{"id":17438,"date":"2016-02-05T13:11:06","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17438"},"modified":"2016-02-05T13:11:06","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:11:06","slug":"the-worlds-forests-will-collapse-if-we-dont-learn-to-say-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17438","title":{"rendered":"The world\u2019s forests will collapse if we don\u2019t learn to say \u2018no\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world\u2019s forests will collapse if we don\u2019t learn to say\u00a0\u2018no\u2019<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n

An\u00a0alarming new study<\/a>\u00a0has shown that the world\u2019s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of \u201ccore forest\u201d \u2014 remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive\u00a0wildlife<\/a>\u00a0and ecological processes \u2014 are vanishing even faster.<\/p>\n

Core forests are disappearing because a tsunami of\u00a0new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0is rapidly slicing into the world\u2019s last wild places, opening them up like a flayed fish to deforestation, fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities.<\/p>\n

Most vulnerable of all are\u00a0forests in the tropics<\/a>. These forests sustain the planet\u2019s most biologically rich and environmentally important habitats.<\/p>\n

The collapse of the world\u2019s forests isn\u2019t going to stop until we start to say \u201cno\u201d to environmentally destructive projects.<\/p>\n

Damn the dams<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those who criticise new infrastructure projects are often accused of opposing direly needed economic development, or \u2014 if they hail from industrial nations \u2014 of being hypocrites.<\/p>\n

But when one begins to look in detail at the proposed projects, an intriguing pattern appears: Many are either poorly justified or will have far greater costs than benefits.<\/p>\n

For example, in a\u00a0recent essay<\/a>\u00a0in the journal Science, Amazon expert Philip Fearnside argues that many of the 330-odd hydroelectric dams planned or under construction in the Amazon will be more trouble than they\u2019re worth.<\/p>\n

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Construction of the S\u00e3o Manoel Dam in the Brazilian Amazon.<\/span>\u00a0International Rivers\/Flickr<\/a>,\u00a0CC BY-NC-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption>
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Many of these dams will have huge environmental impacts, argues Fearnside, and will dramatically increase forest loss in remote regions.<\/p>\n

This happens both because the Amazon is quite flat, requiring large areas of forest to be flooded, and because dams and their power lines require road networks that open up the forest to other human impacts. For instance, the 12 dams planned for Brazil\u2019s Tapaj\u00f3s River are expected to increase Amazon deforestation by\u00a0almost 1 million hectares<\/a>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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The world\u2019s forests will collapse if we don\u2019t learn to say\u00a0\u2018no\u2019 An\u00a0alarming new study\u00a0has shown that the world\u2019s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of \u201ccore forest\u201d \u2014 remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive\u00a0wildlife\u00a0and ecological processes \u2014 are vanishing even faster. Core forests are disappearing because a tsunami of\u00a0new roads, dams, power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[150,1000,12243,4553,12241,12242],"class_list":["post-17438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-collapse","tag-dams","tag-environmental-destruction","tag-forests","tag-roads","tag-tropics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17439,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17438\/revisions\/17439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}