Deforestation and development: The hope of sustainable oil palm for Sri Lanka, Relief to plantations in Sarawak but NCR land claimants upset
Editor's note: With the rising push for corporate voluntary pledges to stop deforestation, the rise of concerns over smallholder development is no surprise. The baton of hectarage growth has earlier been handed from large corporate plantation groups to smaller corporations and smallholders. This is very evident in aggregate national data. WRI's report of a pick-up in deforestation in the broad down-trend in Brazil and Indonesia is interesting. Could this be a reaction to lower commodity prices? i.e. you need more production and area to hit your target income? Moreover, will palm oil supply-chain players be actually pressed to stop purchasing from sensitive zones and stick to their pledges for third party sourcing (certification targets 2018-2020)? Thus, if smallholders are discouraged from palm oil, will some turn other lower intensity (higher land use) activity? This would be perverse problem of this kind of voluntary sustainability policy leakage. How does REDD+ appear as a solution, so far? We'll keep an eye on this.
Opinion : Sustainable oil palm central to success of Sri Lanka’s plantation industry November 24, 2017 By Professor Asoka Nugawela: The superior potential of oil palm to reinvigorate the Sri Lankan plantation sector is undeniable. Growth in demand for palm oil in the world even surpasses that of tea and rubber. Unlike tea or rubber, palm oil is cheaper to produce and requires far less land, and far less investment. The only other close competitor for vegetable oil in Sri Lanka, coconut has a NSA and a COP of Rs. 40 and Rs.15 per nut respectively. However, coconut produces a yield per hectare (YPH) of only 7,000 nuts, whilst oil palm produces 18,000 kg per hectare annum.... In essence, oil palm is by far Sri Lanka’s most profitable crop. Coconut generates Rs. 175,000 per hectare per annum, while Tea and Rubber produce Rs. 45,000 and Rs. 50,000 respectively whereas oil palm generates Rs. 514,000 per hectare per annum.... Given the stark differences in the profit making potential of these crops, the only remaining question for the Sri Lankan plantation industry is whether we have the ability to establish and manage oil palm in a manner that is sustainable for all stakeholders and for the environment as a whole.... http://www.lankabusinessonline.com/opinion-sustainable-oil-palm-central-to-success-of-sri-lankas-plantation-industry/
Land titles remain with LCDA but natives to receive compensation 14 Oct 2017 -- Yesterday, the Federal Court panel set aside the High Court order to rectify the title and ordered the state government and Kota Samarahan Land and Survey superintendent to pay compensation to the plaintiffs, with the amount to be decided by an inquiry. Met outside the courthouse later, a tearful Nyutan said he was unhappy with the decision. “We don’t want to get compensation. We want to have our land back. “This land was inherited from our ancestors and now we have lost it,” he said, adding that the villagers hoped for a better solution to land disputes.
Read more at http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2017/10/14/land-titles-remain-with-lcda-but-natives-to-receive-compensation/#ASHjMI5KBCC5ULmU.99
Hunger in Africa, Land of Plenty by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Anis Chowdhury SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 14 (IPS) -- African agricultural productivity has not only suffered, but also African agriculture remains less resilient to climate change and extreme weather conditions. Africa is now comparable to Haiti where food agriculture was destroyed by subsidized food imports from the US and Europe, as admitted by President Clinton after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake....Despite its potential, vast tracts of arable land remain idle, due to decades of official neglect of agriculture. More recently, international financial institutions and many donors have been advocating large-scale foreign investment. A World Bank report notes the growing demand for farmland, especially following the 2007-2008 food price hikes. Approximately 56 million hectares worth of large-scale farmland deals were announced in 2009, compared to less than four million hectares yearly before 2008. More than 70% of these deals involved Africa.... In most such deals, local community concerns are often ignored to benefit big investors and their allies in government. For example, Feronia Inc – a company based in Canada and owned by the development finance institutions of various European governments – controls 120,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.... Most such deals involve land already cleared, with varied, but nonetheless considerable socioeconomic and environmental implications. Local agrarian populations have often been dispossessed with little consultation or adequate compensation, as in Tanzania, when Swedish-based Agro EcoEnergy acquired 20,000 hectares for a sugarcane plantation and ethanol production.
Land grabbing by foreign companies for commercial farming in Africa is threatening smallholder agricultural productivity, vital for reducing poverty and hunger on the continent. In the process, they have been marginalizing local communities, particularly ‘indigenous' populations, and compromising food security. http://ipsnews.net/2017/10/hunger-africa-land-plenty
Bill Kayong murder: Shock and grief at court after three of the accused walk free June 6, 2017, by Cecilia Sman http://www.theborneopost.com/2017/06/06/bill-kayong-murder-shock-and-grief-at-court-after-three-of-the-accused-walk-free/
Sudden sale may doom carbon-rich rainforest in Borneo 2 January 2017 / John C. Cannon - Home to critical watersheds and orangutans, a 101,000-hectare forest located in the Trus Madi Reserve was on track to serve as a blueprint for a conservation economy, before the rights to log it were sold in October. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/sudden-sale-may-doom-carbon-rich-rainforest-in-borneo/
Temer government set to overthrow Brazil’s environmental agenda 21 December 2016 / Sue Branford and Maurício Torres -- Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby (bancada ruralista) is pushing a raft of new laws to set back environmental and indigenous protections by 30 years.... A catastrophic setback to environmental and indigenous protections was narrowly averted last week when quick action from two federal deputies prevented the agricultural lobby from forcing passage of bills to authorize construction of three mega-industrial waterways in the Amazon and elsewhere.... The Congress will likely pick up the bills again after the recess in February. They would authorize building many dozens of dams and industrial waterways in three river basins — PDC 119/2015 on the Tapajós, Teles Pires and Juruena rivers in the Amazon; PDC 120/2015 on the Tocantins and Araguaia rivers, also in the Amazon; and PDC 118/2015 on the Paraguai River.... In 2005, a similar bill was passed, fast tracking the Belo Monte dam and bypassing proper environmental evaluation. Today, Norte Energia, the consortium that built the Amazon mega-dam has been charged with environmental crimes, ethnocide and is under investigation for corruption.... Another bill working its way through the National Congress would completely gut the environmental licensing process for most infrastructure projects, while still another would take away hard won protections guaranteed to Brazil’s indigenous people in the 1988 Constitution.... https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/temer-government-set-to-overthrow-brazils-environmental-agenda/
Illegal logging shows little sign of slowing 30 December 2016 / Morgan Erickson-Davis -- A recent report finds regulation loopholes, an uptick in organized crime, and lax land rights are allowing illegal logging to thrive.“Forestry crime including corporate crimes and illegal logging account for up to $152 billion every year, more than all official development aid combined,” said Erik Solheim, Head of UN Environment, one of the partner organizations supporting the assessment. ....It finds that bilateral trade agreements between producer and consumer countries – e.g., the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan (FLEGT) that requires timber products imported into the EU be legally harvested – have prompted shifts in the timber trade to less restrictive domestic markets. The researchers also found jumps in exports to India and China, which have less stringent regulations and are now the biggest importers of both legal and illegal tropical wood....https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/illegal-logging-shows-little-sign-of-slowing/
Jokowi grants first-ever indigenous land rights (13k ha) to 9 communities, 4 January 2017 / Mongabay.com -- That movement still has a long way to go. The nine “customary forests” — known as hutan adat in Indonesian — acknowledged by President Joko Widodo’s administration last week encompass a total of 13,100 hectares (32,370 acres). But the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) has mapped more than 8.2 million hectares of customary lands it says belongs to the nation’s adat groups, as those who practice ancient modes of knowledge, belief, community and economy are called here. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/jokowi-grants-first-ever-indigenous-land-rights-to-9-communities/
The human cost of palm oil production in Myanmar - Aggressive expansion of plantations enacted in southern provinces largely ignoring environment and workers' rights. By Taylor Weidman | 04 Jan 2017 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/11/human-cost-palm-oil-production-myanmar-161120085639460.html
$3.3m in new grants to protect Kalimantan forests by The Jakarta Post December 14, 2016 -- The Tropical Forest Conservation Act Kalimantan (TFCA Kalimantan), a partnership program among the US government, the Indonesian government, the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia, has approved 14 new grants worth $3.3 million for local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Indonesia. The US Embassy in Jakarta said in a statement on Wednesday that the NGOs would work with forest-dependent communities to conserve tropical forests, protect natural resources and wildlife and improve livelihoods.... http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/12/14/3-3m-in-new-grants-to-protect-kalimantan-forests.html
10 countries with the most protected areas by Melissa Breyer, December 14, 2016 -- As of now, a mere 14.8 percent of the world’s total land enjoys protected status; which is actually a step-up from 1990 when it was just 8.2 percent. Surprisingly, one of the world’s leading oil exporters took first place for percentage of land designated as protected. Countries with the most protected areas
1. Venezuela (53.9 percent of total land area)
2. Slovenia (53.6)
3. Monaco (53.4)
4. Bhutan (47.3)
5. Turks and Caicos Islands (44.4)
6. Liechtenstein (44.3)
7. Brunei Darussalam (44.1)
8. Seychelles (42.1)
9. Hong Kong (41.8)
10. Greenland (41.2)
http://www.treehugger.com/conservation/10-countries-largest-amount-protected-land.html#14821524277441&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=
With deforestation increasing in Brazil, will Norway ask for its US$1 billion REDD money back? Chris Lang 8 December 2016 -- On 29 November 2016, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released its estimate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon for the period August 2015 to July 2016. It’s not good news. Deforestation increased by 29% compared to the previous year.... The actual area deforested is even largely. A recent study in Conservation Letters found that Brazil was under-reporting deforestation rates in its official figures. The study found that about 9,000 square kilometres of forest was cleared between 2008 and 2012 without the deforestation showing up in the official figures.... Part of the problem is that the Brazilian Amazon by Satellite Project (PRODES) excludes areas of less than 6.25 hectares. Leah VanWey, co-author of the research and senior deputy director at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, said... We showed that while deforestation in large plots of primary rainforests has declined, it has expanded in these areas not tracked by PRODES....In an article in Nature, Jeff Tolleson quotes Paulo Barreto, a senior researcher at the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment, as saying that the size of the forest tracts that are being cleared is increasing. Tolleson notes that this is “a sign that the major players are investing in illegal deforestation”.....
http://www.redd-monitor.org/2016/12/08/with-deforestation-increasing-in-brazil-will-norway-ask-for-its-us1-billion-redd-money-back/
Bad news from Brazil: Deforestation rates are going up and are likely to go even higher Chris Lang in Brazil 24 November 2016 http://www.redd-monitor.org/2016/11/24/bad-news-from-brazil-deforestation-rates-are-going-up-and-are-likely-to-go-even-higher/
Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection? by Peter Richards, Eugenio Arima, Leah VanWey, Avery Cohn, Nishan Bhattarai First published: 7 November 2016 -- Abstract: Rates of deforestation reported by Brazil's official deforestation monitoring system have declined dramatically in the Brazilian Amazon. Much of Brazil's success in its fight against deforestation has been credited to a series of policy changes put into place between 2004 and 2008. In this research, we posit that one of these policies, the decision to use the country's official system for monitoring forest loss in the Amazon as a policing tool, has incentivized landowners to deforest in ways and places that evade Brazil's official monitoring and enforcement system. As a consequence, we a) show or b) provide several pieces of suggestive evidence that recent successes in protecting monitored forests in the Brazilian Amazon may be doing less to protect the region's forests than previously assumed.... PRODES deforestation diverged from other deforestation indicators after 2008. From 2002 to 2008, PRODES estimated that, on average, approximately 19,000 km² of forests were lost annually in the Amazon Biome. Deforestation was highest from 2002 to 2005, when forest loss rates exceeded 20,000 km² per year. Rates then fell over the course of 2006–2008 to approximately 10,000 km². After PPCDAm ii, they fell even further to 5,000 km² per year. ... From 2002 to 2008, the GFC data estimated that, on average, about 20,000 km² of forests were lost per year. Just as with PRODES, GFC recorded the highest forest loss rates during the early part of the decade. Rates then dropped in 2006 and 2007, to approximately 15,000 km² per year. However, loss rates did not drop to the same extent as the PRODES estimates after 2008. From 2009 to 2013, deforestation rates in the GFC data remained around 10,000 km² per year, or roughly double PRODES levels. Significant deforestation spikes occurred in 2010 and 2012, when loss rates increased to approximately 15,000 km² per year..... The FIRMS data follow the GFC data. Fires were prolific during the early 2000s. The number of fire incidents reached a nadir in 2005, but fell to lower levels in 2006. From 2009 to 2013, the number of fires recorded per year fell, on average, fell to less than half of levels observed earlier in the decade. Significant spikes in fire incidents were observed in 2010 and 2012, the same years for which deforestation spikes were observed in the GFC data..... The largest discrepancies between the GFC and PRODES data were found in northern Mato Grosso, where a thriving soybean sector is creating high demand for land; and in northeastern Pará, where investments in cattle processing, soybean production (in the region around Paragominas), and palm oil production are transforming the region into one of the most rapidly growing rural economies in the Amazon (Figure 2). We argue that these areas are those where landowners would have both the greatest incentives to avoid detection, and be more likely to have knowledge on how to avoid the monitoring system. .... The greatest returns to opening new land may be in these higher valued regions in north-central Mato Grosso and in northeastern Pará. Landowners in these areas, presumably, would thus have had both the greatest incentive to continue opening land and more awareness with respect to which lands could be opened without triggering a deforestation observation. Smallholder farmers and ranchers, in contrast to their more capitalized counterparts, may not have had access to the same technical knowledge. They also would have had less incentive to avoid deforestation detection. Small farming areas are less likely to be subject to environmental enforcement, despite higher rates of forest loss (Godar et al. 2014; Schneider & Peres 2015; Richards & VanWey 2016).....
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12310/full
Only 5 Sumatran Tigers Left in Bengkulu's Mukomuko By : Usmin & Ratri M. Siniwi | on 2:03 PM August 05, 2016 -- According to Fernandi, one of the major causes is due to the major loss of habitat, leaving the tigers few places to hunt for food and driving them to hunt outside of conservation areas. Sumatran tiger habitat has been shrinking after decades of the palm oil plantation boom — which led to a land clearances — across Sumatra. http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/news/only-5-sumatran-tigers-left-in-bengkulus-mukomuko/
Hundreds leave home in palm oil conflict by Severianus Endi The Jakarta Post Pontianak | Tue, August 2 2016 -- Hundreds of residents from several hamlets in West Kalimantan have fled their homes to avoid arrest over their alleged involvement in a conflict with an oil palm company operating plantations in the area. The residents from the area around the village of Olak-Olak in Kubu district, Kubu Raya regency, have reportedly escaped to regions in and around Pontianak City. In search of support, around 50 of them approached the West Kalimantan chapter of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in Pontianak on Monday to report the case. Some women were crying while carrying their children, who have not attended school for nearly a week. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/08/02/hundreds-leave-home-palm-oil-conflict.html
Peer-Reviewed Study Finds High Tropical Deforestation from Oil Palm Production 28 Jul 2016 --- A new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found high levels of oil palm-driven deforestation over a 25-year period in Southeast Asia and South America, but relatively low levels in Mesoamerica (Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean) and Africa. Three of the countries studied – Ecuador, Peru and Indonesia – had the greatest levels of observed deforestation within sampled sites, with more than half of the oil palm grown on land deforested during the study period. The study by researchers at Duke University and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is the first to examine past deforestation and potential future deforestation and biodiversity impacts associated with oil palm plantations in 20 countries across the world. The study used satellite imagery to evaluate where oil palm plantations replaced forests from 1989 to 2013........The study’s key findings included the highest conversion rates of tropical forests to oil palm plantations in sampled areas in the following countries: Ecuador (60.8 percent), Indonesia (53.8 percent), Peru (53.1 percent), Malaysia (39.6 percent) and Brazil (39.4 percent). http://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/Peer-Reviewed-Study-Finds-High-Tropical-Deforestation-from-Oil-Palm-Production.html?frompage=index&tracking=Headlines
Forests, species on four continents threatened by palm oil expansion July 27, 2016 by Varsha Vijay -- As palm oil production expands from Southeast Asia into tropical regions of the Americas and Africa, vulnerable forests and species on four continents face increased risk of loss, a new Duke University-led study finds.
