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DOSSIER Deforestation with just 40 cubic metres, equal to just ten large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019 (25,000 cubic metre of illegal timber was seized in 2018). The Chico Mendes Institute, responsible for such seizures, must now announce in advance the time and location of its raids on illegal loggers. The picture appears just as grim in central Africa. Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) covers 93.2m ha, but 8.5m ha was lost between 2001 and 2017. Palmed Off, a report this summer by the Rainforest Foundation UK, concluded that palm oil and rubber plantations destroy large swathes of rainforests and disrespect human rights in the Congo basin. Plantations in the region are rarely subject to environmental impact assessments and undeclared and illegal logging is common. Indigenous communities have been displaced from lands they depend upon for hunting, fishing and farming. Within the Congo basin, the pressures differ geographically. On its periphery, in Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, the forest is undergoing rapid change. Rates of forest loss also shot up dramatically in 2018 in Ghana (60 per cent) and Cote D’Ivoire (26 per cent), according to the WRI, primarily as a result of small-scale cocoa farming that was responding to a global surge in cocoa demand. ‘We’re increasingly seeing roads, pipelines, dams and railways – infrastructure that typically gets put into developing countries,’ says Counsell. ‘When you get these corridors of infrastructure, they bring secondary impacts, such as logging, palm oil and subsistence farming.’ Rubber plantations and mining activity are also increasingly intrusive in these areas. ‘Without extremely strict controls – which are beyond the capability of the governments there – it’s pretty much impossible to stop the cascade of deforestation that follows,’ he says. Meanwhile, in the DRC, which accounts for two-thirds of the basin, the impact of large-scale logging concessions has been monitored closely with satellite imaging since 2004. At the last count the country had 10m ha of legal logging concessions. The logging is notionally sustainable and involves the harvesting of trees such as the sapele, sipo, azobe, wenge, afrormosia and iroko, which are popularly used in the west for decking, boardwalks and quays. A good deal of this is issued with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal of approval. ‘Concessions involve selective harvesting of prime commercial timber,’ says Counsell. ‘The problem is, once the trees are gone, they’re gone. The companies that log the timber either move on or go bust. They leave behind them labourers and associated infrastructure such as roads. Small-scale subsistence farming and oil palm moves in and the already degraded forest gets completely degraded.’ Greenpeace is equally critical. ‘In the Congo Basin, we are witnessing widespread environmental and human rights violations,’ says Victorine CheThoener, head of the Congo Basin forests campaign at Greenpeace Africa. ‘It’s all a kleptocracy where governments and companies collude to loot our natural resources and ordinary people pay the price.’ Other pressures also apply to the region, says Hansen. ‘Congo has 100m people, they have to feed themselves. There’s really no state to offer them any 20 • Geographical Increasing Primary Forest Loss in South American Countries 300k (hec t are s) los s fore st Primar y 250k 200k 150k 100k 50k Bolivia Peru Colombia 0 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Fighting back in the DRC n There is room for optimism in the DRC, says Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK, thanks to a recent shift in attitudes towards ownership. ‘Unlike Latin America,’ he says, ‘there has historically been no possibility for local communities to gain security of tenure. Farmers are effectively squatters. That does not create conditions to look after the land sustainably.’ However, two laws have changed the ground rules and give Counsell hope. In 2016 the DRC government approved a law allowing communities to claim ownership of areas of land up to 50,000ha. ‘This is important, it allows them to protect the land against logging companies. It’s a positive opportunity that hasn’t emerged elsewhere in the region.’ So far, 450ha of land has been designated in this way to 40 community groups. A separate presidential decree, passed in 2003, bans the expansion of any new logging concession. ‘It was widely breached during the first few years but it is now more or less holding steady,’ says Counsell. ‘Without this, the 10mha of logging concessions could have expanded to 70mha.’ Community groups are increasingly feeling confident about reporting breaches and illegal activity.
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In Colombia, primary forest loss increased nine per cent between 2017 and 2018, continuing an upward trend since 2016. In Bolivia, most forest loss was related to conversion of forests to large-scale agriculture and pasture. Forest loss in Peru, on the other hand, was generally for small-scale agriculture, including some illegal cocoa production Source: Globalforestwatch.org ‘There are still voices in Brazil that are saying it’s not a good idea to roll back reforms’ support, people are largely on their own. That makes it a much harder nut to crack.’ Yet the picture is nuanced, cautions Counsell. Sustainable use of the forest is entirely possible. Much of the Congo basin, he points out, has been inhabited for more than 2,000 years and is subject to sustainable, rotational farming, hunting and gathering. ‘The pygmies have been there even longer. They’ve hunted bushmeat for their protein for all that time without any great impacts.’ Biodiversity has remained high, with more 600 tree species and 10,000 animal species identified. PALM READING Indonesia, meanwhile, is more of a paradox. Rainforest extends to 110.9m ha but between 2001 and 2017 the country lost 24.4m ha, or 15 per cent of its cover, amounting to 2.44 gigatonnes of CO2. The majority of loss relates to oil palm plantations. Yet according to WRI, the country appears to be making progress, with primary forest loss in Indonesia in 2018 40 per cent lower than the 2002 to 2016 average. Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, has pledged to transfer 127,000 sq km of state land to communities. Following Greenpeace pressure, Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader, which has a huge presence in Indonesia, last year committed to map and satellite monitor all of its suppliers. Greenpeace says this move has been ignored by other leading palm oil traders. Some onlookers suggest Indonesia’s political will has yet to be tested. ‘Sumatra alone has 9m ha of cleared forest just sitting there thanks to land speculation,’ says Hansen. ‘If they are going to plant oil palms then they don’t actually need to clear any more rainforest for a while, but their charts will say they’re reducing their deforestation rates.’ Furthermore, says Hansen, the bald figures will find other ways to erroneously imply things are headed in the right direction. ‘They’ve taken out all the easy forests, now they’re going into the swamps and up the mountain sides after what is left – which happens to be harder to reach, there’s less of it and it takes longer – but they can say they are taking out less than they used to.’ However, the WRI’s Seymour identifies real progress. ‘Oil palm plantations have fallen off quite a bit, there’s been a drop in the price of palm oil. But Indonesia has also imposed an escalating series of bans on the use of primary forest and peatlands for oil palm. The government position is definitely part of the picture.’ First-hand experience of deforestation-related catastrophe has also been a driver of reform in Indonesia. ‘The country became serious after the 2015 fires,’ says Seymour. ‘The government quickly understood the implications of deforestation. It wasn’t just the $16bn cost to the nation. You had millions of citizens suffering pulmonary stress as well. If you lose your forests it’s not just the global climate that suffers – without them your cities receive less water and have more extreme temperatures.’ Similar experiences in China, Thailand and the Philippines, where devastating flooding triggered by logging of forests, led to greater controls on deforestation, she adds. Such action indicates that sustainable solutions will come from forest-rich nations rather than the rich global north. ‘Those governments will drive whether the forests are protected,’ says Seymour. ‘Often it is a catastrophe that is the trigger, whether it is fires or flooding, that has impacted their population.’ GLOBAL CHANGES The torrent of depressing statistics should not let us lose sight of what can be achieved, and how, says Seymour. She points to the actions Brazil took in the first decade of this century, such as meaningful penalties for regional departments, incentives for preferential access to markets for doing the right thing. ‘There are still voices in Brazil in the supply chains that want access to Europe, that are saying it’s not a good idea to roll back reforms,’ she says. Many of the solutions are well-known and indeed self-evident points out William Baldwin-Cantello global leader on forests for WWF International. These include reducing food waste (one-third of food produced globally is chucked away); society needs to eat less meat; and we need to make greater use of degraded lands for agriculture rather than opening September 2019 • 21

