deforestation

Molly is our online marketing coordinator and is next up in the blog relay, a whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

In January 2005, the Onilahy River in southwest Madagascar flooded. Nineteen people were killed and thousands left homeless. The cyclone that caused it was probably exacerbated by climate change; the landslides that followed were definitely made worse by extensive deforestation in the area.

The flood was little reported outside Madagascar. Similar events, caused or worsened by environmental destruction, happen all over the world on a regular basis, and most of them don't make the news. The only reason I know about it is because I was there.

Huge areas in the Amazon rainforest are illegally logged to clear land for soya plantations © Greenpeace/Beltra

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.

Prince Charles has a cunning plan to protect rainforests like this one along the banks of the Congo river © Stok/Greenpeace

The almost complete lack of green issues on the G20 agenda has had heads shaking both in our office and across the environmental movement, yet there was one result this week worth celebrating. It didn't come from the G20 directly, but the presence of so many world leaders was an excellent opportunity for Prince Charles to gather many of them together to talk about rainforests.

For some time now, the Prince has (like us) been promoting the idea that stopping deforestation in places like the Amazon and Indonesia is an excellent way to put the brakes on climate change. His recent trip to the Amazon (documented by the Sun's new environment editor) was just the latest demonstration of the Prince's passion for the issue.

Greenpeace China projects a climate change message onto Yong Ding Gate: Beijing, March 23 2009

The latest monthly slideshow of Greenpeace activities around the world has just been published, and it's been a busy time. Lots of action around climate change, as you'd expect, with big events in the US and Brazil, and a symbolic projection onto the Yong Ding gate in Beijing, China. 

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.

Fox News is a strange beast which is at once both wonderfully entertaining and deeply, deeply disturbing. Here in the UK, we're insulated from its 'Day Today gone real' presence (although I'm not so smugly parochial that I haven't noticed our own TV news drifting in a similar direction) and if it weren't for the wonder of YouTube, we might not see it at all.

So a big thumbs up to Rolf Skar from Greenpeace USA who gave an interview this week about the new tissue paper guide they've recently released. The two newscasters get to do a tissue texture test (recycled comes out good), and Rolf valiantly presses on when one says she finds recycled toilet paper "really hard and scratchy". But there are creams you can get for that.

Eucalyptus plantations surround an area of rainforest in the Amazon: one of Daniel's winning images ©Greenpeace/Beltrá

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.

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.