Using 25 years of high-resolution Google Earth and Landsat satellite imagery, Vijay and her team tracked the extent of this deforestation in four regions: Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and Mesoamerica, which includes Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.... "Many past studies have focused solely on Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 80 percent of the world's palm oil. By evaluating deforestation caused by palm oil production in 20 countries across four regions, our study demonstrates that the biodiversity impacts of this expansion are very different from country to country and region to region," said Clinton Jenkins of the Institute for Ecological Research in Brazil..... "The palm oil industry has a legacy of deforestation, and today consumer pressure is pushing companies toward deforestation-free sources of palm oil," noted Sharon Smith of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who co-authored the study with Vijay, Pimm and Jenkins. "This research helps us understand where to focus on using government regulation and voluntary market interventions to shape oil palm plantation expansion in ways that protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems and prevent deforestation," Smith said.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-forests-species-continents-threatened-palm.html#jCp
Land Used for Palm Oil Could Double Without Damaging Forests: Researchers By : Chris Arsenault | July 27, 2016 -- Researchers from the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) studied satellite maps from Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America to determine where the crop used to make vegetable oils and other consumer products could be expanded sustainably. The findings follow criticism from campaign groups who say the expansion of palm oil plantations has destroyed rainforests and displaced local people from their ancestral lands. An area larger than Uruguay, more than 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) of land, is covered by palm oil plantations, up from six million hectares in 1990, IIASA said. Expansion of the crop, which accounts for about 30 percent of all vegetable oil used worldwide, has been concentrated in biodiversity-rich tropical forests in Malaysia and Indonesia.....Satellite data shows an area of up about 19 million hectares onto which the industry could grow without damaging forests that are particularly valuable for biodiversity or storing carbon as means of combating climate change, IIASA said. Globally, an estimated three million small farmers work in the palm oil business and this could rise above seven million if the industry is expanded sustainably, IIASA said. ...Reuters.. http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/international/land-used-palm-oil-double-without-damaging-forests-researchers/
Situating smallholders at the fore - Empowering smallholders is essential for economic development – and to protect forests Deanna Ramsay 19 Jul 2016 -- But the fact is that now companies are making commitments to source supply that is clean, that is deforestation free. And I think that’s one of the main issues that they’re struggling with is how to build these clean sources of supply that involve smallholders. But that is going to imply for them to build some kind of agreements with these groups of smallholders that are supplying these companies. So that’s the big issue. Because the majority of smallholders are independent smallholders, like in the oil palm sector in Indonesia.....I think what is needed is business models that are able to share those costs – share the cost, share the risks and share the benefits. Because in most of the cases you have business models that then transfer the costs to the producers that are upstream in the supply chains. So they are the ones who pay for the cost. In an ideal situation, the companies also should be able – if they are targeting deforestation free in markets – they should be able if there is some reward to transfer the rewards upstream in the value chains.... So the smallholders can also benefit or receive some compensation on the costs that they are investing in improving the production systems. But that is still an open question, and we don’t know if that’s going to work in that way.... http://blog.cifor.org/42305/situating-smallholders-at-the-fore?fnl=en
Community forestry in Central Africa: Has it been a success? New book draws lessons for participatory resource management in the Congo Basin 21 Jul 2016 -- ).....There are several factors that explain the limited effectiveness of communal forestry: (i) reforms to the forestry sector in Central Africa in the mid-1990s favored industrial concessions and community forests, (ii) the development of communal forests was never a fundamental challenge or stake for Central African states or for technical and financial partners, and, (iii) in countries like Cameroon where decisive experiments have been carried out, the relatively high cost of the forest acquisition process has prevented many decentralized territorial units from adopting this management system independently......... http://blog.cifor.org/42380/community-forestry-in-central-africa-has-it-been-a-success?fnl=en
Wood fuel not as bad for the environment as previously thought Jack Hewson 18 Jul 2016 -- .....“We’re saying that the studies that have been published so far have not been adequate to inform policy,” she said. “You find that most of the papers are either looking at the environmental factors and making broad conclusions from that, or the health factors where wood fuel is causing lots of respiratory disorders, and then there are those who are focusing on the economic aspects. But you don’t have studies that try to look at all of these issues together and, most importantly, at the trade-offs among them.”...In partnership with the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), CIFOR has commissioned a number of systematic reviews as part of its Evidence-Based Forestry Initiative, including Cerutti and Sola’s research on wood fuel....“In this regard, we are now seeing a holistic reappraisal of what is deemed sustainable,” said Cerutti http://blog.cifor.org/42288/wood-fuel-not-as-bad-for-the-environment-as-previously-thought?fnl=en
CONSERVATION KEY TO CURBING EMISSIONS FROM OIL PALM AGRICULTURE IN AFRICA June 28, 2016 Featuring John Randolph Poulsen -- DURHAM, N.C. -- As oil palm production expands from Southeast Asia into Central Africa, a new Duke University-led study warns that converting Africa’s tropical forests into monoculture palm plantations will cause a significant spike in climate-warming carbon emissions. The authors urge regional governments to enact mandatory policies regulating which forests can be cleared and how much remaining forest must be set aside for conservation. “Our case study, which focuses on oil palm farming in the nation of Gabon, finds that converting even previously logged forest into oil palm plantations will lead to high carbon emissions,” said John R. Poulsen, assistant professor of tropical ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Clearing just 11,500 hectares of forest -- or roughly 28,400 acres -- would release about 1.5 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere,” Poulsen said. “That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of some small developing countries.” However, the new study finds that these emissions could be completely offset over 25 years if development were centered on forests that store less carbon and if a portion of every development had conservation set-asides. Poulsen and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed study June 24 in the journal Conservation Letters....They used field measurements and LiDAR satellite data to calculate forest carbon stocks -- the amount of carbon stored in trees -- and potential carbon emissions at the site of a 50,000-hectare palm oil plantation in Gabon. The plantation is being developed jointly by the Gabonese government and the agribusiness firm Olam International Ltd., to test if low-emissions palm oil development is feasible in the equatorial country on the Atlantic Ocean..... “First, we recommend establishing a nationwide carbon threshold of 108 to 118 metric tons per hectare. Only forests that store less than this density of carbon will be considered suitable for development,” Poulsen said. “Second, palm oil companies will also have to set aside enough land within a plantation -- roughly one acre for every 2.6 acres developed -- to offset emissions. “The precise set-aside ratio may vary by site, but 2.6 to 1 is generally the point at which carbon storage in the conserved forest will offset carbon loss in the rest of the plantation and achieve net-zero emissions over time,” Poulsen explained.... “Although our study considers only forest carbon, and not biodiversity or other ecosystem services, we estimate there is enough low-carbon forest in Gabon to achieve net-zero emissions while still permitting the nation to meet its palm oil production goals,” he said. Allowing industry to voluntarily adhere to these new guidelines or opt out of them is not an option, he stressed. “To succeed, this approach needs to be mandatory and implemented by the government with careful land-use planning and strict enforcement.” Support for this research came from Olam Palm Gabon and Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment....
https://nicholas.duke.edu/about/news/conservation-key-curbing-emissions-oil-palm-agriculture-africa; CITATION: “Reducing Carbon Emissions from Forest Conversion for Oil Palm Agriculture in Gabon,” Mark E.H. Burton, John R. Poulsen, Michelle E. Lee, Vincent P. Medjibe, Christopher G. Stewart, Arun Venkataraman, Lee J.T. White. Conservation Letters, June 24, 2016. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12265
Conservation to Compensate Carbon Emission Essential in Gabon June 30, 2016 http://www.azocleantech.com/news.aspx?newsID=23460
EU TIMBER REGULATION: As a major global supplier of timber products from various origins, Olam International Ltd is committed to sustainable forest management practices and third party verification of all wood sourced from outside our operations. http://olamgroup.com/products-services/industrial-raw-materials/wood/eu-timber-regulation/, http://olamgroup.com/products-services/industrial-raw-materials/wood/
Olam To Divest Timber Assets In Gabon For US$18.0 Million, Singapore, January 24, 2014 -- entered into an agreement with a consortium of Chinese investors to sell part of its forestry and saw milling assets in Gabon for a gross consideration of US$18.0 million.... The divestment, which is a part of Olam’s revised strategy to restructure the Wood Products portfolio, includes the sale of two saw mills in the Makokou region of Gabon, 2.5 hectares of land in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Nkok, Gabon and associated forestry concessions. - See more at: http://olamgroup.com/news/olam-to-divest-timber-assets-in-gabon-for-us18-0-million/#sthash.LkMYLaI4.dpuf (note: search of company website does not indicate any further divestment of Gabon timber business)
Can Oil Palm Plantations and Orangutans Coexist? Companies are partnering with environmental groups to aid the red apes, but results are elusive By Melati Kaye on June 30, 2016 -- This lush portion of the plantation should be ideal habitat for orangutans. I have not spotted any, but according to Hendriyanto, my guide from the plantation’s conservation team, an estimated 14 of the red apes do indeed live here. .... Surveyors came up with that number by counting orangutan nests in this 657-hectare so-called "High Conservation Value" (HCV) enclave within the 18,000-hectare plantation. The population density survey and the HCV set-aside are required of oil palm companies like Hendriyanto's employer, Ketapang-based PT Kayung Agro Lestari (PT-KAL), for eco-compliance certification by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a consortium that has been setting the industry's sustainability standards since 2004..... But one step outside this refuge lies a very different scene: blistering tropical heat and regimented rows of spiky oil palm trees spread over miles of ochre mud that turns to deep, rutted puddles after a drizzle. Borneo's forest-to-plantation ratio has plummeted in recent decades. Satellite data show that the island's forest cover dwindled from 76 percent to a mere 28 percent between 1973 and 2010. Deforestation has only accelerated since then, especially in 2015, when fires smoldered across 1.3 million hectares of peatland for months on end.... From an ape's point of view, the plantation vista presents an uninhabitable hellscape. From an industry standpoint, it is a prospect of burgeoning revenue. Half of the vegetable oil consumed around the world comes from oil palms. According to data from USDA and the World Bank, the global market for palm oil and palm kernels is around $47 billion..... To forestall such a public relations disaster, industry-leading oil palm companies have tried a series of conservation initiatives to show that orangutans and plantations can co-exist--hence the RSPO, the HCV enclaves and the relocation of orphaned apes to rehabilitation centers for later reintroduction back to the forest. The latest scheme is to interlink isolated HCV patches with migration "corridors" so that orangutans and other forest-dwelling creatures can disperse in accordance with their natural behaviors.... To implement such measures (and garner some third-party credibility), many companies have partnered with environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But results have so far been elusive. Part of the problem is a general lack of data. But companies can also ignore or skimp on the NGO recommendations. Compounding matters, the RSPO and its ilk are agonizingly slow at investigating complaints, and their findings are no more than advisory, with no force of law. Moreover, Indonesian licensing laws can undermine conservation by reallocating forest leases of companies that do not exploit their allotted tracts fully or quickly enough. And with RSPO covering barely a fifth of the world’s palm oil operators, there is always a queue of wildcat planters ready to take up rescinded leases.... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-oil-palm-plantations-and-orangutans-coexist/
On land and in space, understanding the impacts of fires. To measure greenhouse gas emissions from the fires in maritime Southeast Asia in 2015, a variety of methods and expertise coalesced DEANNA RAMSAY 28 Jun 2016 -- The study’s authors determined that the carbon emissions released by the fires in September and October 2015 of 11.3 million tons per day were higher than those of the entire European Union, which daily released 8.9 million tons over the same period.....The widespread landscape fires in parts of Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua last year generated noxious smoke and haze affecting millions – and international attention – and the team on the ground was the very first to assess the emissions from actively burning peatland..... “There have been some isolated studies before where people artificially set fires in the lab to try to understand the chemical characteristics of peatland fire smoke in Indonesia. But no one had done this on natural fires, and especially not on the kind of extreme fires seen in 2015. We are the first people to do that,” said King’s College London professor Martin J. Wooster, one of the study’s lead authors. The team used their measurements of ground-level smoke from burning peat to derive the emission factors, i.e. to understand how much carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane is released for a particular amount of tropical peat burned. Satellites provided data on the heat output being radiated by the fires, as well as information on the amount of carbon monoxide present in the surrounding atmosphere. From this, the total carbon emissions were determined by combining the satellite measurements and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) modeling framework with the newly determined emission factors from fires around Palangka Raya – one of the hardest hit sites. The researchers concluded that 884 million tons of carbon dioxide was released in the region last year – 97% originating from burning in Indonesia. The corresponding carbon emissions were 289 million tons, and associated carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions 1.2 billion tons .....“This sort of modeling has only been possible quite recently. When we saw the fires start in the region – knowing that it was an El Niño year – we were able to quickly start analyzing the situation, and we started contacting others who could contribute,” said study lead author Vincent Huijnen of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who works on the CAMS framework. Wooster concurred about the clarity of their calculations because of fresh technologies....He said, “We found that this was the largest single fire event in terms of carbon emissions from Indonesia since 1997. We can much more confidently make our calculations because of the new satellite, modeling and field instrument technology that is now available compared to 20 years ago.”.... For David Gaveau, also a CIFOR scientist and study co-author, the fires in 2015 were different because they were primarily on drained, idle peatland. “In 1997 the drought lasted longer, the fires were more severe and a lot more forest burned. In 2015, fires mostly burned on degraded peatland covered with shrubs and wood debris,” he said.... “The last year has seen the largest single year atmospheric carbon dioxide increase since records began in the 1950s, and we calculated that the fires burning in Indonesia made up a significant component of the increase over what is ‘normal’ in non-El Niño years,” Wooster said..... For Murdiyarso, good policy is key – and providing numbers related to the 2015 fires can help. With the Indonesian government’s Peatland Restoration Agency established following the fires last year, there is movement to avert future fires....... http://blog.cifor.org/42098/on-land-and-in-space-understanding-the-impacts-of-fires?fnl=en
Vast Peat Fires Threaten Health and Boost Global Warming. Largest blazes on earth smolder for months in Canada and Indonesia By XiaoZhi Lim on July 2, 2016 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vast-peat-fires-threaten-health-and-boost-global-warming/
THESE FIRES ARE HUGE, HIDDEN AND HARMFUL. WHAT CAN WE DO? Smoldering peat gives off massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, but the search for solutions is on. By XiaoZhi Lim, freelance science reporter based in Singapore. June 28, 2016 -- June 28, 2016 — As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada. Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. ey produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities. Although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth.”And although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth,” says Guillermo Rein, a peat fire researcher at Imperial College in the United Kingdom....The boreal forests are thought to contain some 30 times more peat than Indonesia. Because they can smolder for weeks and months, sometimes even staying active underground throughout cold northern winters, peat fires emit on average the equivalent of 15 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to Rein — carbon that took thousands of years to sequester.... Rein recently received a five-year, €2 million grant from the European Research Council to develop a peat fire early warning system. He is trying to characterize the heat fingerprints of peat fires by replicating small peat fires in the laboratory and using infrared cameras to record the heat emitted. He hopes to use his findings to calibrate satellites specifically for peat fires, just as some motion sensors are calibrated to detect infrared radiation unique to humans.....Rein is also collecting the gases produced from his experiments and analyzing them for patterns that could become telltale warning signs of a growing peat fire. For example, the ratios of carbon monoxide or volatile organic compounds to carbon dioxide can be used to tell the difference between emissions from peat fires and those from combustion engines or power plants. These patterns could then be applied to handheld gas sensors or gas analyzers placed in drones, airplanes or buildings in nearby villages and cities to help detect peat fires....Once found, one problem to putting out peat fires is that peat soil repels water when it gets very dry, says Watts.... Adding a fire retardant to the water might help make water more effective at this. One example is Peat FireX, a plant-based powder developed in 2012 by Steve Sinunu, CEO of Texas-based EnvironX Solutions. When dissolved in water, it disrupts the strong hydrogen bonds between water molecules, making it easier for the water to penetrate soil. As the solution moves into the soil, it coats the peat to protect it from fire....Earlier this year, the Indonesian government adopted Peat FireX as a weapon against peat fires, according to Steve Sinunu and an independent company in Singapore who helped connect EnvironX with the Indonesian government....
