Some good news just in from Brazil, where soya traders have reinforced their commitment to boycott soya grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon.
Clearing-cutting to make space for new soya plantations has been one of the main causes of rainforest destruction in recent years, which is why we campaigned successfully for a moratorium (temporary ban) three years ago.
Posted by jamie — 12 March 2009 at 3:53pm
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There are some alarming stories in the press
today about how
much of the Amazon rainforest will be lost due to climate change. According to a new report from the Met Office's Hadley Centre, up to 85 per
cent of it will disappear if we see a 4C rise in global temperatures.
It's a nightmare scenario and on the face of
it, it makes you wonder if we shouldn't just throw in the towel - I have to
admit to the occasional dark thought along those lines myself. But on the
contrary, information like this illustrates yet again how crucial it is that we
address climate change and deforestation together, and do it now before
we get locked in to huge temperature rises.
Photographs illustrating the environmental problems we're facing provide one of the most powerful tools we have for our campaign work. Whether it's an image of the beauty that still remains or one of the havoc we humans so often create, sometimes one photo really can explain it all.
This map shows the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil and highlights some of the effects of the cattle industry on the Amazon rainforest. You can see how the slaughterhouses (the black dots) are strung along the roads through the state, which have cut through the green areas of forest and savannah.
Click on the Greenpeace placemarkers for more information and photos.
Posted by jamie — 20 February 2009 at 12:42pm
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One of the great things about working for an
international organisation is that my inbox is constantly filling with emails
from around the globe detailing what other Greenpeace offices are working on. A
thread I've been following particularly closely is the stream of messages
coming from the Arctic Sunrise which is currently back in Brazil on a two-and-a-half month tour of the country.
The purpose of the tour - which goes under the
name of 'Save The Planet Now... Or Now!' - is to highlight the important role Brazil (as the fourth largest emitter of
greenhouse gases on the planet) can play in fighting it in the lead-up to the
UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
For about three years now, we've been working on curbing the impacts of the soya industry on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil which, before the current moratorium was put into place, was replacing the forest with plantations on a massive scale.
However, there's another agricultural sector cutting deep into the forest which we're also going to tackle: cattle ranching. To assess the scale of the problem, Greenpeace researchers in Brazil have produced a new set of maps showing how the Amazon region has suffered.
Posted by jamie — 19 January 2009 at 11:27am
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The challenges of monitoring the effects of
deforestation on the Amazon are immense. The vast areas which need to be
covered means it's difficult to keep tabs on what's happening on the remote
fringes of the rainforest and news
of illegal logging and other environmental damage can take a long time to reach
the authorities, if they find out at all.
To help solve this problem, the Greenpeace
team in Brazil
has been training local people to map the impacts of the soya industry in the
Santarém region of the forest, the heart of soya production in the Amazon. It's
a collaborative project with Brazilian organisations Projeto Saude e Alegria (Health
and Happiness Project) and the Rural Workers Unions of Santarém and nearby
Belterra, training people to use GPS technology to pinpoint the damage caused
by intensive agriculture, empowering them to help defend their land and the rainforest.
Posted by jamie — 12 December 2008 at 11:11am
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High-tech smuggling operations may not be what
you'd normally associate with the ongoing clearance of the Amazon rainforest,
but logging companies intent on plundering it for timber have been using
hackers to break into the Brazilian government's sophisticated tracking system
and fiddle the records.
To monitor the amount of timber leaving the
Amazon state of Pará, the Brazilian environment ministry did away with paper dockets
and two years ago introduced an online system. Companies logging the rainforest for timber or charcoal production are only
allowed to fell a certain amount of timber every year and this is controlled by
the use of transport permits issued by the state government's computer system.
With the current climate talks now underway in
Poznan, the Brazilian government has finally
fulfilled a promise it made at the previous round of talks in Bali
last year and set targets for reducing deforestation in the Amazon. It's great to
see they finally have some targets to work towards (and it's been a long time
coming) but as is often the way with these political initiatives, it all falls
short of what's really needed.
