AMONG THE MANY NASTY things that humans are doing to the environment, few rank worse than destroying tropical forests. Rainforests sustain an astonishing diversity of species and keep our planet liveable by limiting soil erosion, reducing floods, maintaining natural water cycles, and stabilising the climate. Yet roughly 10 million hectares of tropical forest are destroyed every year – the equivalent of 50 football fields a minute.
Not even intense international pressure, the BP oil spill, worsening floods, or the fact that the last six months have been the warmest on record globally was enough to push US climate legislation through the Senate. In the end the legislation died without a single Republican supporting it and a number of Democrats balking. Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, said they would continue to push climate legislation in the fall, but analysts say success then is unlikely given up-coming elections in November.
13 July 2010:The High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, co-chaired by Prime Ministers Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia) and Jens Stoltenberg (Norway), held its second meeting on 12-13 July 2010, in New York, US.
Fire in the Amazon, it turns out, was not a 'report' or a scientific paper but, as the WWF now acknowledges, a text published by IPAM? on its website in 1999
While the global community is fighting wars on many fronts, the Commonwealth Secretary-General has said that there is no greater fight than climate change, "where the battle for the forest represents the front line, and the very thick of the action."
Finally, the primacy of the forest in combating climate change is admitted
June 2010: The UNFCCC Secretariat has published the report of the informal meeting of experts, which took place in Bonn, Germany, from 25-26 May 2010, on enhancing coordination of capacity-building activities in relation to using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidance and guidelines as a basis for estimating forest-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals, forest carbon stocks and forest area changes.
Discouraged by the outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit last December as well as how negotiations at the just concluded talks in Bonn in Germany seem to have turned out, developing nations made up of mainly those from Africa are now looking inwards as a way out of the dilemma.
VietNamNet Bridge – On the occasion of an international conference on “Payments for Environmental Services and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” (REDD) in Hanoi from June 23-24, VietNamNet would like to introduce an article by Charlotte Streck, a renowned environmentalist, about Vietnam’s active participation in REDD.