http://ensia.com/features/these-fires-are-huge-hidden-and-harmful-what-can-we-do/
Ravaged woodlands - Stricken trees provide clues about how America will adapt to global warming—but little hope that it can be averted Jul 9th 2016 -- The growth of wildfires is a worldwide problem, with even bigger burns elsewhere. Siberia, Tasmania, Canada and Indonesia have seen record-breaking fires in recent years. According to Greenpeace, fire consumed over 7m acres of Russian forest in the year to May 23rd (the Kremlin offers much lower figures). The area of Canadian forest burning each year has roughly doubled since the 1970s; a wildfire near Fort McMurray, in Alberta, which started in May, has turned 1.5m acres of forest and 2,400 buildings to ash. Now heading north through Saskatchewan, the fire is reckoned to be Canada’s costliest natural disaster.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21701751-stricken-trees-provide-clues-about-how-america-will-adapt-global-warmingbut-little-hope?
A new generation of forest managers in the Democratic Republic of Congo - A university on the banks of the Congo River is producing the next generation of experts on sustainable forestry. Fai Collins 29 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41698/a-new-generation-of-forest-managers-in-the-democratic-republic-of-congo?fnl=en
Reserves need tweaks to withstand Amazon fire threat - Despite their rapid proliferation, 'Sustainable Use Reserves' in the Amazon aren't living up to their hype- especially when it comes to reducing fire. Samuel McGlennon 30 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41726/reserves-need-tweaks-to-withstand-amazon-fire-threat?fnl=en
Quantifying the drivers of South American deforestation - New research uses spatially and temporally explicit data to better understand deforestation trends in South America. Samuel McGlennon 27 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41685/quantifying-the-drivers-of-south-american-deforestation?fnl=en
What’s Driving Deforestation Now? Doug Boucher, scientific adviser, Climate and Energy | April 14, 2016 http://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/whats-driving-deforestation-now
The challenges of conserving tropical forests - From industrial concessions to community forests, new research looks at what constitutes responsible forest management TARA LOHAN 29 Apr 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41259/the-challenges-of-conserving-tropical-forests?fnl=en
Switching swidden to agroforestry – a small intervention with big potential in West Java By converting to agroforestry, farmers in Indonesia could reap major environmental, economic and social benefits. KATE EVANS 26 Apr 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41242/switching-swidden-to-agroforestry-a-small-intervention-with-big-potential-in-west-java?fnl=en
Sabah To Test High Carbon Stock For Sustainable Oil Palm December 11, 2015 KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 11 (Bernama) -- The Sabah Forestry Department has committed to test the High Carbon Stock plus (HCS+) methodology for sustainable oil palm development in six months following the release of the HCS+ study's findings. "We are very keen to pursue the offer from the Sabah Forestry Department which indicated that this would be very helpful for them.
CIFOR links:
New NASA Probe Will Study Earth’s Forests in 3-D, September 8, 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-nasa-probe-will-study-earth-s-forests-in-3-d/#.VzR_xIR97am... By revealing the 3-D architecture of forests in unprecedented detail, GEDI will provide crucial information about the impact that trees have on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Although it is well-established that trees absorb carbon and store it long-term, scientists have not quantified exactly how much carbon forests contain. As a result, it’s not possible to determine how much carbon would be released if a forest were destroyed, nor how well emissions could be countered by planting new trees.... "One of the most poorly quantified components of the carbon cycle is the net balance between forest disturbance and regrowth,” said Ralph Dubayah, the GEDI principal investigator at the University of Maryland. “GEDI will help scientists fill in this missing piece by revealing the vertical structure of the forest, which is information we really can’t get with sufficient accuracy any other way.”.. GEDI is scheduled to be completed in 2018. NASA’s Earth Venture Instrument program is part of the Earth System Science Pathfinder program, managed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The GEDI team includes co-investigators from Goddard; Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the U.S. Forest Service, Ogden, Utah; and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
RM500-1,000 Monthly Compensation To Be Paid To Pahang Residents Affected By Bauxite Mining 30 November 2015 Chairman of the Bukit Goh Bauxite Coordination Committee, Datuk Abd Wahid Abd Manap had announced yesterday that the compensation will be paid out to individuals identified by the committee from funds provided by the bauxite contractors. "For now, we can offer RM1,000 compensation to each business operator and RM500 per month to each resident whose livelihood have been badly affected by the bauxite mining scourge.... According to media reports, bauxite mining activities have released heavy metal particles into Kuantan’s air and water supply, leading to an outbreak of respiratory problems and skin disease with the heavy particles even contaminating water treatment plants.
http://malaysiandigest.com/frontpage/29-4-tile/581704-rm500-1-000-monthly-compensation-to-be-paid-to-pahang-residents-affected-by-bauxite-mining.html
DOE finds high mercury levels in rivers near bauxite mining sites, says Kuantan MP BY RAM ANAND Published: 23 November 2015
http://www.
All prepared for the worst by nicholas cheng, neville spykerman, andsyed azhar November 2, 2015; KUALA LUMPUR: The monsoon season is coming and the Fire and Rescue Department says it is prepared for things to go as bad as the east coast flood crisis last year. Over the year, officers in the flood prone states of Kelantan, Pahang and Terengganu have been conducting water training in rivers to test their readiness to evacuate scores of people should water levels rise. Fire and Rescue Department assistant director-general (Operations Division) Datuk Soiman Jahid said assets had been placed in the states in preparation for the rainy season. “We are preparing for it to be as bad as last year. We have conducted water training for officers to be well versed in navigating floods and we have made sure our fire engines and boats are all in good working order in those states. http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2015/11/02/All-prepared-for-the-worst-Fire-and-Rescue-Dept-officers-undergo-water-training-as-part-of-monsoon-r/
REDD-I partnership celebrates five years with handover to FORDA 26 Oct 2015; CIFOR’s Director of Communications and External Relations, John Colmey, officially transferred the management of REDD-Indonesia.org to FORDA Director General, Henry Bastaman, during the International Conference of Indonesia Forestry Researchers (INAFOR) at the IPB Convention Center, Bogor.... REDD-Indonesia.org (REDD-I), jointly developed by CIFOR and FORDA, has become Indonesia’s leading website for reliable information on forests, climate change and REDD+ in Indonesia. It was launched in 2011 after CIFOR and FORDA identified an information gap on climate change problems and solutions in the country. Now, the website attracts 6,000 visits per month and has 9,300 subscribers to its monthly news updates. http://www.cifor.org/corporate-news/redd-i-partnership-celebrates-five-years-with-handover-to-forda/
Anti-graft group fears Kelantan deforestation will breed corruption, cronyism Published: 18 October 2015 1:50 PM The Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism is concerned over Kelantan's logging policies after the state approved additional land for logging. – Photo courtesy of Flickr, October 18, 2015.The Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) has raised concerns that the deforestation in Kelantan, following policies by the state government, will breed corruption and cronyism. C4 executive director Cynthia Gabriel in a statement today called on the Kelantan government to reveal if the multiple approvals awarded to a private company has breached the state's annual logging cap. She said that during the height of the flood crisis in Kelantan last December, Kelantan Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yakob blamed “illegal land clearing and logging” for the devastating floods in the state, and added the government had always capped logging at 5,960 hectares a year, the standard set by the National Land Council. "So it comes as a shock to discover that Kelantan recently approved an additional 4,500 hectares to a private company for logging, while 9,000 acres (3,642 hectares) are to be used for oil palm planting." - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/anti-graft-group-fears-kelantan-deforestation-will-breed-corruption-cronyis#sthash.8nTVEHk6.dpuf
Kelantan deforestation policies need urgent answers – Cynthia Gabriel Published: 18 October 2015 2:00 PM It was only last year that the great floods – dubbed the worst flood in Malaysian history since 1971 – hit Malaysia from December 22, 2014 to January 3. More than 200,000 people were displace while 21 lost their lives. At the height of the crisis, Kelantan Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yakob had then blamed “illegal land clearing and logging” as among the causes for the devastating floods in the state. He claimed the government had always capped logging at 5,960ha a year, the standard set by the National Land Council...... In his statement, Husam claimed that the private companies had obtained several approvals from the state government, raising the question if only selected crony companies are benefitting from the state’s generosity. - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/kelantan-deforestation-policies-need-urgent-answers-cynthia-gabriel#sthash.nlScP8BC.dpuf
Palm oil company caught destroying primary forest in endangered ecosystem Tuesday 13 October 2015 by Mongabay.com - RAN photo deforestation lesuer Non-profit forest group, Rainforest Action Network took pictures of the forest, which it says was cleared by palm oil company PT Tualang Raya in August 2015 in the Leuser Ecosystem in northern Sumatra. Image: Paul Hilton/ RAN http://www.eco-business.com/news/palm-oil-company-caught-destroying-primary-forest-in-endangered-ecosystem/
Palm oil plantations devouring forests in West Africa Global Information Network | September 29, 2015, newly released study has found that trees covering an area twice the size of Maine were cut down worldwide in 2014. But, the biggest threat to forests is looming over West Africa. Governments there have been buckling to pressure to convert “vacant” land and sell off forests for more profitable uses, namely palm oil plantations—a key ingredient in shampoo, toothpaste, ice cream, floor polish and many other foodstuffs and cosmetics. By 2020 global demand for palm oil is expected to double and then triple by 2050 http://www.frostillustrated.com/2015/palm-oil-plantations-devouring-forests-in-west-africa/
CIFOR, USAID to Conduct Research on Zero-Deforestation Policy 18 October, 2015 | 13:38 WIB TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has teamed up with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to conduct a research on the implication of palm oil companies’ commitment to forest and landscape in Indonesia. Steven Lawry, the director of CIFOR’s Forests and Governance Research, said that one of the research topics was related to the evaluation of zero-deforestation policy made by large-scale oil palm companies. The research, Lawry said, was aimed at answering the most urgent questions that affect forest governance in Indonesia. “This includes evaluating the zero-deforestation policy pledged by huge palm oil companies and understanding how they can ensure access for farmers to a supply chain that is free of deforestation,” Lawry said in a press release as quoted by Bisnis.com on Sunday, October 18, 2015. http://en.tempo.co/read/news/2015/10/18/206710609/CIFOR-USAID-to-Conduct-Research-on-Zero-Deforestation-Policy
Fire & haze in Indonesia: Research and resources 9 Oct 2015 ; Forest fires occur in Indonesia every dry season. However, the haze that spreads to other countries is no longer restricted to drought years, and has become increasingly frequent due to ongoing deforestation of peatlands – with profound health and economic impacts across Southeast Asia. There are no easy solutions. The complex factors involved in every fire mean the problem goes far beyond who actually lights the match. That’s why the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has collected its work on fire and haze in Southeast Asia. The new site explains the context, impacts and history of this ongoing crisis – drawing upon cutting edge science and research. See the full collection at cifor.org/fire-and-haze...http://www.cifor.org/corporate-news/fire-haze-in-indonesia-research-and-resources/
Can we trust country-level data from global forest assessments? DG’s Column by Peter Holmgren - Significant differences exist between the FAO's Global Forest Resource Assessment and the Global Forest Watch results.... against what reference should we monitor progress towards targets expressed in these commitments? And do we have the processes in place to deliver accurate findings? In an earlier article I compared attempts to assess changes in the global forest with the story about blind men and the elephant. Differences in methods, definitions, completeness and field verifications inevitably led to entirely incomparable results between Global Forest Watch and the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment. These results are widely communicated and used as a reference in many political and economic analyses. In fact, there are few alternative sources of information on global forest change....To make the data easier to digest, I’ve extracted the 29 countries that had more than 20 Mha forest in 2005, according to FRA 2005. Together, these countries represent about 85% of the world’s forests. Their total forest area change in the period according to FRA is -2.2 Mha/yr, and the “tree cover loss” in GFW 16.4 Mha/yr. See the data table here. Going country by country, it is clear that the discrepancies are caused by quite different situations on the ground. I decided to subjectively divide the 29 countries into five categories in an attempt to highlight why these gaps are so significant. Category 1. Complete contradiction – countries where FRA shows a stable or increasing forest area, whereas GFW reports major tree cover losses. Includes: Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Gabon, India, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden and the United States, representing about half of the world’s forests. – FRA 2015: total gain of 2.4 Mha/yr – GFW: total loss of 9.6 Mha/yr... http://blog.cifor.org/34669/can-we-trust-country-level-data-from-global-forest-assessments?fnl=en
One wicked problem, three major challenges - How to stop deforestation while boosting benefits for smallholders and meeting market demand? by Pablo Pacheco Friday, 25 Sep 2015; To achieve zero deforestation, new ties need to be woven between different levels of government, the private sector and civil society. But in order to act on private-sector commitments, incentive systems and regulations that are reinforcing old patterns first need to be untangled. Beef and soybean production are the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil, and oil palm expansion threatens Indonesia’s forests and peatlands. These two countries have the largest forest areas in the world – and the largest forest losses over the past five years. Powerful industry and multi-stakeholder groups that have an extensive supply base in Brazil and Indonesia signed the New York Declaration on Forests in 2014, pledging to make their supply chains deforestation-free by 2030. The Indonesian government signed the declaration; Brazil did not, although some of its subnational governments did. http://blog.cifor.org/33868/zero-deforestation-special-one-wicked-problem-three-major-challenges
http://www.landscapes.org/cifor-dg-seeing-the-big-picture-on-the-worlds-forests/
Kissing livelihoods and ecosystems goodbye — the very real threat of 'fake forests' in Africa 15 Sep 2015 09:25|Samantha Spooner; Planted forests have been increasing in Africa at a rate of 0.2 million hectare a year--to the benefit largely of the commercial plantations....This culminated in a protest on September 10 in Durban, when over 3,000 people took to the streets as part of an action against “fake forests”. The march concluded with Greenpeace executive director, Kumi Naidoo, handing over a 100,000 signature petition against plantations to the WFC Programme Manager Motsamai Nkosi. Fake forest threat. Since 1990, some 38 million hectares of primary forest have been reported as modified or cleared. This does not necessarily mean that this forest is converted to other land uses. Primary forest, when modified but not cleared, changes into other naturally regenerated (secondary) forest and in some cases planted forest. Planted forest area has increased by over 110 million hectares since 1990, reaching a to al of 290 million hectare in 2015, and accounts for 7% of the world’s forest area. In the case of Africa, the amount of replanted forest increased by 0.2 million hectares per year from 2010, totalling 16 million hectares in 2015. What is of concern to the civil society groups is that even the FAO is not making enough of a differentiation between natural and planted forests and the impact this has on the ecosystems and local communities. For example, the FAO’s definition of ‘“forest” includes commercial plantations of fast growing trees. http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-09-01-the-threat-of-fake-forests-in-africa
Can REDD save Indonesia’s peatlands from burning? By Chris Lang 14 October 2015 http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/10/14/can-redd-save-indonesias-peatlands-from-burning/
Cameroon’s REDD plans critiqued by NGOs ahead of World Bank meeting By Chris Lang 9 October 2015' .... ER-PIN focusses largely on reducing emissions from community agricultural activities. This makes Cameroon’s Emissions Reductions Program (ER-P) far less likely to succeed in reducing deforestation: Poor communities will not simply starve in order to abide by rules agreed between the government and conservation organisations; a programme which does not genuinely incorporate their rights and interests will see high levels of non-compliance (and therefore continuing deforestation and GHG emissions), most likely accompanied by significant levels of serious human rights violations (including violence by ecoguards, for example, something which is already a significant problem in Cameroon)....http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/10/09/cameroons-redd-plans-critiqued-by-ngos-ahead-of-world-bank-meeting/
Editor's note: I have this from a reader based in northern ASEAN "Asia has equally serious annual haze problems in other regions where there are no plantation crops (and no Singapore or KL nearby). Earlier this year Thailand's Chiang Rai airport was closed due to serious smoke haze, and public health warnings were issued around Northern Thailand. I believe some areas were as bad as Singapore but largely unreported in international media. (In early 2015, many) hot spots were located in northern ASEAN.... (getting) much, worse with over 900 satellite marked hotspots and serious disruption of commercial aviation throughout the region... . At the northern limits of oil palm cultivation, normally around 10 degrees N , the sunsets are currently a spectacular red due to smoke haze drifting down from further north. Much of northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia is often shrouded in smoke haze at this time of year, to the extent of sometimes closing airports. This is a normal dry season phenomenon which has nothing to do with oil palms ( although it is man-made, as seen from the many satellite hotspots). This is not to suggest that clearing land for new oil palm cultivation is not an important contributor to smoke haze. But to identify oil palm cultivation as the main cause of smoke haze within Asia is misleading. And as we know, misleading information sometimes obscures an effective response."
