I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
The trouble with rainforests is you can’t make much money out of leaving them alone. Yes, they are majestic and stuffed full of creepy crawlies, with the occasional orangutan or tiger but, compared with a nice productive palm oil plantation they just don’t pay their way. Or do they?
The ‘value’ of rainforests has been assessed several times recently and the valuations come out as being very high – but you have to look at the economics in a particular way. The ‘real’ value of rainforests is in their ecological services – the roles they play in regulating the climate and nutrient cycles, the medicines derived from their species, recreational value and the value of timber and food that can be sustainably harvested from them.
Back in 1997 Robert Costanza and colleagues put some numbers to all these things and came up with a rainforest value of $969/ha/yr. Of this value well over half is delivered through nutrient cycling and climate regulation. Most tropical soils are poor in nutrients and in rainforests the nutrients from dead animals and plants are efficiently recycled into new animals and plants. So although the soil under a rainforest is very rich, and you can grow a good crop on it for a while, our agricultural systems lose the nutrients and then you are left with having to add fertilisers to maintain your crops.
Rainforests also store huge amounts of carbon in their soils, roots and the above-ground vegetation. Forest destruction releases much of that carbon and accounts for about 8-20% of global carbon emissions each year. About 300 billion tonnes of carbon are usefully stored away in tropical rainforests and almost half of that amount is in Latin America.
Rainforests have produced many medicines that are in widespread use. The endangered Madagascar periwinkle is the source of medicines that combat leukaemia, diabetes, malaria and Hodgkin’s disease.
Many of these benefits from rainforests are shared benefits – you benefit, I benefit, a man on a bicycle in Delhi benefits and a woman lying on the beach in California benefits from the existence of the Amazon rainforest, but none of us is asked to pay for our benefits. And so a man with a chainsaw, who also benefits from those shared benefits, sees that he can benefit more, at least in the short term, if he chops down the trees, sells the timber and replants with a more commercial crop.
Some rainforests are being protected and sometimes primarily for their wildlife – which is fine because if the wildlife is protected so are all those other values too. A good example is the work that the RSPB has done with the BirdLife International partner in Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone government. The Gola Rainforest has been made a National Park and that means better protection for chimpanzees, carbon and the world’s climate.
But overall the world has to find a way to show that rainforests pay their way, and that probably means finding a way that I (and you! – we must be fair about this), the bloke on the bike in Delhi and that woman in California put our hands in our pockets and pay for what we are getting at the moment for free. There are plenty of plans in place to do this but they are all immensely complex and not guaranteed to succeed. But unless they do succeed then the cost to us all will be enormous.
Did you know that you can step up and protect tropical rainforests when you’re shopping? If you shop at Tesco, you can donate your green clubcard points to our joint project, Together for Trees. What a great way to protect one of the most important and incredible places on earth!
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.
Exactly Mark,you can always put it better than I can.The knowledge you have on so many subjects continually astounds me.It shouldn't really by now but that makes it even more impressive.
Sooty - that would be one way to do it. I wonder (this is what you are saying in another way) whether our governance systems are up to the job, let alone whether the people who govern are up to the job. It's one of those things where 'think global and act local' only works to some extent. We need to think global and act global too. There must be a way to sort it out - but I'm not sure it is an easy one.
Think the only way of getting money from everyone for protection of rain forests would be for a small % of each country's tax they collected to go to saving essential rain forests as like you say we all benefit,the difficult bit would be agreement from all country's,what chance when they cannot even agree how to save the E U.