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DOSSIER Deforestation with just 40 cubic metres, equal to just ten large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019 (25,000 cubic metre of illegal timber was seized in 2018). The Chico Mendes Institute, responsible for such seizures, must now announce in advance the time and location of its raids on illegal loggers. The picture appears just as grim in central Africa. Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) covers 93.2m ha, but 8.5m ha was lost between 2001 and 2017. Palmed Off, a report this summer by the Rainforest Foundation UK, concluded that palm oil and rubber plantations destroy large swathes of rainforests and disrespect human rights in the Congo basin. Plantations in the region are rarely subject to environmental impact assessments and undeclared and illegal logging is common. Indigenous communities have been displaced from lands they depend upon for hunting, fishing and farming. Within the Congo basin, the pressures differ geographically. On its periphery, in Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, the forest is undergoing rapid change. Rates of forest loss also shot up dramatically in 2018 in Ghana (60 per cent) and Cote D’Ivoire (26 per cent), according to the WRI, primarily as a result of small-scale cocoa farming that was responding to a global surge in cocoa demand. ‘We’re increasingly seeing roads, pipelines, dams and railways – infrastructure that typically gets put into developing countries,’ says Counsell. ‘When you get these corridors of infrastructure, they bring secondary impacts, such as logging, palm oil and subsistence farming.’ Rubber plantations and mining activity are also increasingly intrusive in these areas. ‘Without extremely strict controls – which are beyond the capability of the governments there – it’s pretty much impossible to stop the cascade of deforestation that follows,’ he says.