Lucrative illegal market for crop land a key cause of fires: Researcher CIFOR Published 28 September 2015 by David Fogarty Assistant Foreign Editor; Dr Purnomo said there is a well- established market for abandoned or conflict land, with land cleared by burning fetching a premium. Using excavators and other heavy equipment to clear the land is costly and time- consuming. "You need to understand that the fire and haze create a lot of money. Quite a lot of money. There is a market for burned land and also it is a way for cheap and quick land preparation for HTI (pulpwood) and oil palm," he told The Straits Times in an interview last week. "Because if you grab the land, the forest - it can be concession land or state land - you can sell it. My research shows that the price is around eight million rupiah (S$800) per hectare. But if you burn that land, the price will increase," he said. "Some people can claim that land and can sell to the network of people. And the buyers can be someone in Jakarta, Bogor, everywhere... It can be 10ha, 20 or even 100ha." Data shows mid-level investors can come from places outside Indonesia, such as Malaysia, he added. According to Dr Purnomo, the price per hectare is US$665 (S$950) after the land is slashed and cut. If the land is burned, the price goes up about US$200 per hectare: a more or less 30 per cent rise. "There is a market for people who mostly prepare for oil palm. You can imagine if they grow the oil palm, after three years, then the price of that land can reach US$3,077 per ha," he said, basing his research on land prices in Sumatra's Riau province. http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/lucrative-illegal-market-for-crop-land-a-key-cause-of-fires-researcher
Norway to complete $1 billion payment to Brazil for protecting Amazon by Green Business | Tue Sep 15, 2015 9:52am EDT Norway will make a final $100-million payment to Brazil this year to complete a $1-billion project that rewards a slowdown in forest loss in the Amazon basin, Norway's Environment Ministry said on Tuesday. Brazil had more than achieved a goal of reducing the rate of deforestation by 75 percent, the condition for the payments under an agreement for 2008-15 meant to protect the forest and slow climate change, it said. The remaining cash would be paid before a U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December, the ministry said. Since 2008, Norway has paid about $900 million to Brazil's Amazon Fund. "Brazil has established what has become a model for other national climate change funds," Norwegian Environment Minister Tine Sundtoft said in a statement...... http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/15/us-climatechange-amazon-norway-idUSKCN0RF1P520150915
Trees covering an area twice the size of Portugal lost in 2014, study finds - Palm oil plantations are devouring forests rapidly worldwide, with west Africa becoming the new hot spot for tree loss, Wednesday 2 September 2015 04.00 BST; Data reveals that tree loss in Brazil and Indonesia is on the rise again – by 16% and 30% respectively since 2013 – despite longer term downward trends.. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/02/trees-covering-an-area-twice-the-size-of-portugal-lost-in-2014-study-finds
CIFOR DG: Seeing the big picture on the world’s forests - September 8, 2015 This post originally appeared on CIFOR’s Director General’s blog. By Peter Holmgren, CIFOR Director General..... This week we have the opportunity to compare different assessment of the world’s forests. FAO presents the results of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA 2015) at the World Forestry Congress in Durban. Global Forest Watch has released new global satellite observations of tree cover reductions in 2014. And Nature has published an article describing over 400,000 field plots from national forest inventories that were used to count all of the world’s trees.
Data streams from dozens of sources help companies measure the risk of deforestation in their supply chains by Stacy Collett By Stacy Collett Computerworld | Sep 2, 2015 3:30 AM PT; Today, about a dozen of the largest commodity traders and buyers in the world use the app. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) uses the tool for its alert and fire monitoring system to track fires and deforestation activity. "Companies who are certified by RSPO had far fewer fire alerts" on their land, says Sanath Kumaran, head of impacts for RSPO in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. "During the last six months, only 10 fire hotspots occurred in RSPO-certified [land] compared to over 2,000 total fire hotspots in all other oil palm [land]."...http://www.computerworld.com/article/2977562/data-analytics/world-resources-institute.html
The Need for Development Is Missing in Defining Sustainable Palm Oil Posted: 09/04/2015 11:51 am EDT Robert Hii Sustainable Business Consultant; .... On the issue of carbon emissions, we in developed nations who make up a mere 20 percent of humans worldwide are responsible for a staggering 70 percent of global emissions . Simply put, if the intention to fight climate change on a global front is honest, developed countries including those in the European Union and North America would be mandating how much their citizens can consume. Doing this however, would likely mean high unemployment rates and poverty, which describes life today for millions of people in developing and underdeveloped countries.....In the case of palm oil, we "speak for the environment" by demanding that palm oil be produced sustainably. The popular definition of sustainable palm oil comes from Greenpeace and enjoys wide support by social media activists. Its definition focuses on protecting HCS or High Carbon Stock forests (meaning climate-change-fighting forests) while maintaining the rights of local peoples to either accept or reject palm oil plantations in their communities. The one factor they've failed to address is local communities that may want to clear HCS forests to grow palm oil. What is the solution there? Do we tell these villagers who own a few acres of primary forests that we will not accept any palm oil they grow as sustainable?... In the case of palm oil, we "speak for the environment" by demanding that palm oil be produced sustainably. The popular definition of sustainable palm oil comes from Greenpeace and enjoys wide support by social media activists. Its definition focuses on protecting HCS or High Carbon Stock forests (meaning climate-change-fighting forests) while maintaining the rights of local peoples to either accept or reject palm oil plantations in their communities. The one factor they've failed to address is local communities that may want to clear HCS forests to grow palm oil. What is the solution there? Do we tell these villagers who own a few acres of primary forests that we will not accept any palm oil they grow as sustainable?....http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-hii/the-need-for-sustainable-palm-oil_b_8085846.html
Forestry for a sustainable future – Making a difference beyond agreements 4 Sep 2015 BY Peter Holmgren; ....The WFC is considered the world’s most significant forestry event, organized by FAO every six years together with a host country. At 89 years old, it is also a long-standing tradition within the international community. The first congress was held in Rome in 1926, and Jakarta hosted the 1978 edition. This year, the WFC will be held in Africa for the first time. ..... http://blog.cifor.org/
Will Indonesia’s new palm oil subsidy undermine no-deforestation push? 1st September 2015 / Philip Jacobson & Sapariah Saturi - Officials are selling nascent CPO Fund on sustainability grounds, but experts fear it will do more harm than good... • Questions remain about whether the CPO Fund will carry environmental safeguards and how its resources will be divided between its two main purposes: helping farmers increase their yields and subsidizing biodiesel. • A senior adviser to the energy minister worries the subsidy, if administered haphazardly, could throw an unfortunate lifeline to the dwindling market for palm oil from deforestation, peatland coversion and land grabbing. • The man who designed the fund says it's all about sustainability because it will reduce dependence on foreign petroleum and shore up flagging palm oil prices. http://news.mongabay.com/2015/
Can REDD+ shift the tide against elite capture of forest benefits? Probably not 25 Aug 2015 BY Esther Mwangi, Isla Duporge and Krister Andersson; REDD+ is the largest coordinated international attempt to reverse the trend of deforestation and forest degradation globally. It remains one of the most dominant items on the agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)....The lack of evidence from projects where participants are rewarded for performance means that there are few empirical lessons to draw from at this stage in REDD+ development. Criticism has been levied at REDD for unintentionally exacerbating existent inequalities; findings show that when tenure rights (de jure and de facto) are legally defined and secure in practice, this will allow for a more equitable benefit sharing. A recent study using two large datasets explored how tenure rights affect benefit sharing. The first dataset was drawn from International Forestry Research and Institutions and comprises 582 forest oduct records across 350 user groups in 14 developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This work shows that where collective rights for harvesting forest products are secure, the benefits of these products are more equally distributed among participating individuals. However, this finding is dependent upon the level of ethnic diversity within the harvesting group. Where there are higher levels of ethnic diversity, lower equity is found in benefit distribution and vice versa. This implies that REDD+ projects in areas with high ethnic diversity need to enforce additional measures to prevent elite capture by privileged ethnic groups. ... http://blog.cifor.org/32241/can-redd-shift-the-tide-against-elite-capture-of-forest-benefits-probably-not#.VfUz7oywqpo
Multiple ways for Congo Basin forests to flourish and deliver: study 24 Aug 2015 BY Harry Pearl; ...Providing forest users with clear incentives to work together could reduce conflict and improve the management of Central Africa’s timber concessions, according to a new study.... http://blog.cifor.org/32387/multiple-ways-for-congo-basin-forests-to-flourish-and-deliver-study#.VfUz5oywqpo
Canopy commerce: forest conservation and poverty alleviation, Published 03 Feb 2012; Innovative approaches for protecting the future of Sierra Leone’s Gola Forest – globally important for its biodiversity and its carbon reserves – are being developed by a collaboration of conservation agencies and University of Cambridge researchers. Our goal is to find a mechanism by which richer countries can help one of the poorest countries in the world protect its nature at the same time as improving the livelihoods of the local communities. Dr Jeremy Lindsell (RSPB) Gola Forest, situated at the westernmost tip of a once extensive swathe of forest that stretched a thousand kilometres from Sierra Leone to Togo, is classified as a biodiversity hotspot of global significance. Its 71,000 hectares are home to over 330 species of bird, including the rare White-necked Picathartes and Rufous Fishing Owl, more than 500 species of butterfly, and a long list of threatened and endangered plants and animals...After a return visit for a follow-up survey, the researchers are now analysing the data, with results expected early in 2012. “All in all, the project will provide the first detailed formal policy evaluation of a major conservation programme,” said Kontoleon. “The results should allow us to derive reliable inferences on the livelihood and behavioural impacts of conservation policies.” - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/canopy-commerce-forest-conservation-and-poverty-alleviation#sthash.0rR7472i.dpuf
24 Nov 2017: The hope of sustainable oil palm for Sri Lanka
Opinion : Sustainable oil palm central to success of Sri Lanka’s plantation industry November 24, 2017 By Professor Asoka Nugawela: The superior potential of oil palm to reinvigorate the Sri Lankan plantation sector is undeniable. Growth in demand for palm oil in the world even surpasses that of tea and rubber. Unlike tea or rubber, palm oil is cheaper to produce and requires far less land, and far less investment. The only other close competitor for vegetable oil in Sri Lanka, coconut has a NSA and a COP of Rs. 40 and Rs.15 per nut respectively. However, coconut produces a yield per hectare (YPH) of only 7,000 nuts, whilst oil palm produces 18,000 kg per hectare annum.... In essence, oil palm is by far Sri Lanka’s most profitable crop. Coconut generates Rs. 175,000 per hectare per annum, while Tea and Rubber produce Rs. 45,000 and Rs. 50,000 respectively whereas oil palm generates Rs. 514,000 per hectare per annum.... Given the stark differences in the profit making potential of these crops, the only remaining question for the Sri Lankan plantation industry is whether we have the ability to establish and manage oil palm in a manner that is sustainable for all stakeholders and for the environment as a whole.... http://www.lankabusinessonline.com/opinion-sustainable-oil-palm-central-to-success-of-sri-lankas-plantation-industry/
15 Oct 2017: Relief to plantations and landowners in Sarawak, but NCR land claimants wanted their land, not compensation; Africa agriculture neglect and land grabs
Read more at http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2017/10/14/land-titles-remain-with-lcda-but-natives-to-receive-compensation/#ASHjMI5KBCC5ULmU.99
Hunger in Africa, Land of Plenty by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Anis Chowdhury SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 14 (IPS) -- African agricultural productivity has not only suffered, but also African agriculture remains less resilient to climate change and extreme weather conditions. Africa is now comparable to Haiti where food agriculture was destroyed by subsidized food imports from the US and Europe, as admitted by President Clinton after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake....Despite its potential, vast tracts of arable land remain idle, due to decades of official neglect of agriculture. More recently, international financial institutions and many donors have been advocating large-scale foreign investment. A World Bank report notes the growing demand for farmland, especially following the 2007-2008 food price hikes. Approximately 56 million hectares worth of large-scale farmland deals were announced in 2009, compared to less than four million hectares yearly before 2008. More than 70% of these deals involved Africa.... In most such deals, local community concerns are often ignored to benefit big investors and their allies in government. For example, Feronia Inc – a company based in Canada and owned by the development finance institutions of various European governments – controls 120,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.... Most such deals involve land already cleared, with varied, but nonetheless considerable socioeconomic and environmental implications. Local agrarian populations have often been dispossessed with little consultation or adequate compensation, as in Tanzania, when Swedish-based Agro EcoEnergy acquired 20,000 hectares for a sugarcane plantation and ethanol production.
