Fighting poverty accidentally stopped deforestation

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-15/how-fighting-poverty-accidentally-stopped-deforestation

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

235 102 6 years ago

Also an example of UBI in action.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

UBI requires a country to be pretty wealthy though, have a steady, reliable source of income such as natural resources or healthy trade.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.vn/4gTqu

jes5199• 6 years ago

there’s a nonprofit called “Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty” where you can buy carbon offset credits that are implemented by paying impoverished people in various parts of the world to reforest their land. I’d love to see a comparison of whether that was ultimately more or less effective than UBI at the two goals of reducing poverty and averting climate change

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

I currently use TerraPass. Are these guys audited by third parties or something like that? Generally work in the US is more trustworthy since it's theoretically verifiable here.

itsmeamario• 6 years ago

Care to share why? I'd like to help, but the trouble is how am I sure that the money goes to the pockets of people who need it and not to some CEO's holiday?

yboris• 6 years ago

A well-researched good write-up comes from Founders Pledge [0] recommending an "intergovernmental organisation of more than 50 rainforest nations which works to promote environmental sustainability while creating opportunities for economic advancement within tropically forested developing countries."

[0] https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-...

ima_banana• 6 years ago

This may be a dumb question, but is there a field of study of unintended consequences?

beamatronic• 6 years ago

In many cases, that's economics.

staticautomatic• 6 years ago

Closest I can think of is failure mode analysis.

seltzered_• 6 years ago

Complexity Theory / Santa Fe Institute folks might be in this domain. Jordan Hall recommends this book for starters: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/thousand-years-nonlinear-hist...

Frost1x• 6 years ago

I would say emergence and emergentism come to mind which captures many of these sort of ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Oh and systems theory also comes to mind for more rigorous attempts at study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory

baddox• 6 years ago

Game theory is concerned with what will happen in interactions between actors with certain strategies and goals, so unintended consequences tends to come up a lot.

Public choice theory and social choice theory are related disciplines which concern themselves with the outcomes of various political and social mechanisms for making collective decisions based on individuals preferences and behaviors.

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

No shit. It also stops crime, a lot of early and unnecessary deaths.

projektfu2• 6 years ago

I came across a charity that gets a “double” or triple in a similar way. They build stoves for people who are currently cooking on open hearth. Those people then use less fuel, make less carbon dioxide, take less from the forest, and have vastly better respiratory health.

https://guatemalastoveproject.org/

SenHeng• 6 years ago

Don't those masonry stoves store a lot of heat in them?

How does that work over the summer?

CuriousCosmic• 6 years ago

Not OP but have at least a bit of cursory experience.

Masonry stoves get warm but when properly built they aren't insanely hot outside of the inside, the stove tops, and the chimney. Most of the excess heat after finishing cooking will dissipate through the chimney.

Also insulation in most of the houses these are being built for isn't great. Because of this, the stove won't keep the house from cooling off at night. During the day people are out and about so it isn't too much of problem then either. Also it's probably cooler overall since less heat is lost to the environment compared to what they replaced.

It's by no means a perfect solution but comparatively to what they were using before, it is leagues better.

projektfu2• 6 years ago

This culture spends all day cooking so the alternative is an open hearth burning inside the house all day. I was told by the representative of the charity that a stove is so popular that other families come to the one who has the stove and cook with them.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

Proves that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit still that can have a much bigger impact than e.g. buying an electric vehicle.

gowld• 6 years ago

How so? I don't see any comparative numbers.

gbear6052• 6 years ago

The problem is that we need to do both. We can’t escape climate change if everyone on the planet is driving a large gas guzzling SUV. So we need to both change to electric cars and also do things like this oven.

In addition, it’s bad to say to developing countries “well, you have to make this change for the good of the planet, but we don’t have to make any change, even though we produce much more CO2 than you do.”

ReticentVole2• 6 years ago

“You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.”

- Sir Peter Scott, Founder, WWF (1909-1989)

redis_mlc2• 6 years ago

That's a great quote.

In a lot of countries, you have to be married to even get family planning advice, so that's a hindrance.

The US has its own problems with requiring current prescriptions ($$) for anything, including the pill.

(For non-US readers, a doctor's office visit without insurance is typically $100 in SF, if you can find one with a patient list opening. Plus filling the prescription.)

Refillable natural gas containers would also help reduce deforestation. They're commonly used in SE Asian homes, but should be expanded to areas still cutting down trees for firewood.

fragmede• 6 years ago

That's not entirely accurate. San Francisco, and the rest of California, changed the law in 2016 so that properly trained pharmacists are allowed to prescribe the birth control pill. That training is part of the standard curriculum for new pharmacists, and training is available for pharmacists who got their license before that became part of the curriculum. Anecdotally, I will also say that Planned Parenthood of California is pretty decently funded and are able to offer IUDs (Mirena) and Depoprevera (the shot) at a reasonable price, with and with-out insurance.

