- It is estimated that an area of rainforest the size of
Poland - some 78 million acres of land - is destroyed each year by logging,
mining, farming, fire and other human activities.
-
- Rainforests cover about 2 per cent of the earth's surface
yet they harbour the greatest concentration of wildlife on earth, which
led Norman Myers, the Oxford environmentalist, to describe them as "the
finest celebration of nature ever known on the planet".
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- Between 40 and 50 per cent of all known and yet-to-be-discovered
species are thought to live in the relatively small space stretching from
the forest undergrowth to the tree canopy.
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- The richest rainforests occur in tropical climates -
as opposed to the cooler rainforests of more temperate regions -- which
stretch along the equator from South America and Africa to east Asia. The
Amazon is home to the biggest tropical rainforest on earth but has been
subjected to one of the most sustained deforestation programmes in recent
history.
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- Last May, a team of American and Brazilian scientists
found that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has accelerated significantly
since 1990 despite claims by the government in Brasilia that it is trying
to curb both legal and illegal logging.
-
- William Laurance, an expert on rainforest destruction
at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, said forest loss
has shot up by 50 per cent in the southern and eastern regions of the Amazon
since 2002.
-
- "The recent deforestation numbers are just plain
scary. During the past two years nearly 12 million acres of rainforest
have been destroyed - that's equivalent to about 11 football fields a minute,"
he said.
-
- Scientists link the increase in deforestation to Brazil's
$40bn (£22bn) development drive, launched in 2000 to build new roads,
power lines, gas pipelines, hydroelectric power stations and river-drainage
schemes.
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- Brazilian politicians argued that the development wasneeded
to lift millions of people with no access to basic sanitation or education
out of poverty. However, some scientists believe land speculation and the
rapid expansion of soybean farming and cattle ranching has led to a deforestation
rush.
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- Philip Fearnside, of Brazil's National Institute for
Amazonian Research, explained: "Soybean farms cause some forest clearing
directly, but they have a much greater impact by consuming cleared land,
savannah and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn
farmers even deeper into the forest frontier.
-
- "Soybean farming also provides a key economic and
political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects, which accelerate
deforestation by other actors," he said.
-
- History has shown that whenever a road is built through
pristine rainforest, deforestation of the surrounding area quickly follows
with miners and illegal loggers finding it easier to move in with heavy
equipment.
-
- Illegal logging for tropical hardwood is particularly
difficult to police given the remoteness of the locations and the ease
with which it can be done with chainsaws and trucks.
-
- Mark Cochrane of Michigan State University said that
these initial forays into a pristine forest often go unnoticed by satellite
observations: "When you view these forests from a distance, they look
OK, but when you stand in them, you can see they've been thinned, and that
they've changed," he said.
-
- "You can see how they've been chewed up. It's like
they have holes punched in them. These holes can make a rainforest dry
out and be vulnerable to fire," he added.
-
- Fire is perhaps the most destructive force in rainforest
ecology. Both deliberate and unintentional fires are devouring millions
of acres each year.
-
- "These rainforest fires are much more frequent than
these ecosystems can resist. These fires are flying under the radar and
people don't realise what's happening," Dr Cochrane said.
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- Furthermore, a study by the University of Sao Paulo and
the Smithsonian Institution has found evidence that rising carbon dioxide
levels in the atmosphere - caused by global industrial pollution - cause
some trees to grow faster at the expense of others, potentially destabilizing
the ecosystem.
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- "In general, large, fast-growing trees are winning
at the expense of smaller trees that live in the forest understorey,"
said Alexandre Oliveira at Sao Paulo.
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- RAINFORESTS IN FIGURES
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- * Brazil's rainforest is the world's biggest, covering
two million square miles of the Amazon river basin
-
- * Brazil is top of the list for deforestation with more
than 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) being lost each year
-
- * Indonesia is second, losing more than a million hectares
of rainforest, followed by the Congo, Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, Malaysia,
Burma, Sudan and Thailand
-
- * Computer models suggest there will be no rainforests
left in 50 years
-
- * Sixty per cent of the anti-cancer drugs developed over
the past 10 years come from tropical forests.
-
- * An area the size of Mexico and Indonesia combined lost
its rainforest over the past 15 years
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world
- /environment/story.jsp?story=539801
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