Land grabbing by foreign companies for commercial farming in Africa is threatening smallholder agricultural productivity, vital for reducing poverty and hunger on the continent. In the process, they have been marginalizing local communities, particularly ‘indigenous' populations, and compromising food security. http://ipsnews.net/2017/10/hunger-africa-land-plenty
6 Jun 2017: Sarawak activist murder - accused walk free
Bill Kayong murder: Shock and grief at court after three of the accused walk free June 6, 2017, by Cecilia Sman http://www.theborneopost.com/2017/06/06/bill-kayong-murder-shock-and-grief-at-court-after-three-of-the-accused-walk-free/
5 Jan 2017: More pendulum swing back in 2017? Mongabay stories on Brazil Amazon mega-industrial waterways plan and Sabah forest deal. Push for legal logging harvest faces policy leakage.
Editor's note: 2H2016 there was market chatter on more Sabah forest deals, and now a write-up talks about an October 2016 sale of 100k ha there that worries NGOs. Also note the counter-trends: rising deforestation in Brazil and analysis that official data half reports tree losses (not covering land clearance in small pieces below threshold of monitoring by PRODES). For Indonesia, award of first-ever indigenous land rights (13k ha) to 9 communities; with worries of deforestation to come.Sudden sale may doom carbon-rich rainforest in Borneo 2 January 2017 / John C. Cannon - Home to critical watersheds and orangutans, a 101,000-hectare forest located in the Trus Madi Reserve was on track to serve as a blueprint for a conservation economy, before the rights to log it were sold in October. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/sudden-sale-may-doom-carbon-rich-rainforest-in-borneo/
Temer government set to overthrow Brazil’s environmental agenda 21 December 2016 / Sue Branford and Maurício Torres -- Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby (bancada ruralista) is pushing a raft of new laws to set back environmental and indigenous protections by 30 years.... A catastrophic setback to environmental and indigenous protections was narrowly averted last week when quick action from two federal deputies prevented the agricultural lobby from forcing passage of bills to authorize construction of three mega-industrial waterways in the Amazon and elsewhere.... The Congress will likely pick up the bills again after the recess in February. They would authorize building many dozens of dams and industrial waterways in three river basins — PDC 119/2015 on the Tapajós, Teles Pires and Juruena rivers in the Amazon; PDC 120/2015 on the Tocantins and Araguaia rivers, also in the Amazon; and PDC 118/2015 on the Paraguai River.... In 2005, a similar bill was passed, fast tracking the Belo Monte dam and bypassing proper environmental evaluation. Today, Norte Energia, the consortium that built the Amazon mega-dam has been charged with environmental crimes, ethnocide and is under investigation for corruption.... Another bill working its way through the National Congress would completely gut the environmental licensing process for most infrastructure projects, while still another would take away hard won protections guaranteed to Brazil’s indigenous people in the 1988 Constitution.... https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/temer-government-set-to-overthrow-brazils-environmental-agenda/
Illegal logging shows little sign of slowing 30 December 2016 / Morgan Erickson-Davis -- A recent report finds regulation loopholes, an uptick in organized crime, and lax land rights are allowing illegal logging to thrive.“Forestry crime including corporate crimes and illegal logging account for up to $152 billion every year, more than all official development aid combined,” said Erik Solheim, Head of UN Environment, one of the partner organizations supporting the assessment. ....It finds that bilateral trade agreements between producer and consumer countries – e.g., the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan (FLEGT) that requires timber products imported into the EU be legally harvested – have prompted shifts in the timber trade to less restrictive domestic markets. The researchers also found jumps in exports to India and China, which have less stringent regulations and are now the biggest importers of both legal and illegal tropical wood....https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/illegal-logging-shows-little-sign-of-slowing/
Jokowi grants first-ever indigenous land rights (13k ha) to 9 communities, 4 January 2017 / Mongabay.com -- That movement still has a long way to go. The nine “customary forests” — known as hutan adat in Indonesian — acknowledged by President Joko Widodo’s administration last week encompass a total of 13,100 hectares (32,370 acres). But the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) has mapped more than 8.2 million hectares of customary lands it says belongs to the nation’s adat groups, as those who practice ancient modes of knowledge, belief, community and economy are called here. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/jokowi-grants-first-ever-indigenous-land-rights-to-9-communities/
5 Jan 2017: Worries about Myanmar plantations expansion
The human cost of palm oil production in Myanmar - Aggressive expansion of plantations enacted in southern provinces largely ignoring environment and workers' rights. By Taylor Weidman | 04 Jan 2017 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/11/human-cost-palm-oil-production-myanmar-161120085639460.html
21 Dec 2016: $3.3m in new grants to protect Kalimantan forests, 10 countries with the most protected areas (41-54% versus 14.8% for the world)
$3.3m in new grants to protect Kalimantan forests by The Jakarta Post December 14, 2016 -- The Tropical Forest Conservation Act Kalimantan (TFCA Kalimantan), a partnership program among the US government, the Indonesian government, the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia, has approved 14 new grants worth $3.3 million for local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Indonesia. The US Embassy in Jakarta said in a statement on Wednesday that the NGOs would work with forest-dependent communities to conserve tropical forests, protect natural resources and wildlife and improve livelihoods.... http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/12/14/3-3m-in-new-grants-to-protect-kalimantan-forests.html
10 countries with the most protected areas by Melissa Breyer, December 14, 2016 -- As of now, a mere 14.8 percent of the world’s total land enjoys protected status; which is actually a step-up from 1990 when it was just 8.2 percent. Surprisingly, one of the world’s leading oil exporters took first place for percentage of land designated as protected. Countries with the most protected areas
1. Venezuela (53.9 percent of total land area)
2. Slovenia (53.6)
3. Monaco (53.4)
4. Bhutan (47.3)
5. Turks and Caicos Islands (44.4)
6. Liechtenstein (44.3)
7. Brunei Darussalam (44.1)
8. Seychelles (42.1)
9. Hong Kong (41.8)
10. Greenland (41.2)
http://www.treehugger.com/conservation/10-countries-largest-amount-protected-land.html#14821524277441&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=
12 Dec 2016: Deforestation increasing in Brazil, Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection?
Editor's note: Did Brazil's official PRODES data underestimate 900,000 ha of deforestation? Read Conservation Letters, Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection? by Peter Richards et al.With deforestation increasing in Brazil, will Norway ask for its US$1 billion REDD money back? Chris Lang 8 December 2016 -- On 29 November 2016, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released its estimate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon for the period August 2015 to July 2016. It’s not good news. Deforestation increased by 29% compared to the previous year.... The actual area deforested is even largely. A recent study in Conservation Letters found that Brazil was under-reporting deforestation rates in its official figures. The study found that about 9,000 square kilometres of forest was cleared between 2008 and 2012 without the deforestation showing up in the official figures.... Part of the problem is that the Brazilian Amazon by Satellite Project (PRODES) excludes areas of less than 6.25 hectares. Leah VanWey, co-author of the research and senior deputy director at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, said... We showed that while deforestation in large plots of primary rainforests has declined, it has expanded in these areas not tracked by PRODES....In an article in Nature, Jeff Tolleson quotes Paulo Barreto, a senior researcher at the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment, as saying that the size of the forest tracts that are being cleared is increasing. Tolleson notes that this is “a sign that the major players are investing in illegal deforestation”.....
http://www.redd-monitor.org/2016/12/08/with-deforestation-increasing-in-brazil-will-norway-ask-for-its-us1-billion-redd-money-back/
Bad news from Brazil: Deforestation rates are going up and are likely to go even higher Chris Lang in Brazil 24 November 2016 http://www.redd-monitor.org/2016/11/24/bad-news-from-brazil-deforestation-rates-are-going-up-and-are-likely-to-go-even-higher/
Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection? by Peter Richards, Eugenio Arima, Leah VanWey, Avery Cohn, Nishan Bhattarai First published: 7 November 2016 -- Abstract: Rates of deforestation reported by Brazil's official deforestation monitoring system have declined dramatically in the Brazilian Amazon. Much of Brazil's success in its fight against deforestation has been credited to a series of policy changes put into place between 2004 and 2008. In this research, we posit that one of these policies, the decision to use the country's official system for monitoring forest loss in the Amazon as a policing tool, has incentivized landowners to deforest in ways and places that evade Brazil's official monitoring and enforcement system. As a consequence, we a) show or b) provide several pieces of suggestive evidence that recent successes in protecting monitored forests in the Brazilian Amazon may be doing less to protect the region's forests than previously assumed.... PRODES deforestation diverged from other deforestation indicators after 2008. From 2002 to 2008, PRODES estimated that, on average, approximately 19,000 km² of forests were lost annually in the Amazon Biome. Deforestation was highest from 2002 to 2005, when forest loss rates exceeded 20,000 km² per year. Rates then fell over the course of 2006–2008 to approximately 10,000 km². After PPCDAm ii, they fell even further to 5,000 km² per year. ... From 2002 to 2008, the GFC data estimated that, on average, about 20,000 km² of forests were lost per year. Just as with PRODES, GFC recorded the highest forest loss rates during the early part of the decade. Rates then dropped in 2006 and 2007, to approximately 15,000 km² per year. However, loss rates did not drop to the same extent as the PRODES estimates after 2008. From 2009 to 2013, deforestation rates in the GFC data remained around 10,000 km² per year, or roughly double PRODES levels. Significant deforestation spikes occurred in 2010 and 2012, when loss rates increased to approximately 15,000 km² per year..... The FIRMS data follow the GFC data. Fires were prolific during the early 2000s. The number of fire incidents reached a nadir in 2005, but fell to lower levels in 2006. From 2009 to 2013, the number of fires recorded per year fell, on average, fell to less than half of levels observed earlier in the decade. Significant spikes in fire incidents were observed in 2010 and 2012, the same years for which deforestation spikes were observed in the GFC data..... The largest discrepancies between the GFC and PRODES data were found in northern Mato Grosso, where a thriving soybean sector is creating high demand for land; and in northeastern Pará, where investments in cattle processing, soybean production (in the region around Paragominas), and palm oil production are transforming the region into one of the most rapidly growing rural economies in the Amazon (Figure 2). We argue that these areas are those where landowners would have both the greatest incentives to avoid detection, and be more likely to have knowledge on how to avoid the monitoring system. .... The greatest returns to opening new land may be in these higher valued regions in north-central Mato Grosso and in northeastern Pará. Landowners in these areas, presumably, would thus have had both the greatest incentive to continue opening land and more awareness with respect to which lands could be opened without triggering a deforestation observation. Smallholder farmers and ranchers, in contrast to their more capitalized counterparts, may not have had access to the same technical knowledge. They also would have had less incentive to avoid deforestation detection. Small farming areas are less likely to be subject to environmental enforcement, despite higher rates of forest loss (Godar et al. 2014; Schneider & Peres 2015; Richards & VanWey 2016).....
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12310/full
12 August 2016: Indonesia news links
Elephant population in Sumatra shrinks drastically The Jakarta Post Jakarta | Fri, August 12 2016 http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/08/12/elephant-population-in-sumatra-shrinks-drastically.htmlOnly 5 Sumatran Tigers Left in Bengkulu's Mukomuko By : Usmin & Ratri M. Siniwi | on 2:03 PM August 05, 2016 -- According to Fernandi, one of the major causes is due to the major loss of habitat, leaving the tigers few places to hunt for food and driving them to hunt outside of conservation areas. Sumatran tiger habitat has been shrinking after decades of the palm oil plantation boom — which led to a land clearances — across Sumatra. http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/news/only-5-sumatran-tigers-left-in-bengkulus-mukomuko/
Hundreds leave home in palm oil conflict by Severianus Endi The Jakarta Post Pontianak | Tue, August 2 2016 -- Hundreds of residents from several hamlets in West Kalimantan have fled their homes to avoid arrest over their alleged involvement in a conflict with an oil palm company operating plantations in the area. The residents from the area around the village of Olak-Olak in Kubu district, Kubu Raya regency, have reportedly escaped to regions in and around Pontianak City. In search of support, around 50 of them approached the West Kalimantan chapter of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in Pontianak on Monday to report the case. Some women were crying while carrying their children, who have not attended school for nearly a week. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/08/02/hundreds-leave-home-palm-oil-conflict.html
30 July 2016: High Tropical Deforestation from Oil Palm Production reported
Peer-Reviewed Study Finds High Tropical Deforestation from Oil Palm Production 28 Jul 2016 --- A new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found high levels of oil palm-driven deforestation over a 25-year period in Southeast Asia and South America, but relatively low levels in Mesoamerica (Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean) and Africa. Three of the countries studied – Ecuador, Peru and Indonesia – had the greatest levels of observed deforestation within sampled sites, with more than half of the oil palm grown on land deforested during the study period. The study by researchers at Duke University and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is the first to examine past deforestation and potential future deforestation and biodiversity impacts associated with oil palm plantations in 20 countries across the world. The study used satellite imagery to evaluate where oil palm plantations replaced forests from 1989 to 2013........The study’s key findings included the highest conversion rates of tropical forests to oil palm plantations in sampled areas in the following countries: Ecuador (60.8 percent), Indonesia (53.8 percent), Peru (53.1 percent), Malaysia (39.6 percent) and Brazil (39.4 percent). http://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/Peer-Reviewed-Study-Finds-High-Tropical-Deforestation-from-Oil-Palm-Production.html?frompage=index&tracking=Headlines
Forests, species on four continents threatened by palm oil expansion July 27, 2016 by Varsha Vijay -- As palm oil production expands from Southeast Asia into tropical regions of the Americas and Africa, vulnerable forests and species on four continents face increased risk of loss, a new Duke University-led study finds.