This practice is not limited to California, either. Washington DC and nine other states - Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah – allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control.

https://www.goodrx.com/blog/heres-how-to-get-birth-control-w...

thayne• 6 years ago

a doctor's office visit without insurance is typically $100 in SF

Wait, really? That's less than I usually pay with insurance (in the US, on a High-deductible plan).

unishark• 6 years ago

You don't need a prescription for condoms anywhere.

There are plenty of free clinics in SF.

All kinds of hormone-based drugs generally require prescriptions. There's exceptions you can find but they only seem to have really weak effects from what I've seen.

yyy888sss• 6 years ago

Turns out it's more about economic development and education - most women who are financially secure don't want to have 10 children.

ReticentVole2• 6 years ago

That doesn't seem to be the case if you look at places like Egypt, where birthrates are not falling despite the country being relatively developed. A lot more of it is cultural and social, and whether people care about their overall impact on the environment.

Besides, we don't really have the time to wait until 2100, when some nations may advance. We need to link foreign aid directly to widespread family planning for African and West Asian countries.

Nasrudith4• 6 years ago

That assumption often fails sadly without social security they want a big family just to ensure they are able to support them in old age or can't exactly expect all of them to survive. A k model does improve quality of life and environmental impact though.

mywacaday• 6 years ago

Probably been posted a lot before but always worth a watch. https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w The Great Hans Rosling. His book is well worth a read as well.

MiguelVieira• 6 years ago

Environmental Kuznets curve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...

CryptoPunk• 6 years ago

And the best way to increase per capita income is to implement pro-market policies, that provide rights to private property and the freedom to contract:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_why_the_world_needs_cha...

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

eru• 6 years ago

Not a popular insight in the western world these days, alas.

Compare https://www.econlib.org/socialism-the-failed-idea-that-never...

aaron695• 6 years ago

How Fighting Poverty Accidentally Stopped Deforestation

This is garbage -

When know by fighting poverty, which is increasing wealth, it's good for

The environment, all the social rights, IQ, crime, happiness, almost all issues the rich first world people think are important. Because the people targeted become better off and can afford to worry about these issues as well.

This is why good people fight poverty, and the bad people jump ahead and fight for the things that come after poverty, because that's what makes them personally feel good.

mrpopo2• 6 years ago

Then why are rich people bigger meat consumers and bigger CO2 emitters than poor people?

imtringued• 6 years ago

They burn coal instead of wood. In practice both are equally unsustainable but deforestation is an issue with higher visibility.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

They consume more because they have more money to consume with; that's not the focal point of the article though, it focused on deforestation specifically. CO2 emissions is a different challenge, albeit related to CO2 emissions and sequestration.

ClumsyPilot• 6 years ago

Ow really? So how much more does GDP of US need to improve so that it can stop its environmentally irresponsibly behaviour?

nwah1• 6 years ago

Look into the Environmental Kuznets Curve and the Demographic Transition.

Mirioron3• 6 years ago

I don't quite understand the headline. This seems like a rather obvious outcome.

The big question is: what are the limits on it? Helping the poor in Indonesia (and Brazil) would diminish deforestation, but would it do the same if you were helping the poor in the US? Ukraine? My guess is that it would do barely anything about deforestation in the US, but I have no idea about Ukraine.

princeb• 6 years ago

This seems like a rather obvious outcome

it was not an obvious outcome. if it were obvious, you'd have the answer to your question.

gbear6052• 6 years ago

I think it was an obvious outcome that “some people who have more money don’t have to sell wood anymore,” since there’s much less deforestation in developed countries than in developing ones. The specific outcome of how much and where is very much not obvious.

PeterisP2• 6 years ago

What deforestation in the US? The forest area in the US has been stable since ~1900, and the volume of forest has been increasing in the last decades.

I don't have good recent data about Ukraine, but it also seems to have increased the amount of forests e.g. in the period between 1990-2010. https://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Ukraine.... ; this would match the general trend of the rest of Europe of an increase in forests.

Mirioron3• 6 years ago

Yes, but people still cut down trees. The question is how much faster forests would spread since there would be less deforestation.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon where one lives), fighting poverty is like fighting pandemics: some places try it, and others declare it difficult* and leave it untried.

* "difficult" being the charitable interpretation of the people who will argue, at length and in print, that having poverty or having an endemic or having brutality is somehow better than the alternatives.

