Region Archives: International

BRASILIA, Brazil — Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest slowed by nearly half compared to the year before, according to government satellite data released Wednesday. It’s the largest reduction since 2016, when officials began using the current method of measurement. In the past 12 months, the Amazon rainforest lost 4,300 square kilometers, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. That’s a nearly 46% decrease compared to the previous period. Still, much remains to be done to end the destruction and the month of July showed a 33% increase in tree cutting over July 2023. A strike by officials at federal environmental agencies contributed to this surge, said João Paulo Capobianco, for the Environment Ministry. …During this same period, deforestation in Brazil´s vast savannah, known as the Cerrado, increased by 9%. The native vegetation loss reached 7,015 square kilometers – an area 63% larger than the destruction in the Amazon.

David Lindenmayer

As scandal-plagued VicForests – Australia’s biggest native logging company – was preparing to shut its doors, the organisation’s CEO, Monique Dawson, was already working with other powerful logging bosses to set up a brand new organisation – The Healthy Forests Foundation, which would hire loggers and logging lobbyists from VicForests and elsewhere. The Healthy Forests Foundation’s core purpose, according to Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents, is “the protection and enhancement of the natural environment”. David Lindenmayer from Australian National University has another view. “The aim is just to work out ways to keep cutting the forest. It’s a front — it’s just a way of keeping the [logging] industry going,” Professor Lindenmayer said. The Healthy Forests Foundation says part of its purpose is to promote First Nations forest management, which proponents admit will also supply timber. …Some First Nations leaders are excited about the opportunities, and say removing trees is part of “healing country”.

The trade in black market timber is now the third most profitable cross-border crime after counterfeiting and drug trafficking, according to Interpol. The global fraud is destroying critical forests, undermining international sanctions and decimating indigenous lands and livelihoods. But authorities are hitting back. The Financial Times’s Madeleine Speed visits the high-tech forest detectives fighting the multibillion-dollar trade in tarnished timber. [Video story]

AUSTRALIA — Since European colonisation, 29 million hectares (54%) of the forests and woodlands that once existed in New South Wales have been destroyed. A further 9 million ha have been degraded in the past two centuries. This amounts to more than 60% of the state’s forest estate. We will never know the full impacts this rampant clearing and degradation have had on the state’s wildlife and plants. But it is now possible to put into perspective the impacts of logging practices in the past two decades on species that have already suffered enormous loss. Cutting down native vegetation for timber destroys habitat for forest-dependent species. Our research has found ongoing logging in NSW affects the habitat of at least 150 species considered at risk of extinction, due mostly to historical deforestation and degradation.

SAO PAULO — Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came into office in 2023 pledging to tackle deforestation in the Amazon. …But a new study indicates that deforestation alone accounts for an only fraction of climate damage involving the Amazon. Logging, forest burning and other forms of human-caused degradation, along with natural disturbances to the Amazon ecosystem, are releasing more climate-warming carbon dioxide than clear-cut deforestation, the study published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, which used data obtained from airborne laser scanning of the Amazon region for a more precise accounting of the changes in the rainforest than satellite imagery provides, found that human-caused degradation and natural disturbances accounted for 83% of the carbon emissions, with 17% loss from deforestation. The research underscores the damage being done to the forest by fires after a drought that has made the region a tinderbox.

AUSTRALIA – On January 1 this year, the commercial logging of native forests ended in Victoria and Western Australia. It was one of the most significant changes in the history of forest management in Australia. After the chainsaws fell silent, the debate began over how to best care for our forests in future. There has been a stream of articles about the threats of thinning forests, the damage from fire management, and confusion over Indigenous-led forest management. These practices are worth discussing. But conflating them with the destructive commercial logging practices of the past is unwarranted. We have a rare opportunity to consider a fundamental question – how much should we intervene and manage our forests? With commercial logging gone, should we aim to create “wilderness” – nature without people – or should we manage Country, as Australia’s Traditional Custodians have done for millennia?