Using 25 years of high-resolution Google Earth and Landsat satellite imagery, Vijay and her team tracked the extent of this deforestation in four regions: Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and Mesoamerica, which includes Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.... "Many past studies have focused solely on Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 80 percent of the world's palm oil. By evaluating deforestation caused by palm oil production in 20 countries across four regions, our study demonstrates that the biodiversity impacts of this expansion are very different from country to country and region to region," said Clinton Jenkins of the Institute for Ecological Research in Brazil..... "The palm oil industry has a legacy of deforestation, and today consumer pressure is pushing companies toward deforestation-free sources of palm oil," noted Sharon Smith of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who co-authored the study with Vijay, Pimm and Jenkins. "This research helps us understand where to focus on using government regulation and voluntary market interventions to shape oil palm plantation expansion in ways that protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems and prevent deforestation," Smith said.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-forests-species-continents-threatened-palm.html#jCp
27 July 2016: Austria study of satellite maps suggest palm oil could double without forest damage
Editor's note: Expertise in mapping studies seems focussed in Europe and North America. However, data has to be carefully verified.Land Used for Palm Oil Could Double Without Damaging Forests: Researchers By : Chris Arsenault | July 27, 2016 -- Researchers from the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) studied satellite maps from Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America to determine where the crop used to make vegetable oils and other consumer products could be expanded sustainably. The findings follow criticism from campaign groups who say the expansion of palm oil plantations has destroyed rainforests and displaced local people from their ancestral lands. An area larger than Uruguay, more than 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) of land, is covered by palm oil plantations, up from six million hectares in 1990, IIASA said. Expansion of the crop, which accounts for about 30 percent of all vegetable oil used worldwide, has been concentrated in biodiversity-rich tropical forests in Malaysia and Indonesia.....Satellite data shows an area of up about 19 million hectares onto which the industry could grow without damaging forests that are particularly valuable for biodiversity or storing carbon as means of combating climate change, IIASA said. Globally, an estimated three million small farmers work in the palm oil business and this could rise above seven million if the industry is expanded sustainably, IIASA said. ...Reuters.. http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/international/land-used-palm-oil-double-without-damaging-forests-researchers/
25 July 2016: Situating smallholders at the fore - need to transfer the rewards upstream in the value chains, the limited effectiveness of communal forestry, a holistic reappraisal of what is deemed sustainable
Situating smallholders at the fore - Empowering smallholders is essential for economic development – and to protect forests Deanna Ramsay 19 Jul 2016 -- But the fact is that now companies are making commitments to source supply that is clean, that is deforestation free. And I think that’s one of the main issues that they’re struggling with is how to build these clean sources of supply that involve smallholders. But that is going to imply for them to build some kind of agreements with these groups of smallholders that are supplying these companies. So that’s the big issue. Because the majority of smallholders are independent smallholders, like in the oil palm sector in Indonesia.....I think what is needed is business models that are able to share those costs – share the cost, share the risks and share the benefits. Because in most of the cases you have business models that then transfer the costs to the producers that are upstream in the supply chains. So they are the ones who pay for the cost. In an ideal situation, the companies also should be able – if they are targeting deforestation free in markets – they should be able if there is some reward to transfer the rewards upstream in the value chains.... So the smallholders can also benefit or receive some compensation on the costs that they are investing in improving the production systems. But that is still an open question, and we don’t know if that’s going to work in that way.... http://blog.cifor.org/42305/situating-smallholders-at-the-fore?fnl=en
Community forestry in Central Africa: Has it been a success? New book draws lessons for participatory resource management in the Congo Basin 21 Jul 2016 -- ).....There are several factors that explain the limited effectiveness of communal forestry: (i) reforms to the forestry sector in Central Africa in the mid-1990s favored industrial concessions and community forests, (ii) the development of communal forests was never a fundamental challenge or stake for Central African states or for technical and financial partners, and, (iii) in countries like Cameroon where decisive experiments have been carried out, the relatively high cost of the forest acquisition process has prevented many decentralized territorial units from adopting this management system independently......... http://blog.cifor.org/42380/community-forestry-in-central-africa-has-it-been-a-success?fnl=en
Wood fuel not as bad for the environment as previously thought Jack Hewson 18 Jul 2016 -- .....“We’re saying that the studies that have been published so far have not been adequate to inform policy,” she said. “You find that most of the papers are either looking at the environmental factors and making broad conclusions from that, or the health factors where wood fuel is causing lots of respiratory disorders, and then there are those who are focusing on the economic aspects. But you don’t have studies that try to look at all of these issues together and, most importantly, at the trade-offs among them.”...In partnership with the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), CIFOR has commissioned a number of systematic reviews as part of its Evidence-Based Forestry Initiative, including Cerutti and Sola’s research on wood fuel....“In this regard, we are now seeing a holistic reappraisal of what is deemed sustainable,” said Cerutti http://blog.cifor.org/42288/wood-fuel-not-as-bad-for-the-environment-as-previously-thought?fnl=en
7 July 2016: Olam Palm Gabon and Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment recommend 108-118 tC/ha threshold for development with 1:2.6 set-aside to development area ratio, Scientific American article on HCV, 97% of 1.2 billion tons CO2E due Indonesia Haze Crisis 2015
Editor's note: Readers reckon that set-aside areas may suit for low impact logging operations with FSC, so that oil palm and timber can co-exist with the needed certifications / sustainability schemes on both commodities with business synergy. The logging and oil palm link is well established especially for large concessionaires - the Malaysia FELDA large-scale developments in Pahang and Johore also featured revenues from timber, of which MARA, overseas timber business and local logging contractors/sub-contractors would have been part of the timber business.CONSERVATION KEY TO CURBING EMISSIONS FROM OIL PALM AGRICULTURE IN AFRICA June 28, 2016 Featuring John Randolph Poulsen -- DURHAM, N.C. -- As oil palm production expands from Southeast Asia into Central Africa, a new Duke University-led study warns that converting Africa’s tropical forests into monoculture palm plantations will cause a significant spike in climate-warming carbon emissions. The authors urge regional governments to enact mandatory policies regulating which forests can be cleared and how much remaining forest must be set aside for conservation. “Our case study, which focuses on oil palm farming in the nation of Gabon, finds that converting even previously logged forest into oil palm plantations will lead to high carbon emissions,” said John R. Poulsen, assistant professor of tropical ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Clearing just 11,500 hectares of forest -- or roughly 28,400 acres -- would release about 1.5 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere,” Poulsen said. “That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of some small developing countries.” However, the new study finds that these emissions could be completely offset over 25 years if development were centered on forests that store less carbon and if a portion of every development had conservation set-asides. Poulsen and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed study June 24 in the journal Conservation Letters....They used field measurements and LiDAR satellite data to calculate forest carbon stocks -- the amount of carbon stored in trees -- and potential carbon emissions at the site of a 50,000-hectare palm oil plantation in Gabon. The plantation is being developed jointly by the Gabonese government and the agribusiness firm Olam International Ltd., to test if low-emissions palm oil development is feasible in the equatorial country on the Atlantic Ocean..... “First, we recommend establishing a nationwide carbon threshold of 108 to 118 metric tons per hectare. Only forests that store less than this density of carbon will be considered suitable for development,” Poulsen said. “Second, palm oil companies will also have to set aside enough land within a plantation -- roughly one acre for every 2.6 acres developed -- to offset emissions. “The precise set-aside ratio may vary by site, but 2.6 to 1 is generally the point at which carbon storage in the conserved forest will offset carbon loss in the rest of the plantation and achieve net-zero emissions over time,” Poulsen explained.... “Although our study considers only forest carbon, and not biodiversity or other ecosystem services, we estimate there is enough low-carbon forest in Gabon to achieve net-zero emissions while still permitting the nation to meet its palm oil production goals,” he said. Allowing industry to voluntarily adhere to these new guidelines or opt out of them is not an option, he stressed. “To succeed, this approach needs to be mandatory and implemented by the government with careful land-use planning and strict enforcement.” Support for this research came from Olam Palm Gabon and Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment....
Conservation to Compensate Carbon Emission Essential in Gabon June 30, 2016 http://www.azocleantech.com/news.aspx?newsID=23460
EU TIMBER REGULATION: As a major global supplier of timber products from various origins, Olam International Ltd is committed to sustainable forest management practices and third party verification of all wood sourced from outside our operations. http://olamgroup.com/products-services/industrial-raw-materials/wood/eu-timber-regulation/, http://olamgroup.com/products-services/industrial-raw-materials/wood/
Olam To Divest Timber Assets In Gabon For US$18.0 Million, Singapore, January 24, 2014 -- entered into an agreement with a consortium of Chinese investors to sell part of its forestry and saw milling assets in Gabon for a gross consideration of US$18.0 million.... The divestment, which is a part of Olam’s revised strategy to restructure the Wood Products portfolio, includes the sale of two saw mills in the Makokou region of Gabon, 2.5 hectares of land in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Nkok, Gabon and associated forestry concessions. - See more at: http://olamgroup.com/news/olam-to-divest-timber-assets-in-gabon-for-us18-0-million/#sthash.LkMYLaI4.dpuf (note: search of company website does not indicate any further divestment of Gabon timber business)
Can Oil Palm Plantations and Orangutans Coexist? Companies are partnering with environmental groups to aid the red apes, but results are elusive By Melati Kaye on June 30, 2016 -- This lush portion of the plantation should be ideal habitat for orangutans. I have not spotted any, but according to Hendriyanto, my guide from the plantation’s conservation team, an estimated 14 of the red apes do indeed live here. .... Surveyors came up with that number by counting orangutan nests in this 657-hectare so-called "High Conservation Value" (HCV) enclave within the 18,000-hectare plantation. The population density survey and the HCV set-aside are required of oil palm companies like Hendriyanto's employer, Ketapang-based PT Kayung Agro Lestari (PT-KAL), for eco-compliance certification by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a consortium that has been setting the industry's sustainability standards since 2004..... But one step outside this refuge lies a very different scene: blistering tropical heat and regimented rows of spiky oil palm trees spread over miles of ochre mud that turns to deep, rutted puddles after a drizzle. Borneo's forest-to-plantation ratio has plummeted in recent decades. Satellite data show that the island's forest cover dwindled from 76 percent to a mere 28 percent between 1973 and 2010. Deforestation has only accelerated since then, especially in 2015, when fires smoldered across 1.3 million hectares of peatland for months on end.... From an ape's point of view, the plantation vista presents an uninhabitable hellscape. From an industry standpoint, it is a prospect of burgeoning revenue. Half of the vegetable oil consumed around the world comes from oil palms. According to data from USDA and the World Bank, the global market for palm oil and palm kernels is around $47 billion..... To forestall such a public relations disaster, industry-leading oil palm companies have tried a series of conservation initiatives to show that orangutans and plantations can co-exist--hence the RSPO, the HCV enclaves and the relocation of orphaned apes to rehabilitation centers for later reintroduction back to the forest. The latest scheme is to interlink isolated HCV patches with migration "corridors" so that orangutans and other forest-dwelling creatures can disperse in accordance with their natural behaviors.... To implement such measures (and garner some third-party credibility), many companies have partnered with environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But results have so far been elusive. Part of the problem is a general lack of data. But companies can also ignore or skimp on the NGO recommendations. Compounding matters, the RSPO and its ilk are agonizingly slow at investigating complaints, and their findings are no more than advisory, with no force of law. Moreover, Indonesian licensing laws can undermine conservation by reallocating forest leases of companies that do not exploit their allotted tracts fully or quickly enough. And with RSPO covering barely a fifth of the world’s palm oil operators, there is always a queue of wildcat planters ready to take up rescinded leases.... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-oil-palm-plantations-and-orangutans-coexist/
On land and in space, understanding the impacts of fires. To measure greenhouse gas emissions from the fires in maritime Southeast Asia in 2015, a variety of methods and expertise coalesced DEANNA RAMSAY 28 Jun 2016 -- The study’s authors determined that the carbon emissions released by the fires in September and October 2015 of 11.3 million tons per day were higher than those of the entire European Union, which daily released 8.9 million tons over the same period.....The widespread landscape fires in parts of Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua last year generated noxious smoke and haze affecting millions – and international attention – and the team on the ground was the very first to assess the emissions from actively burning peatland..... “There have been some isolated studies before where people artificially set fires in the lab to try to understand the chemical characteristics of peatland fire smoke in Indonesia. But no one had done this on natural fires, and especially not on the kind of extreme fires seen in 2015. We are the first people to do that,” said King’s College London professor Martin J. Wooster, one of the study’s lead authors. The team used their measurements of ground-level smoke from burning peat to derive the emission factors, i.e. to understand how much carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane is released for a particular amount of tropical peat burned. Satellites provided data on the heat output being radiated by the fires, as well as information on the amount of carbon monoxide present in the surrounding atmosphere. From this, the total carbon emissions were determined by combining the satellite measurements and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) modeling framework with the newly determined emission factors from fires around Palangka Raya – one of the hardest hit sites. The researchers concluded that 884 million tons of carbon dioxide was released in the region last year – 97% originating from burning in Indonesia. The corresponding carbon emissions were 289 million tons, and associated carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions 1.2 billion tons .....“This sort of modeling has only been possible quite recently. When we saw the fires start in the region – knowing that it was an El Niño year – we were able to quickly start analyzing the situation, and we started contacting others who could contribute,” said study lead author Vincent Huijnen of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who works on the CAMS framework. Wooster concurred about the clarity of their calculations because of fresh technologies....He said, “We found that this was the largest single fire event in terms of carbon emissions from Indonesia since 1997. We can much more confidently make our calculations because of the new satellite, modeling and field instrument technology that is now available compared to 20 years ago.”.... For David Gaveau, also a CIFOR scientist and study co-author, the fires in 2015 were different because they were primarily on drained, idle peatland. “In 1997 the drought lasted longer, the fires were more severe and a lot more forest burned. In 2015, fires mostly burned on degraded peatland covered with shrubs and wood debris,” he said.... “The last year has seen the largest single year atmospheric carbon dioxide increase since records began in the 1950s, and we calculated that the fires burning in Indonesia made up a significant component of the increase over what is ‘normal’ in non-El Niño years,” Wooster said..... For Murdiyarso, good policy is key – and providing numbers related to the 2015 fires can help. With the Indonesian government’s Peatland Restoration Agency established following the fires last year, there is movement to avert future fires....... http://blog.cifor.org/42098/on-land-and-in-space-understanding-the-impacts-of-fires?fnl=en
Vast Peat Fires Threaten Health and Boost Global Warming. Largest blazes on earth smolder for months in Canada and Indonesia By XiaoZhi Lim on July 2, 2016 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vast-peat-fires-threaten-health-and-boost-global-warming/
THESE FIRES ARE HUGE, HIDDEN AND HARMFUL. WHAT CAN WE DO? Smoldering peat gives off massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, but the search for solutions is on. By XiaoZhi Lim, freelance science reporter based in Singapore. June 28, 2016 -- June 28, 2016 — As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada. Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. ey produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities. Although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth.”And although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth,” says Guillermo Rein, a peat fire researcher at Imperial College in the United Kingdom....The boreal forests are thought to contain some 30 times more peat than Indonesia. Because they can smolder for weeks and months, sometimes even staying active underground throughout cold northern winters, peat fires emit on average the equivalent of 15 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to Rein — carbon that took thousands of years to sequester.... Rein recently received a five-year, €2 million grant from the European Research Council to develop a peat fire early warning system. He is trying to characterize the heat fingerprints of peat fires by replicating small peat fires in the laboratory and using infrared cameras to record the heat emitted. He hopes to use his findings to calibrate satellites specifically for peat fires, just as some motion sensors are calibrated to detect infrared radiation unique to humans.....Rein is also collecting the gases produced from his experiments and analyzing them for patterns that could become telltale warning signs of a growing peat fire. For example, the ratios of carbon monoxide or volatile organic compounds to carbon dioxide can be used to tell the difference between emissions from peat fires and those from combustion engines or power plants. These patterns could then be applied to handheld gas sensors or gas analyzers placed in drones, airplanes or buildings in nearby villages and cities to help detect peat fires....Once found, one problem to putting out peat fires is that peat soil repels water when it gets very dry, says Watts.... Adding a fire retardant to the water might help make water more effective at this. One example is Peat FireX, a plant-based powder developed in 2012 by Steve Sinunu, CEO of Texas-based EnvironX Solutions. When dissolved in water, it disrupts the strong hydrogen bonds between water molecules, making it easier for the water to penetrate soil. As the solution moves into the soil, it coats the peat to protect it from fire....Earlier this year, the Indonesian government adopted Peat FireX as a weapon against peat fires, according to Steve Sinunu and an independent company in Singapore who helped connect EnvironX with the Indonesian government....
http://ensia.com/features/these-fires-are-huge-hidden-and-harmful-what-can-we-do/
Ravaged woodlands - Stricken trees provide clues about how America will adapt to global warming—but little hope that it can be averted Jul 9th 2016 -- The growth of wildfires is a worldwide problem, with even bigger burns elsewhere. Siberia, Tasmania, Canada and Indonesia have seen record-breaking fires in recent years. According to Greenpeace, fire consumed over 7m acres of Russian forest in the year to May 23rd (the Kremlin offers much lower figures). The area of Canadian forest burning each year has roughly doubled since the 1970s; a wildfire near Fort McMurray, in Alberta, which started in May, has turned 1.5m acres of forest and 2,400 buildings to ash. Now heading north through Saskatchewan, the fire is reckoned to be Canada’s costliest natural disaster.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21701751-stricken-trees-provide-clues-about-how-america-will-adapt-global-warmingbut-little-hope?
