Demand for Palm Oil Prompts More Forest Clearing Fires in Sumatra. By Nopporn Wong-Anan, Reuters, 10/21/10. “Illegal forest clearing fires in Indonesia's Sumatra Island are sending haze across the Malacca Strait to neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, causing the worst air pollution since 2006, officials said on Thursday. Despite pledge among governments to deter fires, the haze prompted Malaysia to alert vessels in the Malacca Strait of poor visibility as short as 2 nautical miles and shut many schools. Singapore, covered in thick smoke this week, saw its air pollution index hit the highest level since 2006 on Wednesday. The port and international airport are still functioning as normal. ‘The suspicion is that this is coming from forests that have been opened up for plantations. We think it may be for palm oil,’ said Purwasto Saroprayogi, head of the land and forest fires department at Indonesia's Environment Ministry.”

Renewable Energy Bill Introduced With Bipartisan Support. By Timothy Gardner, Reuters, September 21, 2010. "A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill on Tuesday [9/21] that would require utilities to generate minimum levels of renewable power which environmentalists welcomed but analysts said had slim chances of passing this year. Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat and chair of the Senate's energy committee, and Sam Brownback, a Republican, introduced the bill which would create a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) requiring utilities to generate 15% renewable power by 2021. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped a Renewable Electricity Standard out of the broader oil spill bill in July saying climate measures would not get a single Republican vote. But the bill introduced on Tuesday has some support as it is nearly the same bill as one that passed Bingaman's committee last year.

"Supporters of the bill said two other Republicans, Senators Susan Collins and John Ensign, also support it. Steel workers, utilities that have strong renewable portfolios, and environmentalists seeking to spur reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have pushed for the bill saying it would create jobs to help the country compete with China in production of wind turbines and solar power panels… The bill introduced Tuesday would set incremental mandates requiring power companies to generate 3% of their power from renewable sources such as wind, solar, ocean waves, and geothermal by 2012. It requires 6% renewable energy by 2016, 9% by 2017, 12% by 2019, and 15% by 2021."

Saving Europe's Last Primeval Forest. AFP, August 13, 2010. "After three days of protests... Greenpeace said on August 13 that it had agreed with Poland on ways to protect the country's Bialowieza forest, Europe's last first-growth woodland. 'Thanks to today's agreement, logging will take place outside zones that are naturally precious. It's a great step forward in protecting this unique forest,' Robert Cyglicki, head of Greenpeace Poland, told reporters about the accord with the environment ministry… Fearing the issue will come up again next year, Greenpeace also wants the expansion of the Polish national park which currently covers some 17% of the Bialowieza forest… The vast Bialowieza forest, which covers some 140,000 hectares (345,000 acres) and spans the Polish-Belarussian border, is the final remnant of a massive woodland that spread across Europe after the last Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago. About 800 European bison live there freely, half of them on the Polish side. It is also home to rare bird species and lynx."

U.S. Forest Service Now Spends 49% of Budget Combating Fires. By Dina Fine Maron, ClimateWire, August 9, 2010. "Dave Cleaves is charged with charting the course for the Forest Service's response to climate change, helping America's forests and grasslands cope with ongoing threats exacerbated by global warming -- wildfires, diseases and pests. In five months on the job, he has laid out the broad strokes for the agency's next phase in its climate change response. He is only the second climate change adviser for the century-old agency, and he is the first to take the reins during the Obama administration... As forest ecosystems climb northward, for example, deciding what strain of tree to plant in an area wiped out by wildfires is not just a simple matter of planting what lived there before. A hundred years from now, that area's landscape could look completely different. That, Cleaves admitted, is 'daunting.'

"Though firefighting activities required just a 13% slice of the Forest Service's budget in 1991, they now engulf almost half of the agency's budget. For fiscal 2011, the Obama administration requested $5.38 billion for all the Forest Service's activities, about 49% of which would be earmarked for wildland fire activities. In a sense, the agency's main problem is burning through its money. Urban sprawl, in particular, has fueled the bloated firefighting budget, since beating back fires near homes requires more pricey maneuvering. Meanwhile, the agency's earlier fire suppression policies, drought and the millions of acres of dead trees left in the wake of warm temperature-loving bark beetles also set the stage for more frequent and intense burns. And hotter fires from abundant fuel are scorching soils, which may fundamentally change the landscape."

