Deforestation

Presidents from eight Amazon countries meet on Thursday to lay out a save-the-jungle proposal for the UN climate conference.

A great deal has been learned over the past 15 years about how to reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation in ways that benefit local people and the global environment.

This month, the journal Nature Geoscience published a study calculating that deforestation is responsible for about 15% of global carbon emissions, down from earlier estimates of 20% or more. Most of the world's deforestation is concentrated in a few tropical nations, like Brazil and Indonesia where trees are disappearing fast — when these trees die or are burned, they release into the atmosphere all the carbon they've sucked up while they were alive. According to the Nature Geoscience study, the problem of deforestation is becoming a lot less dire than previously thought.

With the world facing global warming and a biodiversity crisis, a new study in Conservation Biology shows that within 15 years logged forests—considered by many to be 'degraded'—can be managed in order to successfully fight both climate change and extinction.

THE recent climate talks in Bangkok, Thailand, highlighted the clear differences between developing countries and some developed countries and NGOs on forestry.