(in my country, it's considered shocking news that, unemployment having reached almost 4%, thousands of people showed up for food handouts during the pandemic. It's considered ongoing news that we still have double digits, about 1% of peak, of new virus cases per day. Both public mass shootings from this century are considered national tragedies)

reinkaos• 6 years ago

For local communities, selling timber and clearing land for cultivation is an income stream of last resort.

There's also another problem that affects places like Brazil: deforestation for cattle ranching.

dba7dba• 6 years ago

South Korea is another example of fighting poverty that stopped and completely reversed deforestation.

Korean peninsula in general went through extreme deforestation under Japan, especially during the WW2 era and Korean War, as supply of coal was cut off from the civilian population and redirected to war effort by Japan and Korea. In order to get fuel supply that was needed to cook food and heat homes, local hills were cleared of trees by locals.

If you watch video footage of the Korean War 1950 - 53, the hills are completely devoid of trees. The trees are missing because they had all be cut down for fuel.

If you talk to any older Korean men who were teens up until mid 1960s, they all remember walking 1 - 2 hrs one way up into the hills to collect firewood, piled mountain high on their A-frames (in Korean, jigae).

Once South Korea started getting better off, they went to coal, oil, natural gas, and then electricity for fuel source.

The South Korean government "Korea Forest Service" ministry is completely focused on restoring the depleted forests. And they seem to have done reasonably well.

cookiengineer• 6 years ago

Little known fact: Germany was exporting wood around the beginning of the 15th century up until the point where over 80% of all forests were gone. You could say that almost all forests we have today are somewhat artificially grown.

That is why, by law, forests have to be maintained and regrown if you want to harvest wood. The earliest established Forstordnung was done in 1442 in Speyer and soon after the Kurpfalz and other states/Fürstentümer adapted it. I think the latest state to adapt it was Sachsen around 1560, but I would have to look that up to be certain.

Nonetheless I think this speaks volumes on how much some countries are behind when it comes to their established laws.

blablabla123• 6 years ago

Most trees growing in Germany grow very fast. In areas with rainforests trees are much older and the ground on which they grow is very different from the ground in german forests. Once deforested it takes decades to just recover the ground, not to speak of the trees.

serverQuestion• 6 years ago

Germany obviously old trees until they remove 80% of them...

VBprogrammer2• 6 years ago

I think you are talking about the acidification of soil caused by pine trees. I've heard the same thing but a quick search suggests that this might be mostly rumour.

Certainly large mono-cultures of conifers are bad for numerous other reasons.

kaybe• 6 years ago

Our trees in Europe can be very old if we let them, but the ground is different because it is young. The glaciers of the ice ages have given us great soil which still contains a lot of nutrients (and which is also still replenished from degrading minerals), while the big tropical forests are mainly located on depleted soil, so the nutrients are in the plant matter and easily lost if you remove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess

(On that topic, this is also interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta)

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Trees grow fast in the rain forest too, and in rain forests and germany alike, it takes a long time to become an old growth forest, which stores a lot of carbon in the soil and organic layers.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

I heard that rainforest soil is actually pretty poor, which to me sounds weird given how much grows (and dies / falls / decomposes) there.

pjc50• 6 years ago

Scotland lost almost all of its trees before Johnson's famous tour in 1773:

"From the bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present century. Now and then about a gentleman’s house stands a small plantation, which in Scotch is called a policy, but of these there are few, and those few all very young. The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cowpar, I passed for a few yards between two hedges. A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice; I told him that it was rough and low, or looked as if I thought so. This, said he, is nothing to another a few miles off. I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was not to be seen nearer. Nay, said a gentleman that stood by, I know but of this and that tree in the county."

Commercial timber (pine) is now quite common. Reforestation was policy after the First World War, when there was huge demand for wood for trench boarding.

arethuza• 6 years ago

A boom in commercial timber growing in Scotland did harm in a number of places, including the Flow Country:

https://www.theflowcountry.org.uk/flow-facts/flow-fact-4/

Fortunately some groups are trying to rewild the Highlands:

https://treesforlife.org.uk/

twic• 6 years ago

It's even worse in the UK - we call those original forests "ancient woodland", and there is not a lot left:

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/ha...

Even these have usually had some human intervention, such as occasional felling of oak trees for timber, even if the whole wood wasn't cleared.

namibj• 6 years ago

"Hambacher Forst" was the last large ancient woodland in Germany, but then RWE got permission to dig up the lignite and burn it. Quite sad.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

Much of the US has also been logged. For example, in Michigan, an uncut piece of forest has been made into a significant park:

https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/parksandtrails/Details.aspx?typ...

(The park is quite large now, the old growth is 49 acres (~20 hectare)).