Towering Northwest Forests Stand Out in Global Map. By Joe Rojas-Burke, Oregonian, July 23, 2010. "Nowhere on Earth can you find forests as tall and vast as those in the Pacific Northwest. They make Canada's great boreal forests look like shrubs. Amazon rain forest trees are mere halflings by comparison... That's strikingly clear in the first global-scale map charting the heights of the world's forests. Michael Lefsky, a former Oregon State University scientist now at Colorado State University, devised a way to combine millions of observations from NASA satellites to map tree heights around the planet. Beyond bragging rights, the mapping effort gives scientists an important tool to track how the world's forests draw in carbon dioxide and influence the rate of global warming. While the first map is a rough draft, it shows the potential for making accurate global measurements of forest growth. 'This is a very impressive technical accomplishment,' says forest ecologist Stephen Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. Only a tiny fraction of the earth's land mass gives rise to tall forests. In northern California, small patches of coast redwoods exceed 200 feet and from British Columbia to Oregon, rain-drenched stands of Douglas fir and Sitka spruce routinely reach 130 feet or more. Forests along the southern rim of the Himalayas come close, as do forests in Laos, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Amazon, average heights of forest stands seldom exceed 70 feet. In the huge tracts of boreal forest across North America and Eurasia, trees are lucky to reach 50 feet."

Canada's Forestry Firms, Environmentalists to Call a Truce over Northern Forest. By Tim Shufelt, CanWest, May 17, 2010. "The battle between forestry companies protecting their timber supply and environmentalists trying to save the trees has been too fierce to hide in the shade of Canada's vast boreal forest. But after decades of fighting, the bitter foes have agreed to bury the hatchet. At the heart of the agreement is an enormous swath of boreal forest spanning about 70 million hectares, an area almost twice the size of Germany. Some of the country's biggest forestry companies will agree to freeze logging on parts of the northern forest. In return, environmental groups will pull marketing campaigns denouncing logging practices and will even go so far as to give the companies a green endorsement... The boreal is the northern treed region that adjoins the tundra along the Arctic tree line, and its southern reaches are particularly valuable ecologically, providing habitat for threatened wildlife and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of Canada's boreal forest is publicly owned and managed, but about half has been allocated or licensed to logging companies."

Indonesia Probes Massive Forest Corruption. AFP, May 20, 2010. "Indonesia's anti-graft commission is investigating rampant corruption in the forestry sector that has cost the state more than 100 billion dollars, an official said on May 20... Deforestation and rampant illegal logging is the main reason Indonesia is the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions report [Illegal Logging in Indonesia, PDF, 20 pages] by a coalition including the BlueGreen Alliance and the Rainforest Action Network released in the United States this month found that 40 to 55% of Indonesia's timber is illegally harvested. It warned that 98% of the archipelago's lowland forests could be gone by 2022."

Depopulation May Be Harming The Amazon Rainforest. By Rhett A. Butler, Mongabay.Com, April 1, 2010. "Urbanization may be having unexpected impacts in the Amazon rainforest by leaving forest areas vulnerable to exploitation by outsiders, report researchers writing in Conservation Letters. Conducting field surveys during the course of 10,000-kilometers of travel along remote Amazon rivers, Luke Parry of Lancaster University found that a sharp decrease in rural habitation has not been accompanied by a decline in harvesting of wildlife and forest resources, indicating that urban populations exact a heavy toll on distant forests through hunting, fishing, logging, and harvesting of non-timber forest products... 'We found evidence that commercial activity continued on the rivers many hundreds of miles beyond the last rural household. Much of the harvesting we observed was to supply the demand for wild foods such as turtles, fish and forest animals to service growing demand from the Amazon's burgeoning urban population.' Parry said that abandoned land was more likely to be colonized by speculators, who cut down forest for cattle pasture, hoping to capitalize on appreciating land values. Under Brazilian law, forest-clearing is one of the easiest ways to gain property rights on unclaimed land. 'When people leave the villages they leave behind a vacuum,' he said. 'When the land isn't occupied the forest is exposed to the threat of large scale deforestation and unregulated land speculation in abandoned headwaters which is a real possibility in some areas due to expansion of the road network.'"

