Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest continues to decline

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/deforestation-in-the-amazon-rainforest-continues-to-plunge/

by PaulHoule • 3 years ago

73 100 3 years ago

news.mongabay.com

einpoklum2• 3 years ago

Note that a lot of deforestation still goes on - it's not that forested areas are being restored. This year, about 4950 square km, or 495,000 hectares of forest, will have been cleared.

And remember, that Amazonian rain forest can't just be restored by planting a bunch of trees. If restoration is at all possible, it requires carefully planned intervention of decreasing intensity over a prolonged period of time. See:

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

for a bit more on this.

holoduke• 3 years ago

In that wiki i read that it is actually quite doable despite the warnings given prior to some experiments. Forrest is quickly back in about 10 years

einpoklum2• 3 years ago

Indeed, it is doable, but it's not trivially doable:

"Forest restoration is an inclusive process, which depends on collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders including local communities, government officials, non-government organizations, scientists and funding agencies."

npunt• 3 years ago

Its doable but not in 10 years. From [1]

They found that soil fertility takes less than 10 years to recover to old-growth forest values. Plant functioning takes less than 25 years, and species diversity takes 60 years. Above-ground biomass and species composition take over 120 years.

This is also discounting any of the unique biodiversity in the Amazon, of which there is a lot and may never come back.

[1] https://news.clemson.edu/researchers-if-left-alone-tropical-...

pvaldes• 3 years ago

A cheaper, lower diversity, forest. 1000 Yo trees can't grow in 10 years

singingfish• 3 years ago

I live in the marginal subtropics in an area with subtropical rainforest. There is a severly degraded historical landslip at the back of my house which we've been working on for 12 years or so.

After getting rid of the gross weeds, it only took a couple of years for a bunch of native rainforest species to start popping up, but it's going to be a very long time before what they call "ecosystem function" is approximately back to the way it was before. You can reduce this time in the tropics because the carbon cycle is so fast, but it's still going to take many years of restoration. Appropriate management can speed things up, but only so much - and the techniques used vary in effectiveness.

tourmalinetaco4• 3 years ago

The Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention; why would we need to intervene at all with its regrowth when we’re the reason it’s being cut down? It sounds more likely that we’d only fuck it up further rather than let it heal.

hinkley11• 3 years ago

Because rainforest soil is very low in nutrients. Most of the nutrients are locked into the biosphere, which they carted off or set on fire.

Temperate forest soil has a lot more capacity for regeneration, but we're 3-4 rounds of clearcutting into most North American forests and we are hearing alarm bells about how there might not be another round if we don't change something.

myshpa3• 3 years ago

The Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention

The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...

edgyquant3• 3 years ago

e Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention

This is incorrect. The Amazon was cultivated by native communities

Xunjin8• 3 years ago

You have a great point, even with Bolsonaro out, the deforestation is happening in a "slower pace". We need a more assertive course of action, not only policing the areas and arresting the crime organization which profit from it. There are people who lives around Amazon that needs a better way of living, so they don't turn into the forest to commit crimes.

Qem2• 3 years ago

The Amazon rainforest was really lucky Bolsonaro was not re-elected to a second term, nor the attempted January 8 coup succeeded.

Gualdrapo• 3 years ago

And that here in Colombia we elected the first left-wing president in more than 90 years.

hanniabu2• 3 years ago

I'm always curious how things vary from country to country. What are some hallmarks of the left in Colombia? What are some things they stand form/support that differs from the right?

goykasi• 3 years ago

nor the attempted January 8 coup succeeded

What effect would this have had?

ufo• 3 years ago

Bolsonaro is pro-deforestation. It was literally one of his campaign promises.

Qem2• 3 years ago

It appears he intended to get a brazilian supreme court minister arrested, void the election he lost, declare martial law ("intervenção") and extend his first term indefinitely, backed by a military junta.

matheusmoreira16• 3 years ago

There was no "coup". There was a protest. Identical to numerous others in the past. Even the pictures look the same. I even saw one of the several brazilian socialist parties condemning the criminalization of the protesters for obvious reasons.

If only there had been a coup. They're all being punished for attempting one anyway. Might as well have tried, right?

Xunjin8• 3 years ago

Please refrain from spread misinformation, that was a coup, in the mind of Bolsonaro's followers the "protest" would trigger an action by the military to "take the power". This was spread by months after the elections, we even had a attempt of exploding a bomb in a gas tank truck for aviation.

Not a single protest in the history of the redemocratization (1988) had a protest that destroyed the buildings from the three powers.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

It shouldn’t be declining it needs to stop completely. Now.

sadhorse• 3 years ago

The US couldn't even compensate the native people whose land they completely destroyed with nuclear testing in the pacific. But it wants LATAM to compensate them by giving up their sovereignty over their own land "because it affects everyone".

wkat42422• 3 years ago

Or the people that they displaced to build Diego Garcia.

Oh wait that's not the US, that was the British. The base is only 'leased' they say. Guess you can outsource your atrocities now and stay clean of blame?

goatlover• 3 years ago

That's not how the world works. Most things aren't all or nothing. Usually there are tradeoffs and competing interests.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Enforced using economic sanctions and if required, military.

We can't mess around with the climate crisis any more.

matheusmoreira16• 3 years ago

It "needs" to do absolutely nothing. The amazon is ours and we can exploit it if we want. If it was up to me, I'd burn that entire jungle down if it brought even a tiny bit of prosperity to Brazil. Who are you to judge?