A new generation of forest managers in the Democratic Republic of Congo - A university on the banks of the Congo River is producing the next generation of experts on sustainable forestry. Fai Collins 29 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41698/a-new-generation-of-forest-managers-in-the-democratic-republic-of-congo?fnl=en
Reserves need tweaks to withstand Amazon fire threat - Despite their rapid proliferation, 'Sustainable Use Reserves' in the Amazon aren't living up to their hype- especially when it comes to reducing fire. Samuel McGlennon 30 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41726/reserves-need-tweaks-to-withstand-amazon-fire-threat?fnl=en
Quantifying the drivers of South American deforestation - New research uses spatially and temporally explicit data to better understand deforestation trends in South America. Samuel McGlennon 27 May 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41685/quantifying-the-drivers-of-south-american-deforestation?fnl=en
What’s Driving Deforestation Now? Doug Boucher, scientific adviser, Climate and Energy | April 14, 2016 http://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/whats-driving-deforestation-now
The challenges of conserving tropical forests - From industrial concessions to community forests, new research looks at what constitutes responsible forest management TARA LOHAN 29 Apr 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41259/the-challenges-of-conserving-tropical-forests?fnl=en
Switching swidden to agroforestry – a small intervention with big potential in West Java By converting to agroforestry, farmers in Indonesia could reap major environmental, economic and social benefits. KATE EVANS 26 Apr 2016 http://blog.cifor.org/41242/switching-swidden-to-agroforestry-a-small-intervention-with-big-potential-in-west-java?fnl=en
12 December 2015: High Carbon Stock study by Sustainable Palm Oil Manifesto - companies and Sabah to test it out; CIFOR REDD+ links and Indonesia REDD handover to FORDA
Sabah To Test High Carbon Stock For Sustainable Oil Palm December 11, 2015 KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 11 (Bernama) -- The Sabah Forestry Department has committed to test the High Carbon Stock plus (HCS+) methodology for sustainable oil palm development in six months following the release of the HCS+ study's findings. "We are very keen to pursue the offer from the Sabah Forestry Department which indicated that this would be very helpful for them.
"This shows that the state is very committed towards sustainable palm oil and a sustainable economy," said Forum for the Future founder Director Jonathan Porritt....
http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/state_news/news.php?id=1198759&cat=sbe
CIFOR links:
- REDD+ offers powerful lessons for green growth - Ten years of experience from REDD+ can give low-emission development strategies a head start. by Christopher Martius 9 Dec 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/38617/redd-offers-powerful-lessons-for-green-growth?fnl=en
- US, RI launch new partnership to manage, protect forests thejakartapost.com, Jakarta | National | Mon, November 16 2015 - See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/11/16/us-ri-launch-new-partnership-manage-protect-forests.html#sthash.T5KnDEzS.dpuf
- COP21 could revitalize REDD+ … or not. A strong agreement in Paris could inject new energy into the original idea for reducing carbon emissions from forestry and land use. By Samuel McGlennon 17 Nov 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/37711/cop21-could-revitalize-redd-or-not?fnl=en
- Migration: What happens to the people (and forests) left behind? New patterns in migration are changing what it means to be ‘rural’ or ‘urban’—and reshaping the future of forests and farms. Harry Pearl by 23 Nov 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/37880/migration-what-happens-to-the-people-and-forests-left-behind?fnl=en
- CIFOR’s REDD+ research http://www.landscapes.org/cifors-redd-research/
- Thinking restoration? Think big and think inclusive. Countries may need to change their approach if they are to meet commitments to restore millions of hectares of degraded land. by Michael Casey 5 Nov 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/37201/thinking-restoration-think-big-and-think-inclusive?fnl=en
A landscape picture from Cameroon - Cameroon’s ‘Technical Operation Units’ may provide a foundation for adopting a landscape approach to development. By John Cannon 2 Nov 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/36186/a-landscape-picture-from-cameroon?fnl=en
Owning the Amazon: Individual titles might not be the answer - Accepted notions about the power of formal, individual property rights may have been turned on their head. By Tara Lohan 3 Nov 2015 http://blog.cifor.org/36425/owning-the-amazon-individual-titles-might-not-be-the-answer?fnl=en - REDD-I partnership celebrates five years with handover to FORDA 26 Oct 2015 http://www.cifor.org/corporate-news/redd-i-partnership-celebrates-five-years-with-handover-to-forda/
New NASA Probe Will Study Earth’s Forests in 3-D, September 8, 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-nasa-probe-will-study-earth-s-forests-in-3-d/#.VzR_xIR97am... By revealing the 3-D architecture of forests in unprecedented detail, GEDI will provide crucial information about the impact that trees have on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Although it is well-established that trees absorb carbon and store it long-term, scientists have not quantified exactly how much carbon forests contain. As a result, it’s not possible to determine how much carbon would be released if a forest were destroyed, nor how well emissions could be countered by planting new trees.... "One of the most poorly quantified components of the carbon cycle is the net balance between forest disturbance and regrowth,” said Ralph Dubayah, the GEDI principal investigator at the University of Maryland. “GEDI will help scientists fill in this missing piece by revealing the vertical structure of the forest, which is information we really can’t get with sufficient accuracy any other way.”.. GEDI is scheduled to be completed in 2018. NASA’s Earth Venture Instrument program is part of the Earth System Science Pathfinder program, managed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The GEDI team includes co-investigators from Goddard; Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the U.S. Forest Service, Ogden, Utah; and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
30 November 2015: Malaysia Pahang bauxite mining compensation plan for residents, DOE found high mercury levels in rivers
RM500-1,000 Monthly Compensation To Be Paid To Pahang Residents Affected By Bauxite Mining 30 November 2015 Chairman of the Bukit Goh Bauxite Coordination Committee, Datuk Abd Wahid Abd Manap had announced yesterday that the compensation will be paid out to individuals identified by the committee from funds provided by the bauxite contractors. "For now, we can offer RM1,000 compensation to each business operator and RM500 per month to each resident whose livelihood have been badly affected by the bauxite mining scourge.... According to media reports, bauxite mining activities have released heavy metal particles into Kuantan’s air and water supply, leading to an outbreak of respiratory problems and skin disease with the heavy particles even contaminating water treatment plants.
http://malaysiandigest.com/frontpage/29-4-tile/581704-rm500-1-000-monthly-compensation-to-be-paid-to-pahang-residents-affected-by-bauxite-mining.html
23 November 2015: Malaysia - Pahang DOE finds high mercury levels in rivers near bauxite mining
DOE finds high mercury levels in rivers near bauxite mining sites, says Kuantan MP BY RAM ANAND Published: 23 November 2015
http://www.
2 November 2015: Malaysia prepares for monsoon for flood prone Kelantan, Pahang and Terengganu; Indonesia REDD-I partnership celebrates five years with handover to FORDA
All prepared for the worst by nicholas cheng, neville spykerman, andsyed azhar November 2, 2015; KUALA LUMPUR: The monsoon season is coming and the Fire and Rescue Department says it is prepared for things to go as bad as the east coast flood crisis last year. Over the year, officers in the flood prone states of Kelantan, Pahang and Terengganu have been conducting water training in rivers to test their readiness to evacuate scores of people should water levels rise. Fire and Rescue Department assistant director-general (Operations Division) Datuk Soiman Jahid said assets had been placed in the states in preparation for the rainy season. “We are preparing for it to be as bad as last year. We have conducted water training for officers to be well versed in navigating floods and we have made sure our fire engines and boats are all in good working order in those states. http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2015/11/02/All-prepared-for-the-worst-Fire-and-Rescue-Dept-officers-undergo-water-training-as-part-of-monsoon-r/
REDD-I partnership celebrates five years with handover to FORDA 26 Oct 2015; CIFOR’s Director of Communications and External Relations, John Colmey, officially transferred the management of REDD-Indonesia.org to FORDA Director General, Henry Bastaman, during the International Conference of Indonesia Forestry Researchers (INAFOR) at the IPB Convention Center, Bogor.... REDD-Indonesia.org (REDD-I), jointly developed by CIFOR and FORDA, has become Indonesia’s leading website for reliable information on forests, climate change and REDD+ in Indonesia. It was launched in 2011 after CIFOR and FORDA identified an information gap on climate change problems and solutions in the country. Now, the website attracts 6,000 visits per month and has 9,300 subscribers to its monthly news updates. http://www.cifor.org/corporate-news/redd-i-partnership-celebrates-five-years-with-handover-to-forda/
20 October 2015: NGO C4 raises concerns about Kelantan deforestation above cap of 5,960 hectares per year after 2014 deadly floods displaced more than 200,000 people and 21 lost their lives
Anti-graft group fears Kelantan deforestation will breed corruption, cronyism Published: 18 October 2015 1:50 PM The Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism is concerned over Kelantan's logging policies after the state approved additional land for logging. – Photo courtesy of Flickr, October 18, 2015.The Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) has raised concerns that the deforestation in Kelantan, following policies by the state government, will breed corruption and cronyism. C4 executive director Cynthia Gabriel in a statement today called on the Kelantan government to reveal if the multiple approvals awarded to a private company has breached the state's annual logging cap. She said that during the height of the flood crisis in Kelantan last December, Kelantan Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yakob blamed “illegal land clearing and logging” for the devastating floods in the state, and added the government had always capped logging at 5,960 hectares a year, the standard set by the National Land Council. "So it comes as a shock to discover that Kelantan recently approved an additional 4,500 hectares to a private company for logging, while 9,000 acres (3,642 hectares) are to be used for oil palm planting." - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/anti-graft-group-fears-kelantan-deforestation-will-breed-corruption-cronyis#sthash.8nTVEHk6.dpuf
Kelantan deforestation policies need urgent answers – Cynthia Gabriel Published: 18 October 2015 2:00 PM It was only last year that the great floods – dubbed the worst flood in Malaysian history since 1971 – hit Malaysia from December 22, 2014 to January 3. More than 200,000 people were displace while 21 lost their lives. At the height of the crisis, Kelantan Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yakob had then blamed “illegal land clearing and logging” as among the causes for the devastating floods in the state. He claimed the government had always capped logging at 5,960ha a year, the standard set by the National Land Council...... In his statement, Husam claimed that the private companies had obtained several approvals from the state government, raising the question if only selected crony companies are benefitting from the state’s generosity. - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/kelantan-deforestation-policies-need-urgent-answers-cynthia-gabriel#sthash.nlScP8BC.dpuf
19 October 2015: CIFOR - Can we trust country-level data from global forest assessments? CIFOR, USAID to Conduct Research on Zero-Deforestation Policy
Palm oil company caught destroying primary forest in endangered ecosystem Tuesday 13 October 2015 by Mongabay.com - RAN photo deforestation lesuer Non-profit forest group, Rainforest Action Network took pictures of the forest, which it says was cleared by palm oil company PT Tualang Raya in August 2015 in the Leuser Ecosystem in northern Sumatra. Image: Paul Hilton/ RAN http://www.eco-business.com/news/palm-oil-company-caught-destroying-primary-forest-in-endangered-ecosystem/
Palm oil plantations devouring forests in West Africa Global Information Network | September 29, 2015, newly released study has found that trees covering an area twice the size of Maine were cut down worldwide in 2014. But, the biggest threat to forests is looming over West Africa. Governments there have been buckling to pressure to convert “vacant” land and sell off forests for more profitable uses, namely palm oil plantations—a key ingredient in shampoo, toothpaste, ice cream, floor polish and many other foodstuffs and cosmetics. By 2020 global demand for palm oil is expected to double and then triple by 2050 http://www.frostillustrated.com/2015/palm-oil-plantations-devouring-forests-in-west-africa/
CIFOR, USAID to Conduct Research on Zero-Deforestation Policy 18 October, 2015 | 13:38 WIB TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has teamed up with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to conduct a research on the implication of palm oil companies’ commitment to forest and landscape in Indonesia. Steven Lawry, the director of CIFOR’s Forests and Governance Research, said that one of the research topics was related to the evaluation of zero-deforestation policy made by large-scale oil palm companies. The research, Lawry said, was aimed at answering the most urgent questions that affect forest governance in Indonesia. “This includes evaluating the zero-deforestation policy pledged by huge palm oil companies and understanding how they can ensure access for farmers to a supply chain that is free of deforestation,” Lawry said in a press release as quoted by Bisnis.com on Sunday, October 18, 2015. http://en.tempo.co/read/news/2015/10/18/206710609/CIFOR-USAID-to-Conduct-Research-on-Zero-Deforestation-Policy
Fire & haze in Indonesia: Research and resources 9 Oct 2015 ; Forest fires occur in Indonesia every dry season. However, the haze that spreads to other countries is no longer restricted to drought years, and has become increasingly frequent due to ongoing deforestation of peatlands – with profound health and economic impacts across Southeast Asia. There are no easy solutions. The complex factors involved in every fire mean the problem goes far beyond who actually lights the match. That’s why the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has collected its work on fire and haze in Southeast Asia. The new site explains the context, impacts and history of this ongoing crisis – drawing upon cutting edge science and research. See the full collection at cifor.org/fire-and-haze...http://www.cifor.org/corporate-news/fire-haze-in-indonesia-research-and-resources/
Can we trust country-level data from global forest assessments? DG’s Column by Peter Holmgren - Significant differences exist between the FAO's Global Forest Resource Assessment and the Global Forest Watch results.... against what reference should we monitor progress towards targets expressed in these commitments? And do we have the processes in place to deliver accurate findings? In an earlier article I compared attempts to assess changes in the global forest with the story about blind men and the elephant. Differences in methods, definitions, completeness and field verifications inevitably led to entirely incomparable results between Global Forest Watch and the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment. These results are widely communicated and used as a reference in many political and economic analyses. In fact, there are few alternative sources of information on global forest change....To make the data easier to digest, I’ve extracted the 29 countries that had more than 20 Mha forest in 2005, according to FRA 2005. Together, these countries represent about 85% of the world’s forests. Their total forest area change in the period according to FRA is -2.2 Mha/yr, and the “tree cover loss” in GFW 16.4 Mha/yr. See the data table here. Going country by country, it is clear that the discrepancies are caused by quite different situations on the ground. I decided to subjectively divide the 29 countries into five categories in an attempt to highlight why these gaps are so significant. Category 1. Complete contradiction – countries where FRA shows a stable or increasing forest area, whereas GFW reports major tree cover losses. Includes: Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Gabon, India, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden and the United States, representing about half of the world’s forests. – FRA 2015: total gain of 2.4 Mha/yr – GFW: total loss of 9.6 Mha/yr... http://blog.cifor.org/34669/can-we-trust-country-level-data-from-global-forest-assessments?fnl=en
One wicked problem, three major challenges - How to stop deforestation while boosting benefits for smallholders and meeting market demand? by Pablo Pacheco Friday, 25 Sep 2015; To achieve zero deforestation, new ties need to be woven between different levels of government, the private sector and civil society. But in order to act on private-sector commitments, incentive systems and regulations that are reinforcing old patterns first need to be untangled. Beef and soybean production are the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil, and oil palm expansion threatens Indonesia’s forests and peatlands. These two countries have the largest forest areas in the world – and the largest forest losses over the past five years. Powerful industry and multi-stakeholder groups that have an extensive supply base in Brazil and Indonesia signed the New York Declaration on Forests in 2014, pledging to make their supply chains deforestation-free by 2030. The Indonesian government signed the declaration; Brazil did not, although some of its subnational governments did. http://blog.cifor.org/33868/zero-deforestation-special-one-wicked-problem-three-major-challenges
CIFOR DG: Seeing the big picture on the world’s forests By: GLF Committee By Peter Holmgren, CIFOR Director General... This week we have the opportunity to compare different assessment of the world’s forests. FAO presents the results of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA 2015) at the World Forestry Congress in Durban. Global Forest Watch has released new global satellite observations of tree cover reductions in 2014. And Nature has published an article describing over 400,000 field plots from national forest inventories that were used to count all of the world’s trees.