Nestle Drops Palm Oil Supplier after Report. By Catherine Hornby. Reuters, March 17, 2010. "Nestle, the world's biggest food group, said it had stopped buying palm oil from Indonesia's Sinar Mas due to concerns about rainforest destruction, following a similar move by consumer goods firm Unilever. Nestle's announcement came after Greenpeace released a report [Caught Red Handed: How Nestle's Use of Palm Oil is Having a Devastating Impact on Rainforest, the Climate and Orangutans, PDF, 9 pp] which looked into how the company was sourcing palm oil. Switzerland's Nestle."

Indonesia Walks a 'Tricky' Path Toward Growth and Sustainability. By Jessica Leber, ClimateWire, March 22, 2010. "Four decades of aggressive development have stripped Indonesia's forests nearly half bare since the time when a young Barack Obama lived there from 1967 to 1971. In June, the U.S. president plans to revisit his childhood home as he aims to forge closer ties with the emerging but often overlooked Asia-Pacific power. Climate change will be a top agenda item in developing a new U.S.-Indonesia bilateral partnership, administration officials said in a briefing last week. The visit comes as Indonesia's government tries for a greater voice in U.N. climate talks and has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas output 26% over the next decade. It says it will raise that target to 41% if enough foreign aid comes under a climate deal. But the world's fourth most populated nation also faces intense pressure to maintain a 6% growth rate in its gross domestic product to employ its expanding workforce... Still, some 80% of Indonesia's greenhouse gas output comes straight from its landscape, as loggers and paper companies clear natural forests and grow plantations, miners cut through forests with roads, and palm oil producers drain carbon-rich peatlands and clear them with fires that can burn out of control."

Palm Oil Defenders Speak Out in Indonesia. By Jerome Rivet, AFP, March 1, 2010. "It is blamed for everything from deforestation to threatening the extinction of the orangutan, but palm oil is a vital source of income for many developing countries, the crop's producers say. In Indonesia, the world's largest palm oil producer, where the plant provides work for three million people, the government is keen to promote the benefits of the crop. Gatot Irianto, research director at Indonesia's Ministry of Agriculture, pleaded with producers, scientists and NGOs meeting on the holiday island of Bali in late February to reconsider the plant's reputation... Most experts agree that demand for palm products such as cooking oil, margarine, soaps, cosmetics and resins, will continue to increase and better management is the only way to reduce its environmental impact... Jean-Charles Jacquemard, an engineer at CIRAD, the French Centre for Agricultural Research said palm oil was too profitable for producers in Asia and Africa to abandon, regardless of pressure from the West. 'It is a plant which has many benefits for them. It produces a large amount of oil per hectare, three to six times more than rapeseed or sunflower,' he said. 'Its cultivation uses relatively little fertilizer -- around eight kilogrammes (18 pounds) per tree per year.' In Indonesia, 40% of production comes from small producers who, by farming between 10 and 20 hectares, 'are able to live decently and send their children to university,' he said."

Saving the Amazon May be the Most Cost-Effective Way to Cut Emissions. By Margot Roosevelt, LATimes, February 21, 2010. "Governors of the Brazilian Amazon's nine states are pushing the U.S. and other industrial nations to invest in projects under rules known as REDD -- or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation -- that are being designed through the auspices of the United Nations. Under pending legislation to cap greenhouse gases, the U.S. government would auction emission allowances, funneling as much as $3 billion from the annual proceeds into rain forest protection. U.S. companies facing carbon controls could meet part of their obligations by investing as much as $13 billion a year by 2020 to preserve forests.