Even our current left-wing president is pushing for oil prospecting in the region. I support him in that.

empath752• 3 years ago

probably a better thing to do would be to get the rest of the world to pay you to not do it.

hinkley11• 3 years ago

Maybe you're unaware of the situation in Haiti, but burning your entire jungle down brings nothing but flooding and despair. The other country on the same island has none of these problems.

I'd do a lot of things if they were free. Nothing is.

readyplayernull2• 3 years ago

Maybe it's due to plastics replacing wood. Interesting we haven't found/invented another kind of material to manufacture objects, maybe metal/crystal foam will replace it one day, some metal's microparticles should be more environmentaly safe than microplastic which carries additives that are toxic and can be burned.

vondur2• 3 years ago

Isn't the cleared land used for growing food and not wood for making things?

readyplayernull2• 3 years ago

Both?

myshpa3• 3 years ago

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

Beef, soy and palm oil are responsible for 60% of tropical deforestation

Beef - 2.71 million hectares / year

Soy - 480,000 ha / year (77% for animal feed, just 7% for humans)

Palm Oil - 270,000 ha / year

Wood - 380,000 ha / year (but probably more)

romusha2• 3 years ago

People have invented many kinds of materials as alternatives to plastics tho. It's just not economical. It's not about technology

lacrimacida3• 3 years ago

Its not economical for quick profits/next generation pays the price. Maybe we should take in consideration the ‘long term, that way better things would become a lot more economical, especially when reuse becomes common sense again. We did better in the past in this regard.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

We've pushed the atmosphere to conditions under which the Amazon will simply die without "deforestation".

tourmalinetaco4• 3 years ago

Explain.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

Drought exposes the jungle to the risk of more frequent wildfires. Repeated wildfires can abruptly shift the dominant habit from jungle to savanna. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/amazon-tipping-trouble-c...

wayfinder• 3 years ago

This is going to be controversial and I don’t want the Amazon to continue deforestation but it’s not quite fair that both Native Americans and the USA as well as the rest of the world deforested a lot of land already in pursuit of development yet countries in South America can’t do that now because they’re too late to the party.

That said, I believe we’ve actually halted deforestation in the US so that’s good.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

Largely affected by steel production being outsourced to China

https://worldsteel.org/steel-topics/statistics/world-steel-i...

m463• 3 years ago

I think we might have run out of trees.

90% of the old-growth forests that existed in the contiguous United States in the 1600s have been cleared.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest#Logging

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

Locations of remaining tracts

  35% in South America
  28% in North America
  19% in northern Asia
  8% in Africa
  7% in South Asia Pacific
  Less than 3% in Europe

tourmalinetaco4• 3 years ago

We have absolutely not run out of trees. 31% of land is still covered by trees, 66% of what it was before agricultural development. It’s more accurate to say we have run out of a need for deforestation.

southernplaces7• 3 years ago

The definitions in the Wikipedia article also state other figures. For one thing, in another part of it, they state that "Barely one-third (34 percent) of the world's forests are primary forests." After centuries of industrialization and explosive population growth in the human species, that percentage is surprisingly decent.

Secondly for your U.S. figure, bear in mind that their baseline for the age of the cleared forests is almost 400 years. Even among trees, many don't live that long. You could easily have a truly ancient forest by any measure, that hasn't seen invasive human presence in centuries, filled with extremely old trees, but consider it what, secondary forest just because it's from the early 1700's instead of the 1600s?

mkoubaa• 3 years ago

Pursuing fairness at all costs seems dumb to me

AnthonyMouse• 3 years ago

Deforesting land is unnecessary at this point. The main use of large tracts of rural land is agriculture, but the world has enough agricultural land to feed everyone already.

This would be a significant concern if agriculture was still a large proportion of the world economy, but it's ~4%. They can do something in the other 96%.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

From what I hear, most of the rich world is now re-foresting.

blipvert• 3 years ago

The Spartans got to throw their babies into a chasm.

I find it unfair that I’m not allowed to commit infanticide just because I’m late to the party.

hinkley11• 3 years ago

You aren't deforesting the Amazon for you. You're deforesting it for us.

First world paying emerging economies money for their non-renewable resources at what seems like reasonable rates only because they haven't the resources to use them for themselves yet, and by the time enough money accumulates to do so, they've shipped off a regrettable proportion of that resource to other countries. Tale as old as colonization.

empath752• 3 years ago

it's more accurate to say that we've out sourced it.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

I was supposed to be in a debate in a class on geoengineering about whether we should pay Brazil to protect the Amazon (my partner) or attach BECCS

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

equipment to their bioethanol factories.

(me, for that class I was the obligatory cornucopian engineer because it's in the freaking engineering school and somebody had to do it)

My partner had spent a lot of time in the Amazon on research projects where they would measure the amount of carbon being captured by trees over time by taking careful measurements with calipers, core samples, etc. He took me to a lecture by an invited professor who showed us videos of how clouds moved over the Amazon. Unlike most places where rain mainly falls and makes it to the ocean, water evaporates and condenses multiple times over the Amazon and creates clouds that carry moisture in various directions including helping mountains in California to develop a snowpack.

There's particular a concern that that the boundary between the Amazon on the southwest side could migrate to the north because of a feedback between land use and climate and that's a reason to be concerned about the land use in that area, not just trees getting cut down.

The night before our debate one of my partner's friends tried to intervene in a fight in a bar and got stabbed and my partner wound up going up to Syracuse in an ambulance with his friend so I had to present both sides of the case.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

Paying them would be a great idea IMO. Telling them not to monetize a natural resource because it's better for the world, after we've long logged our own forests.. Well I can see how they object to that.

I don't think Bolsonaro was a reliable person to deal with but this could be done now.

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest continues to decline

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