man's domesticated animals, specifically goats. Where there is sparse vegetation, the goat herds just clean it up, before moving on.

    There's an old joke about Arizona - it's great farmland, if you just add water. In fact, farmers turned it into the barren landscape that it is today. The plow tore the ground up, killing off the vegetation that retained the moisture in the soil. They would get a couple seasons of good crops out of the land, and then the soil was too dry to support crops. Solution? Pump the Colorado river nearly dry.

    China has it's own war against desertification, which, apparently, is going well in some areas. Watched a good video not long ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klU-UBCbSyE [youtube.com]

    I believe that mankind needs the same sort of dedication in several other places on earth. Arizona would be good, the Sahara would be even better. Greening the deserts would go a long way toward fighting this global warming we hear of.

    Back to forests coming back - it does take time. The hardwood forests in Arkansas are mostly gone. The land gets regreened with pine, but pine forests don't host a lot of the wildlife that hardwood forests do. And, I think we can agree that no monoculture is a "good thing". Some blight, possibly imported from South America, or Asia, could wipe out all those pine forests across the state, in just a few years.

    We are most certainly not "good stewards" of this earth.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 04 2019, @08:44PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 04 2019, @08:44PM (#915912) Journal

    I like your new sig, BTW.

    I favor planting trees, too, and prefer forests to strip malls. But the apocalyptic thinking, the pure end times hysteria that is sweeping the globe now, is not born out by science. Even in the middle of New York City, in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, there are wild places (Jamaica Bay, among others) and within the space of one human lifetime nature is reclaiming what man built (see: North Brother Island [wikipedia.org]). We are part of nature, too, not some alien species despoiling sacred Gaia.

    And that's what it has come down to. It's not a question of stewardship and conservation anymore, but for the Woke eco-warriors a question of the sacred vs. the profane, with the Earth and its creatures (minus our species) being the sacred, and humans being the profane. Never mind that most of the eco-warriors have never seen nature itself beyond a finely photoshopped wallpaper on their desktop, but they scream bloody murder if anyone dare set foot or find harvest of those natural resources, even if they do it with kid gloves on. Worse, they scream bloody murder in utter hypocrisy about PLASTICS BAD BAD BAD but never put down their iPhones made out of--you guessed it--plastic! I don't see a single blessed one of them eschewing the plastic bags to put their produce in at the grocery store, and growing their own produce in gardens to skip the carbon footprint of commercial food. Nope, instead they point their fingers and demand everyone else change their lifestyles while giving themselves an instant pass on their own behavior.

    Every time they are pressed on this point, they get a misty, far away look in their eyes and wax on about how it's meant to be aspirational, not immediate, and they gotta live, and things are so much bigger than they are, and, and, and they give a little shrug and expunge the whole thing from their minds. Oh, look! Their friend sent them a dope Instagram, so Laters!

    I would prefer our cities live light on the land. I'd like them to prevent sprawl, move to a carbon neutral stance, and switch to renewable energy. But when the Woke shift from reasonable measures to forcing veganism and eating bugs, and taxing the crap out of everything because reasons!, contrary to science, I say enough.

    For what it's worth, Arkansas hardwood forests (Ouchita, I think it was) seemed to be doing OK when I crossed that state on I-40 3 years ago. If people dislike the pine, they should log that like they do in the West.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.