"And several Amazon governors have signed agreements with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to measure the carbon in their forests with the goal of selling carbon credits in California's cap-and-trade market, set to begin in 2012. The program would allow California businesses to use the credits to meet their emission caps, and thus funnel several hundred million dollars a year into tropical forest protection. The reason? Slash-and-burn deforestation accounts for about 15% of humanity's carbon dioxide emissions. Despite activists' efforts, forests have been disappearing at the rate of about 34 million acres a year for the last two decades. Globally, Indonesia and Brazil are the third- and fourth-largest emitters respectively of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S., because of their breakneck pace of forest destruction.

"Saving the Amazon, Earth's largest tropical jungle, can be a cheaper and faster way to avoid greenhouse gas emissions than replacing coal-fired power plants with renewable energy or switching to electric cars -- although all such measures are considered necessary by climate experts. President Obama acknowledged as much last fall. 'It is probably the most cost-effective way for us to address the issue of climate change, having . . . mechanisms in place to avoid further deforestation,' he said. Despite the failure to adopt a long-term climate treaty in Copenhagen last year, the U.S., along with Australia, Britain, France, Japan and Norway, promised $3.5 billion in fast-start funds to help preserve tropical forests. But if nations across Latin America, Africa and Asia are to guard their trees, they must first alleviate the poverty of 1.2 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods. Many of these developing nations, struggling economically, bristle at preaching from wealthier countries." See Amazon graphic and slide show.

California May Reverse Carbon Credit Provision which Encourages Clearcutting. Press Release,Center for Biological Diversity, February 12, 2010. "In response to a formal legal letter filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, the California Air Resources Board has proposed to withdraw its adoption of a 'Forest Project Protocol' that would have allowed logging companies to earn valuable carbon credits for clearcutting projects [planting monoculture wood lots in place of forests] and other destructive practices. At its February 25 meeting, the Board will consider reversing its adoption of the protocol pending a legally required review of environmental impacts to forests and the climate... In September 2009, the Air Resources Board adopted an updated version of the protocol that would grant carbon credits to damaging forest-management projects. The Board's adoption of the protocol as a methodology for carbon accounting was the first step toward allowing forest landowners to accumulate credits for the CO2 stored in trees and forest products. Polluters would have been able to buy those credits instead of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions under AB 32, California's global warming law, or other laws requiring mitigation of climate change impacts. In November, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal letter demanding that the Board rescind its adoption of the protocol."

USDA Weighs Genetic Engineering Commercial Forests. By Paul Voosen, Greenwire, January 29, 2010. "While the practice of splicing foreign DNA into food crops has become common in corn and soy, few companies or researchers have dared to apply genetic engineering to plants that provide an essential strut of the U.S. economy, trees. But that will soon change. Two industry giants, International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp., are planning to transform plantation forests of the southeastern United States by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus, a rapidly growing Australian tree that in its conventional strains now dominates the tropical timber industry. The companies' push into genetically modified trees, led by their joint biotech venture, ArborGen, looks to overcome several hurdles for the first time. Most prominently, they are banking on a controversial gene splice that restricts trees' ability to reproduce, meant to allay fears of bioengineered eucalyptus turning invasive and overtaking native forests... Yet many questions remain about the effectiveness of the fertility system used by ArborGen, which, according to leading scientists, has never been rigorously studied in multiyear trials to prove that it can effectively control plants' spread. More research must be conducted before such systems are relied upon to restrict pollen and seed spread, they say... Given the uncertainty involved, however, the Nature Conservancy has recommended to USDA that ArborGen be allowed fewer acres and trees to flower, and none in Florida."

Haiti Earthquake, Deforestation Heighten Landslide Risk. By Ker Than, NatGeographic, January 12, 2010. "The combination of widespread deforestation and the recent earthquake in Haiti could lead to more landslides in the already hard-hit country, scientists say (Haiti map). Many of Haiti's people, the poorest in the Americas, routinely cut down trees for fuel -- either to burn 'raw' or turn into charcoal. As a result, the destruction of Haiti's natural forests is almost total, making the Caribbean country one of the most deforested in the world. As Haiti's trees have disappeared, landslides have become a major concern, especially during the rainy season, and the destabilizing effects of an earthquake on soil only worsen the problem. Forest canopies serve as natural buffers against wind and rain, and the deep roots of trees help keep the granular soil from shifting. Among the rare bright spots for Haiti this week are that its capital, Port-au-Prince, is on relatively flat land -- making the landslide threat one less thing to worry about -- and that the earthquake struck during the dry season."

