[Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging
Biopact
biopact at biopact.com
Wed May 21 16:25:30 CDT 2008
Max,
thanks for your contributions, you seem to have field experience.
What's your take on the debate about avoided deforestation (AD) or REDD: should the international community use a fund based approach, or should carbon markets be allowed to work? And should you start from a current baseline or from historic deforestation rates?
And which combination of approaches do you think allows best 'selective' logging? I can imagine that if the international community prefers a fund-based approach and opts for a baseline model, then they will want to work on the basis of totally intact forests only.
----- Original Message -----
From: MFH
To: 'lou gold'
Cc: 'Nikolaus Foidl' ; terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 11:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging
Dear Lou
Yes it is, and I have proven it.
However, there is probably some confusion in terms here.
The author of the article you list is comparing "selective" logging to clear-felling. In commercial logging language, "selective" logging means taking all the trees of value, and leaving the rest. In PNG lowland forest, with a great diversity of species, that means felling maybe 25 trees/ha. In more uniform dipterocarp forests in Borneo or Sabah, it means taking 90% of the trees.
He's correct in stating that the damage is horrific - untrained chainsaw operators, trees felled in directions that maximise damage to younger stock, untrained bulldozer operators who get to the base of every fallen tree rather than snig with the winch, collateral damage caused by dragging felled trees willy-nilly to the truck site, roads built without drains and culverts, creeks dammed with logs and soil as crossings.
A study in PNG by Tom Vigus illustrated the extent of the damage from "selective" logging:
a) over 85% of remaining trees over 10cm (4") diameter had been damaged and
b) these continued to die for up to 10 years after the logging
I have no argument with your author's list of results and damage, but 'selective' logging is standard tropical logging practice and very different to what I suggest as a 1/40th volume per ha removal per annum.
The latter also assumes using portable sawmills at the fell site, and buffalo carts to extract the sawn timber.
Hope that this clarifies,
Max
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From: lou gold [mailto:lou.gold at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, 22 May 2008 4:16 AM
To: MFH
Cc: Nikolaus Foidl; terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging
Hi Max,
I'm afraid that what you say is not true.
If, for example, 1/40th of the tree volume per hectare of a tropical forest is extracted annually, there will not be any noticeable degradation.
The following is from Mongabay at:
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0807.htm
Even without clear-cutting, the construction of logging roads to reach forest resources is destructive in the its own right and encourages settlement of previously inaccessible forest lands by speculators, land developers, and poor farmers. Studies by the Environmental Defense Fund show that areas that have been selectively logged are eight times more likely to be settled and cleared by shifting cultivators than untouched rainforests because of the access granted by logging roads. Research has found a high correlation between the presence of logging roads and consumption of "bushmeat"-wild animals hunted as food.
Logging roads aside, selective logging itself-where only one or two valuable tree species are harvested from an area-can take a heavy toll on primary tropical forests. A late 2005 study conducted by scientists from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University determined that "selective logging" creates twice as much damage as is detected by satellites while resulting in 25 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than previously believed.
Selective logging-as usually practiced-is degrading to the forest because the felling of a single large tree can bring down dozens of surrounding trees which are connected to the target tree by vines and lianas. The thinning of the protective canopy exposes the forest to increased sunlight and drying winds that can kill symbiotic soil organisms essential for decomposition and nutrient-fixing, while drying leaf litter and increasing the forest's vulnerability to fire. Further, the use of tractors for removing trees tears up the soil and increases erosion. Selective logging has been found to reduce global biodiversity by destroying habitat for primary forest species.
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 1:39 AM, MFH <mfh01 at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
Lou, as you say, there is much sense in the wise extraction of forest products. Trees don't live forever - they get old and die, are killed by lightning strikes, by insect damage and disease. The forest constantly recycles and renews.
If, for example, 1/40th of the tree volume per hectare of a tropical forest is extracted annually, there will not be any noticeable degradation. Economics have something to do with the promotion of this as a system. Generally, the owners of the forests and the trees receive a pittance for the "stump" prices. One of our aims in PNG was to demonstrate to the landowners that the trees in their forests were akin to a bank account. Protect the capital, make a modest withdrawal from time to time, and this would be balanced by the new growth (interest). At that stage they were receiving $3/c.m. stumpage when the logger was getting $150/c.m. fob for round logs. One of the aims of providing small portable sawmills was to demonstrate the value difference. For a 5 c.m. log they could get as much as $250 for the sawn timber versus $15 as a round log. This reinforced the value of the trees and the value of the forest, and led to many landowner groups refusing to deal with loggers.
