Deforestation down as the region’s economy switches away from agriculture towards more mining and energy industries, report says
LONDON, July 22 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Deforestation rates in the world’s second largest rainforest have slowed by a third over the last decade as the region’s economy switched away from agriculture and towards more carbon intensive mining and energy industries, a report showed Monday.
Images taken from satellites showed that fewer than 2,000 square kilometers (sq km) of the Congo basin rainforest were lost annually from 2000 to 2010 compared with almost 3,000 sq km in the 1990s.
“The wetter Congo basin countries had lower rates of deforestation, in part because tax receipts from oil and mineral industries in this region spurred rural to urban migration, declines in agriculture and increased imports of cereals from abroad,” the paper published by UK-based The Royal Society said.
The Congo basin covers nearly 2 million sq km of land, and is second in size only to the Amazon.
It spans across six countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds rich deposits of copper, tin, cobalt and gold, and is among a number of developing countries trying to increase revenue from its mineral wealth.
“Mining and onshore oil activities can, and do cause some deforestation, but it is of a much smaller scale than large scale agriculture where huge areas of land can be cleared to grow crops,” said Simon Lewis, forest scientist at University College London and editor of the paper.
“Of course the imaging cannot detect other types of environmental impact the mining and oil operations could have,” he said.
Deforestation is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, estimated to be responsible for up to 17 percent of global releases of heat-trapping gases.
A YEAR OF EMISSIONS
The forests of the Congo Basin could store up to 39 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide according to the World Bank, more than a year of global man-made CO2 emissions that are blamed for warming the planet.
In 2007, over 190 nations attending a U.N. conference promised to slow deforestation rates by devising an international framework that would allow the private sector and rich countries to pay poorer nations to keep trees standing.
That framework is expected to be signed off at U.N. talks in Warsaw this year, opening up the prospect that projects that slow deforestation could earn carbon credits that companies or countries can use to offset emissions under a new climate deal expected to come into force in 2020.
Due to the delay in the legal framework, just a handful of projects have gotten off the ground so far, funded largely by government and World Bank initiatives, and Lewis said these were unlikely to have had much of an impact so far.
But in the future such schemes, known as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), will become more important to maintain the slowdown, he said.
“Central Africa is at a pivotal moment. The growing trend is for the country to seek income from the oil and mining industry but on the flip side there is growing global demand for agriculture products and crops which could threaten more rainforest,” he said.
To help preserve the region the World Bank, in 2011, launched a $13-million REDD project in the Congo Basin with the Global Environment Facility.
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