So, what do these different studies have to say about the forest resources of the world and how they change?...
http://www.landscapes.org/cifor-dg-seeing-the-big-picture-on-the-worlds-forests/
Kissing livelihoods and ecosystems goodbye — the very real threat of 'fake forests' in Africa 15 Sep 2015 09:25|Samantha Spooner; Planted forests have been increasing in Africa at a rate of 0.2 million hectare a year--to the benefit largely of the commercial plantations....This culminated in a protest on September 10 in Durban, when over 3,000 people took to the streets as part of an action against “fake forests”. The march concluded with Greenpeace executive director, Kumi Naidoo, handing over a 100,000 signature petition against plantations to the WFC Programme Manager Motsamai Nkosi. Fake forest threat. Since 1990, some 38 million hectares of primary forest have been reported as modified or cleared. This does not necessarily mean that this forest is converted to other land uses. Primary forest, when modified but not cleared, changes into other naturally regenerated (secondary) forest and in some cases planted forest. Planted forest area has increased by over 110 million hectares since 1990, reaching a to al of 290 million hectare in 2015, and accounts for 7% of the world’s forest area. In the case of Africa, the amount of replanted forest increased by 0.2 million hectares per year from 2010, totalling 16 million hectares in 2015. What is of concern to the civil society groups is that even the FAO is not making enough of a differentiation between natural and planted forests and the impact this has on the ecosystems and local communities. For example, the FAO’s definition of ‘“forest” includes commercial plantations of fast growing trees. http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-09-01-the-threat-of-fake-forests-in-africa
16 October 2015: REDD and Indonesia peatland burning
Can REDD save Indonesia’s peatlands from burning? By Chris Lang 14 October 2015 http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/10/14/can-redd-save-indonesias-peatlands-from-burning/
11 October 2015: Cameroon REDD plan critiqued "Poor communities will not simply starve in order to abide by rules agreed between the government and conservation organisations, violence by ecoguards already a problem
Cameroon’s REDD plans critiqued by NGOs ahead of World Bank meeting By Chris Lang 9 October 2015' .... ER-PIN focusses largely on reducing emissions from community agricultural activities. This makes Cameroon’s Emissions Reductions Program (ER-P) far less likely to succeed in reducing deforestation: Poor communities will not simply starve in order to abide by rules agreed between the government and conservation organisations; a programme which does not genuinely incorporate their rights and interests will see high levels of non-compliance (and therefore continuing deforestation and GHG emissions), most likely accompanied by significant levels of serious human rights violations (including violence by ecoguards, for example, something which is already a significant problem in Cameroon)....http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/10/09/cameroons-redd-plans-critiqued-by-ngos-ahead-of-world-bank-meeting/
30 September 2015: Norway to complete $1 billion payment to Brazil (in December) for protecting Amazon, CIFOR reports lucrative illegal market for crop land in Indonesia, reader points to northern ASEAN haze problem too
Editor's note: I have this from a reader based in northern ASEAN "Asia has equally serious annual haze problems in other regions where there are no plantation crops (and no Singapore or KL nearby). Earlier this year Thailand's Chiang Rai airport was closed due to serious smoke haze, and public health warnings were issued around Northern Thailand. I believe some areas were as bad as Singapore but largely unreported in international media. (In early 2015, many) hot spots were located in northern ASEAN.... (getting) much, worse with over 900 satellite marked hotspots and serious disruption of commercial aviation throughout the region... . At the northern limits of oil palm cultivation, normally around 10 degrees N , the sunsets are currently a spectacular red due to smoke haze drifting down from further north. Much of northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia is often shrouded in smoke haze at this time of year, to the extent of sometimes closing airports. This is a normal dry season phenomenon which has nothing to do with oil palms ( although it is man-made, as seen from the many satellite hotspots). This is not to suggest that clearing land for new oil palm cultivation is not an important contributor to smoke haze. But to identify oil palm cultivation as the main cause of smoke haze within Asia is misleading. And as we know, misleading information sometimes obscures an effective response."
Lucrative illegal market for crop land a key cause of fires: Researcher CIFOR Published 28 September 2015 by David Fogarty Assistant Foreign Editor; Dr Purnomo said there is a well- established market for abandoned or conflict land, with land cleared by burning fetching a premium. Using excavators and other heavy equipment to clear the land is costly and time- consuming. "You need to understand that the fire and haze create a lot of money. Quite a lot of money. There is a market for burned land and also it is a way for cheap and quick land preparation for HTI (pulpwood) and oil palm," he told The Straits Times in an interview last week. "Because if you grab the land, the forest - it can be concession land or state land - you can sell it. My research shows that the price is around eight million rupiah (S$800) per hectare. But if you burn that land, the price will increase," he said. "Some people can claim that land and can sell to the network of people. And the buyers can be someone in Jakarta, Bogor, everywhere... It can be 10ha, 20 or even 100ha." Data shows mid-level investors can come from places outside Indonesia, such as Malaysia, he added. According to Dr Purnomo, the price per hectare is US$665 (S$950) after the land is slashed and cut. If the land is burned, the price goes up about US$200 per hectare: a more or less 30 per cent rise. "There is a market for people who mostly prepare for oil palm. You can imagine if they grow the oil palm, after three years, then the price of that land can reach US$3,077 per ha," he said, basing his research on land prices in Sumatra's Riau province. http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/lucrative-illegal-market-for-crop-land-a-key-cause-of-fires-researcher
Norway to complete $1 billion payment to Brazil for protecting Amazon by Green Business | Tue Sep 15, 2015 9:52am EDT Norway will make a final $100-million payment to Brazil this year to complete a $1-billion project that rewards a slowdown in forest loss in the Amazon basin, Norway's Environment Ministry said on Tuesday. Brazil had more than achieved a goal of reducing the rate of deforestation by 75 percent, the condition for the payments under an agreement for 2008-15 meant to protect the forest and slow climate change, it said. The remaining cash would be paid before a U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December, the ministry said. Since 2008, Norway has paid about $900 million to Brazil's Amazon Fund. "Brazil has established what has become a model for other national climate change funds," Norwegian Environment Minister Tine Sundtoft said in a statement...... http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/15/us-climatechange-amazon-norway-idUSKCN0RF1P520150915
13 September 2015: A pick up in deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia? Development versus sustainable palm oil. Will Indonesia new subsidies undermine sustainability policies? Studying conservation policies and impacts on livelihoods. REDD+ probably cannot shift the tide against elite capture of forest benefits.
Editor's note: adds CIFOR DG posting on new data report releases recently on world forestsTrees covering an area twice the size of Portugal lost in 2014, study finds - Palm oil plantations are devouring forests rapidly worldwide, with west Africa becoming the new hot spot for tree loss, Wednesday 2 September 2015 04.00 BST; Data reveals that tree loss in Brazil and Indonesia is on the rise again – by 16% and 30% respectively since 2013 – despite longer term downward trends.. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/02/trees-covering-an-area-twice-the-size-of-portugal-lost-in-2014-study-finds
CIFOR DG: Seeing the big picture on the world’s forests - September 8, 2015 This post originally appeared on CIFOR’s Director General’s blog. By Peter Holmgren, CIFOR Director General..... This week we have the opportunity to compare different assessment of the world’s forests. FAO presents the results of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA 2015) at the World Forestry Congress in Durban. Global Forest Watch has released new global satellite observations of tree cover reductions in 2014. And Nature has published an article describing over 400,000 field plots from national forest inventories that were used to count all of the world’s trees.
o, what do these different studies have to say about the forest resources of the world and how they change?... http://www.landscapes.org/cifor-dg-seeing-the-big-picture-on-the-worlds-forests/
The Need for Development Is Missing in Defining Sustainable Palm Oil Posted: 09/04/2015 11:51 am EDT Robert Hii Sustainable Business Consultant; .... On the issue of carbon emissions, we in developed nations who make up a mere 20 percent of humans worldwide are responsible for a staggering 70 percent of global emissions . Simply put, if the intention to fight climate change on a global front is honest, developed countries including those in the European Union and North America would be mandating how much their citizens can consume. Doing this however, would likely mean high unemployment rates and poverty, which describes life today for millions of people in developing and underdeveloped countries.....In the case of palm oil, we "speak for the environment" by demanding that palm oil be produced sustainably. The popular definition of sustainable palm oil comes from Greenpeace and enjoys wide support by social media activists. Its definition focuses on protecting HCS or High Carbon Stock forests (meaning climate-change-fighting forests) while maintaining the rights of local peoples to either accept or reject palm oil plantations in their communities. The one factor they've failed to address is local communities that may want to clear HCS forests to grow palm oil. What is the solution there? Do we tell these villagers who own a few acres of primary forests that we will not accept any palm oil they grow as sustainable?... In the case of palm oil, we "speak for the environment" by demanding that palm oil be produced sustainably. The popular definition of sustainable palm oil comes from Greenpeace and enjoys wide support by social media activists. Its definition focuses on protecting HCS or High Carbon Stock forests (meaning climate-change-fighting forests) while maintaining the rights of local peoples to either accept or reject palm oil plantations in their communities. The one factor they've failed to address is local communities that may want to clear HCS forests to grow palm oil. What is the solution there? Do we tell these villagers who own a few acres of primary forests that we will not accept any palm oil they grow as sustainable?....http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-hii/the-need-for-sustainable-palm-oil_b_8085846.html
Forestry for a sustainable future – Making a difference beyond agreements 4 Sep 2015 BY Peter Holmgren; ....The WFC is considered the world’s most significant forestry event, organized by FAO every six years together with a host country. At 89 years old, it is also a long-standing tradition within the international community. The first congress was held in Rome in 1926, and Jakarta hosted the 1978 edition. This year, the WFC will be held in Africa for the first time. ..... http://blog.cifor.org/
Will Indonesia’s new palm oil subsidy undermine no-deforestation push? 1st September 2015 / Philip Jacobson & Sapariah Saturi - Officials are selling nascent CPO Fund on sustainability grounds, but experts fear it will do more harm than good... • Questions remain about whether the CPO Fund will carry environmental safeguards and how its resources will be divided between its two main purposes: helping farmers increase their yields and subsidizing biodiesel. • A senior adviser to the energy minister worries the subsidy, if administered haphazardly, could throw an unfortunate lifeline to the dwindling market for palm oil from deforestation, peatland coversion and land grabbing. • The man who designed the fund says it's all about sustainability because it will reduce dependence on foreign petroleum and shore up flagging palm oil prices. http://news.mongabay.com/2015/
Can REDD+ shift the tide against elite capture of forest benefits? Probably not 25 Aug 2015 BY Esther Mwangi, Isla Duporge and Krister Andersson; REDD+ is the largest coordinated international attempt to reverse the trend of deforestation and forest degradation globally. It remains one of the most dominant items on the agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)....The lack of evidence from projects where participants are rewarded for performance means that there are few empirical lessons to draw from at this stage in REDD+ development. Criticism has been levied at REDD for unintentionally exacerbating existent inequalities; findings show that when tenure rights (de jure and de facto) are legally defined and secure in practice, this will allow for a more equitable benefit sharing. A recent study using two large datasets explored how tenure rights affect benefit sharing. The first dataset was drawn from International Forestry Research and Institutions and comprises 582 forest oduct records across 350 user groups in 14 developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This work shows that where collective rights for harvesting forest products are secure, the benefits of these products are more equally distributed among participating individuals. However, this finding is dependent upon the level of ethnic diversity within the harvesting group. Where there are higher levels of ethnic diversity, lower equity is found in benefit distribution and vice versa. This implies that REDD+ projects in areas with high ethnic diversity need to enforce additional measures to prevent elite capture by privileged ethnic groups. ... http://blog.cifor.org/32241/can-redd-shift-the-tide-against-elite-capture-of-forest-benefits-probably-not#.VfUz7oywqpo
Multiple ways for Congo Basin forests to flourish and deliver: study 24 Aug 2015 BY Harry Pearl; ...Providing forest users with clear incentives to work together could reduce conflict and improve the management of Central Africa’s timber concessions, according to a new study.... http://blog.cifor.org/32387/multiple-ways-for-congo-basin-forests-to-flourish-and-deliver-study#.VfUz5oywqpo
Canopy commerce: forest conservation and poverty alleviation, Published 03 Feb 2012; Innovative approaches for protecting the future of Sierra Leone’s Gola Forest – globally important for its biodiversity and its carbon reserves – are being developed by a collaboration of conservation agencies and University of Cambridge researchers. Our goal is to find a mechanism by which richer countries can help one of the poorest countries in the world protect its nature at the same time as improving the livelihoods of the local communities. Dr Jeremy Lindsell (RSPB) Gola Forest, situated at the westernmost tip of a once extensive swathe of forest that stretched a thousand kilometres from Sierra Leone to Togo, is classified as a biodiversity hotspot of global significance. Its 71,000 hectares are home to over 330 species of bird, including the rare White-necked Picathartes and Rufous Fishing Owl, more than 500 species of butterfly, and a long list of threatened and endangered plants and animals...After a return visit for a follow-up survey, the researchers are now analysing the data, with results expected early in 2012. “All in all, the project will provide the first detailed formal policy evaluation of a major conservation programme,” said Kontoleon. “The results should allow us to derive reliable inferences on the livelihood and behavioural impacts of conservation policies.” - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/canopy-commerce-forest-conservation-and-poverty-alleviation#sthash.0rR7472i.dpuf