Northern Forest Account for Over Half of World's Forest Based Carbon Sinks. By John Lorinc, NYTimes, November 12, 2009. "A coalition of conservation groups are calling on international climate negotiators in Copenhagen next month to develop land-use policy incentives intended to encourage governments to protect natural carbon storehouses -- especially those in northern boreal forests and peatlands found in Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. 'The 208.1 billion tons of carbon estimated to be stored by forest and peatland ecosystems within Canada's Boreal Forest region is equivalent to 26 years worth of the world's carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning, as measured in 2006,' noted a report [The Carbon the World Forgot, PDF, 36 pp] released Wednesday by the Canadian Boreal Initiative. Undisturbed northern boreal forests, the report says, account for almost 60% of the world's forest-based carbon sinks. By contrast to rain forests, much of the boreal carbon is stored in underground root and soil systems, and will accumulate for thousands of years. Its extent has been underestimated, the authors say."

Brazilian Deforestation Shows Largest Drop in 20 Years. By Marco Sibaja, AP, November 12, 2009. "Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped nearly 46% from August 2008 to July 2009 -- the biggest annual decline in two decades, the government said Thursday. Analysis of satellite imagery by the National Institute for Space Research shows an estimated 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) of forest were cleared during the 12-month period, the lowest rate since the government started monitoring deforestation in 1988. 'The new deforestation data represents an extraordinary and significant reduction for Brazil,' President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a statement. The numbers have been falling since 2004, when they reached a peak of 27,000 square kilometers (10,425 square miles) cleared in one year, according to the space research institute."

Canada Establishes Boreal Forest Preserve Twice Size of California. By Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian (UK), October 29, 2009. "In the far north latitudes, buried within a seemingly endless expanse of evergreen forests, the authorities in Canada are building up one of the world's best natural defences against global warming. In a series of initiatives, Canadian provincial governments and aboriginal leaders have set aside vast tracts of coniferous woods, wetlands, and peat. The conservation drive bans logging, mining, and oil drilling on some 250 million acres -- an area more than twice the size of California... In the latest addition to the carbon storehouse, the provincial premier of Manitoba, Gary Doer, this month announced a $10 milion Canadian fund to protect a 10.8 milion-acre expanse of boreal or evergreen forest. It was one of Doer's last acts as premier; he took over as Canada's ambassador to Washington this month."

Working to Save the 'Living Dead' in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. By Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, September 23, 2009. [Fourth in a series of interviews with participants at the 2009 Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) conference.] "The Atlantic Forest may very well be the most imperiled tropical ecosystem in the world: it is estimated that 7% (or less) of the original forest remains. Lining the coast of Brazil, what is left of the forest is largely patches and fragments that are hemmed in by metropolises and monocultures. Yet, some areas are worse than others, such as the Pernambuco Endemism Centre, a region in the northeast that has largely been ignored by scientists and conservation efforts. Here, 98% of the forest is gone, and 70% of what remains are patches measuring less than 10 hectares. Due to this fragmentation all large mammals have gone regionally extinct, while the medium and small sized mammals are described by Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes, a professor and researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco, as the 'living dead'. The threats to the region and its species are numerous: from widespread hunting to forest exploitation for burning wood and construction material, from a boom in sugarcane biofuels to poor governance. Behind all of this is extreme poverty and a lack of education, according to Pontes. 'Absolute misery and indecent salaries for the lowest classes… prevent them from having access to the very basic daily items, such as animal protein, gas butane for cooking and other purposes, construction materials, and so on.'"

Interior Launches Climate Strategy. By Juliet Eilperin, WashPost, September 15, 2009. "Interior Secretary Ken Salazar launched the Obama administration's first coordinated response to the impacts of climate change Monday, which he said would both monitor how global warming is altering the nation's landscape and help the country cope with those changes."