AUSTRALIA — Pine Wilt Disease is a disease of pine trees. …The problem involves three bodies: a nematode, a fungus and a beetle. The nematode is a tiny roundworm only one millimetre long. It’s called Pine Wood Nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus). It causes Pine Wilt Disease. When Pine Wilt Nematode is carried to a pine tree by a beetle, it feeds on cells inside the tree and multiplies very rapidly. Billions of nematodes — and the tree’s response to them — prevent water flow, causing the tree to wilt and die. …Trees killed by the nematodes are attractive to several species of beetles, which breed inside the damaged tree. The nematodes gather in the breeding chambers of the beetles, attach to the bodies of the beetles, and travel with them to new host trees. Dr Dan Huston… and his colleague, Dr Mike Hodda wrote the National Diagnostic Protocol for Pine Wood Nematode.

Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT) has been forced to back down after wrongly issuing notices banning 19 environmental protesters from entering over 800,000 hectares of Tasmanian public forest. The notices, issued last year, barred protesters from entering all permanent timber production zone land and forestry roads in response to protest action against the logging of a 17-hectare native coupe in the state’s north-west. Bob Brown Foundation campaign manager Scott Jordan described the ban as “illegal intimidation”, saying it prevented some protesters from leaving their homes or going to work. “This is an embarrassing backdown by the state logging agency who have taken six months to come clean,” he said. “That Forestry Tasmania, a government agency, acted in such an unlawful and intimidatory manner is a symptom of a government that will do anything to prevent public protest against logging of our precious native forests.” Jordan said the business will cover the protesters’ estimated $27,000 legal costs.

Trees in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are migrating in search of more favorable temperatures, with species in mountain forests moving uphill to escape rising heat caused by climate change, a new study reveals. Most species in higher parts of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are moving upwards as temperatures rise, but scientists say that those trees which thrive in colder temperatures are at risk of dying out as the world continues to warm. Researchers studying the forest, which stretches along Brazil’s Atlantic seaboard, have also discovered that some trees in lowland forests are migrating downhill. …The researchers studied 627 tree species across 96 different locations across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest to calculate community temperature scores —a means of understanding climate patterns across the Forest. Researchers also discovered that younger trees in high-altitude forests are moving uphill—young tree groups had more growth than the older ones, and this growth had increased over a decade of observing the forest.

AUSTRALIA — A New South Wales government agency has racked up more than $1.1 million in penalties for more than a dozen instances of unlawful activity in fewer than five years, including seven criminal convictions. It also faces three more criminal prosecutions that could result in up to $12 million in additional penalties, if found guilty, and is under investigation for a further 18 potentially-illegal actions. That agency is the state government-owned logging company, Forestry Corporation of NSW. And now a community group has uncovered fresh evidence of illegal logging that experts say is driving endangered species towards extinction, allegations the NSW Environmental Protection Authority said it had added to its list of investigations. …But according to James Jooste from the Australian Forest Products Association NSW, an industry body that represents the timber industry, the allegations are all part of a plan by anti-logging activists to discredit and shut down the industry.

NEW ZEALAND — Short rotation forestry could provide a pathway for New Zealand to replace 6% of its fossil fuel use, while also providing farmers in difficult country a valued biofuel crop option. The latest work by Scion silviculture scientist Dr Alan Jones and his team estimates the reduction in fossil fuel use could be achieved with plantings over about 150,000 hectares of land, or less than 1% of New Zealand’s land area. Jones presented his team’s research findings to a Bioenergy NZ seminar series aimed at exploring NZ’s options on alternative energy pathways to help meet its Paris Accord obligations. …Typically, the trees would be harvested at year 16, with Pinus radiata and three types of eucalyptus being most suitable. …Jones said transport costs are an acknowledged challenge with biofuel sourcing, but decentralised processing of the raw material could also impact an otherwise unsuitable area’s viability.