Meanwhile, in the DRC, which accounts for two-thirds of the basin, the impact of large-scale logging concessions has been monitored closely with satellite imaging since 2004. At the last count the country had 10m ha of legal logging concessions. The logging is notionally sustainable and involves the harvesting of trees such as the sapele, sipo, azobe, wenge, afrormosia and iroko, which are popularly used in the west for decking, boardwalks and quays. A good deal of this is issued with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal of approval.

‘Concessions involve selective harvesting of prime commercial timber,’ says Counsell. ‘The problem is, once the trees are gone, they’re gone. The companies that log the timber either move on or go bust. They leave behind them labourers and associated infrastructure such as roads. Small-scale subsistence farming and oil palm moves in and the already degraded forest gets completely degraded.’

Greenpeace is equally critical. ‘In the Congo Basin, we are witnessing widespread environmental and human rights violations,’ says Victorine CheThoener, head of the Congo Basin forests campaign at Greenpeace Africa. ‘It’s all a kleptocracy where governments and companies collude to loot our natural resources and ordinary people pay the price.’

Other pressures also apply to the region, says Hansen. ‘Congo has 100m people, they have to feed themselves. There’s really no state to offer them any

20 • Geographical

Increasing Primary Forest Loss in South American Countries

300k

(hec t are s)

los s fore st

Primar y

250k

200k

150k

100k

50k

Bolivia

Peru

Colombia

0

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Fighting back in the DRC

n There is room for optimism in the DRC, says Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK, thanks to a recent shift in attitudes towards ownership. ‘Unlike Latin America,’ he says, ‘there has historically been no possibility for local communities to gain security of tenure. Farmers are effectively squatters. That does not create conditions to look after the land sustainably.’

However, two laws have changed the ground rules and give Counsell hope. In 2016 the DRC government approved a law allowing communities to claim ownership of areas of land up to 50,000ha. ‘This is important, it allows them to protect the land against logging companies. It’s a positive opportunity that hasn’t emerged elsewhere in the region.’ So far, 450ha of land has been designated in this way to 40 community groups.

A separate presidential decree, passed in 2003, bans the expansion of any new logging concession. ‘It was widely breached during the first few years but it is now more or less holding steady,’ says Counsell. ‘Without this, the 10mha of logging concessions could have expanded to 70mha.’ Community groups are increasingly feeling confident about reporting breaches and illegal activity.

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