We've seen substantial reforestation in the last 100, without much in the way of laws requiring it. Vast public forests often have limited cutting, but it's more under-management and ad hoc resistance. Large private land management companies of course replant, because they want predictable harvest.

saalweachter3• 6 years ago

In the US, in New England, this basically is a side effect of (a) no one wanting wool anymore and (b) Manifest Destiny making the West available for grazing cattle.

New England was something like 80% cleared at some point, largely to graze sheep for their wool. Besides the fact that the wool market these days has mostly been reduced to hats and scarves, the abundant grazing lands in the West (and the slightly-too-short grazing season in New England) largely prevented the re-purposing of the pastures for other livestock. So nowadays, the land is 75% re-forested.

distant_hat• 6 years ago

India's birth rate in villages plummeted when TV was introduced to them. These kind of effects are not that rare.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

There's a strong correlation between wealth, education, quality of life, and child birth rate. Tl;dr, improve people's lives and birth rate drops.

Which may cause its own problems (e.g. in Japan), but there's a lot of countries that aren't there yet.

gampleman• 6 years ago

I take a bit of issue with the "accidentally". Having been in the deforestation-stopping business for some time it has been blindingly obvious that most approaches that were being taken were completely futile until socio-economic factors were solved for.

For example we were building satellite technology to help environmental police patrol large rainforests to be able to focus on areas with offenders. One time we managed to find a hidden airstrip for drug trafficking which was cool. But most of the time the offenders were people who just needed to feed their kids - and look there is a mahogany tree just over there that will sell for $$$. So the cops will come, give them a fine, and then they will need the money even more. So the pattern continues.

Funnily enough (NB: this is hearsay) the forests were actually better off when the area was controlled by drug gangs as the people had a source of income from the cocaine.

seotut2• 6 years ago

The same phenomenon is easily observed in modern-day Romania. There's a clear inverse correlation between the wealth of a region and the deforestation in that area.

Also notice that the price of wood is fairly stable all across EU because it's an open market after all. But the wages in Romania are far lower than the EU average so that's why the incentive to cut and sell wood is relatively higher here.

simion3142• 6 years ago

In Romania there is the issue where people still have to use wood for heating because of no access to natual gas or not enough money to buy a modern heating system, isolate the home and pay for the has, in some regions the wood is cheap in others wood is expensive.

polynomial• 6 years ago

(NB: this is hearsay)

Also, heresy.

Nasrudith4• 6 years ago

There is one funny resemblance in place to a method ascribed to toddlers - diversion as a strategy. In this case it is diverting deforestation by having higher paying more economically advanced activities than raw resource gathering.

Admittedly a bit "gross" in the paternalistic/imperialist implications but the outcome would be preferred by both the natives and outsiders.

Which also fits in with worries of automation and unemployement and the ironic difficulty in finding good uses for the labor that can support the value. While there may be plenty of decent uses (picking up litter, etc) pairing the utility with a revenue stream is more difficult let alone with a good living standard.

cheez3• 6 years ago

Funnily enough (NB: this is hearsay) the forests were actually better off when the area was controlled by drug gangs as the people had a source of income from the cocaine.

Not a surprise. When animal hunting is legal, people breed animals for hunting. Some escaped extinction this way.

dvanduzer• 6 years ago

We must act now, and let the billionaire class play the Most Dangerous Game. It's our only chance of survival!

stx• 6 years ago

Not a surprise. When animal hunting is legal, people breed animals for hunting. Some escaped extinction this way.

I could see this being true when the hunting is at least properly managed but in the past when it was allowed to go overboard animals did go extinct as a result. Especially when people were hunting for economic reasons.

csours• 6 years ago

Your note about the drug gangs reminds me of the Chernobyl Exclusion Area and how well plants and wildlife are doing there. The "environment" doesn't really care about humans. The environment can do quite well without humans, thank you very much.

waste_monk• 6 years ago

Aside from the whole (alleged) "organised crime setting forest fires in the exclusion zone as cover for illegal logging operations" thing [1], which releases plumes of radioactive ash and ends up with contaminated wood in people's furniture and fireplaces.

But yes, when left alone nature does reclaim the lands rather effectively.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/chernobyl-radioac...

hinkley• 6 years ago

I know of no more blatant example of this than the Haitian border. Dominican Republic side: all trees. Haitian side? grassland.

dr_dshiv• 6 years ago

This is a great example of economic harmony in nature. There has been a big debate in environmentalism whether rising incomes naturally produces more concern for and protection of the environment.

The implications of that question are, very, very important.

the8472• 6 years ago

Cash payments to people in impoverished areas led to a 30% drop in tree loss

It did not stop deforestation. It only lowered the rate of loss. Which of course is a significant improvement but still not sustainable.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

"Accidentally"? Bring up google maps and look at the forest cover of Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic. You don't really need the border drawn as a line.

Fighting poverty accidentally stopped deforestation

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