I'm aware of the results of some of these projects some 15 years after commencement, and in the best of these the diversity and the vigour of the forest has been maintained. In some areas a comparison can be made to an adjacent block that has been industrially logged. From the air after 15 years both areas look similarly vigorous, but on the ground the logged area is a mess of vines, creepers and (often exotic, i.e. foreign) pioneer species which have no commercial value. A reasonable estimate is that it will take 100 years for the area to return to the sort of species mix that existed prior to logging.
So another approach is to work towards a wider realisation that trees are more valuable than the miserable royalties paid, and that forests have many additional economic values. Maybe this means that timber is too cheap - absolutely. Woodchip sells for a miserly few dollars/tonne at source.
This can be looked at from many angles, e.g., how many people can live off a hectare of "managed" tropical forest, as compared to (a) how many can live off a hectare of 'slash and burn' agriculture after the 3rd year, or (b) how many from a cash crop such as cocoa or coffee. The assumption in the first instance would be limited timber extraction plus a range of non-timber forest products (fruits, nuts, shelter materials). Any of the calculations I did showed that the forest had more annual income value when left in place and managed.
Max H
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From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org [mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of lou gold
Sent: Wednesday, 21 May 2008 1:08 PM
To: Nikolaus Foidl
Cc: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging
Oh boy Folke, since David Yarrow and I seem to be the tree-huggers who regularly contribute to this forum I can't help but think that your lecture is being delivered at least in part to me. So let me take the time to correct some of your statements that simply seem off-the-mark to me.
I know, everybody loves trees and it is a gut feeling for everybody that cutting trees is bad.
I don't know who the "everyone" is that you are refering to but it definitely does not include me. I am not against cutting trees and I am not against the logging industry. The problem is that somehow you really don't seem to see the forest for the trees.
In fact, one can take a long term view of the earth's vegetative cover and see a ceaseless war between forestland and grassland. . The territory controlled by these two great vegetative kingdoms has shifted back and for across the earth many times due mostly to changing climatic conditions.
In general, human beings have been soldiers in the army of the grasslands using all the weapons of "civilization" and "domestication" to achieve victory over the forest. In general, BUT NOT ALWAYS. Apparently, one of the great exceptions is to be found among -- you guessed it -- the Indios de Terra Preta -- who are thought to have had millions of people living in the central Amazon basin without ceaseless deforestation.
Deforestation sounds like a catastrophic event.
Well, some times it is and some times it is not. It is when it triggers climate change. Human deforestation created the climate shifts that resulted in the Sahara desert, making it uninhabitable by most plants and critters. A shift like that is catastrophic. When deforestation starts to trigger regional climate change we might prefer to keep a lot of the forest standing.
A grown established forest has neutral balance of fixation and loss, if the forest gets too old the danger of loosing all the stored biomass with a big scale fire is imminent and very often.
This is not true for the central Amazon basin where fire has historically been extremely rare due to heavy rainfall. And where does the rainfall come from? It comes from the transpiration of the trees in the forest. Without the forest, the climate shifts to drought as has already been ocurring in the Eastern Amazon. And drought triggers more fire, etc, etc in a positive feedback loop that can alter both regional and global climate in catastrophic ways.
With all due respects for the important work that you are doing in Bolivia -- and the creative stewardship for both conservation and food production that it represents -- I've got to say that the lowland basin of the Eastern Amazon presents a radically different situation. Here is what Dan Nepstad from Woods Hole says about it:
Mongabay: In Bali you also put out some rather dire projections for the Amazon in 2030. Could you elaborate on this?
Nepstad: There are all these models (namely the Hadley model) pointing to the end of the century when there will be a big forest die-back in the Amazon. But before global warming is going to kick in there is going to be all sorts of damage from the droughts we are already seeing as well as deforestation, logging, and the fires that are part of that regime. To factor in these effects, we took our deforestation model, our logging model, and what we know about the effect of drought on tree mortality, and projected out the year 2030 using current climate patterns - the last 10 years repeated into the future. We found that by the year 2030, 55 percent of the forest will be either cleared or damaged - I think 31 percent cleared and 24 percent damaged by either logging or drought, with a large portion of that damaged forest catching fire. This produces a huge amount of emissions. We're looking at 16-25 billion tons of carbon going into the atmosphere in a very short time frame -- the next 22 years. The scary thing is some of these assumptions are quite conservative.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0124-nepstad.html
We have to see that this planet is the only one and until we do not have an alternative to agricultural food production we cannot save all the trees in this world.
In what possible scenario do you imagine that anyone seriously involved in these issues is trying to "save all the trees in the world"?
OK, I'm glad to think about how we can be most creativily involved in earth changes INCLUDING DEFORESTATION but let's not clutter the discussion with assertions that simply are not true.
Touch the earth and blessed be.
lou
--
http://lougold.blogspot.com
http://flickr.com/visionshare/sets
http://youtube.com/my_videos
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