The Amazon rainforest is known as the "lungs of the earth" and the "green heart," yet this huge green space of 5.5 million square kilometers has been subjected to massive logging and destruction.
On September 9, 2019, a fire broke out in the Amazon rainforest in Portovelho, Rondônia, Brazil. Picture | Visual China
Brazil recently released data showing that more than 28,000 fires broke out in the Amazon rainforest in August, the third consecutive year above the historical average.
According to the latest data released by the Amazon Institute of Human and Environmental Research, between August 2020 and July 2021, the amazon rainforest shrank by 10,476 square kilometers, roughly equivalent to nine Rio de Janeiro cities, which is also the largest damage suffered by the Amazon rainforest in the past 10 years.
Not only the Amazon rainforest, but also many of the earth's tropical rainforests have been cut down and destroyed by humans, and have brought great impacts to the local environment and organisms, which in turn affects the global climate.
Can the rainforest still be saved?
Graphic | Alastair Fossegill (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society) Keith Shorey (PhD, University of Bristol)
Translate | Lin Wei (Assistant Researcher, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) WU Hao (Ph.D., Zhejiang Museum of Natural History)
Edit | Xie Fang Lookout Think Tank
This article is an excerpt from the Lookout Think Tank book, excerpted from "Our Planet: The Disappearing Natural Wonders", published by Jiangsu Phoenix Science and Technology Publishing House in August 2021, the original title was "Cloud Forest - The Secret Land of No One", the original text has been deleted, and does not represent the view of the Lookout Think Tank.
1 Relate everything
As the largest living material entity on Earth, the rainforest operates like a living and breathing organism. The rainforest is the engine of many things, and the rainforest is connected to everything.
Rainforests inhale carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun are essential elements of plant photosynthesis, a fundamental biological process that mass-produces plant matter. Photosynthesis occurs faster than any otherwhere in the core of a humid rainforest. By consuming carbon dioxide, rainforests (indeed, all forests) play an important role in curbing the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that is causing climate change today.
At the same time, forests exhale oxygen, an accidental byproduct of photosynthesis, to help maintain oxygen concentrations at levels we can breathe, but not so high that the entire planet spontaneously burns. They also release other gases, notably hydroxyl radicals, which purify pollutants from the air. Therefore, forests play the role of thermostats and air conditioning systems.
Equally important, rainforests are also rainmakers. As much as 2/3 of the rainwater that falls on the rainforest canopy cannot reach the ground, and they evaporate under the tropical sun, forming a "hanging river" of water vapor in the air above the rainforest. The steam then condenses into new rain clouds, maintaining the rainforest's downdraft and preventing the land from turning into a desert. Air traverses large rainforest areas at least twice as much rain as it does when it passes through areas with little vegetation.
Climate modelers believe rainforests can extend thousands of kilometers of rainwater. Rainforest flourishing depends on continuous rainfall, but rainfall itself requires rainforest to sustain it. Cut down too many trees and the rainfall will decay. Human encroachment on rainforests threatens these systems that sustain life on Earth. Without them, the planet's environment could soon become unrecognizable and no longer fit for us.
A large rainforest on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. Clouds formed by the mist that evaporate from the trees maintain the humidity of the forest, causing daily downpours, nourishing wet-loving plants and animals, as well as nourishing the trees, forming a continuous cycle.
Tropical rainforests also have extremely high biodiversity.
The moisture-soaked forests cover the Andes, Central America, Indonesia, the Himalayas, and the hills of Central Africa, known as the "Moon Mountain." They may cover less than 400,000 square kilometers, less than california, but they are home to many endemic animals, including mountain gorillas in Central Africa and spectacled bears in the Andes.
In eastern Ecuador, the forested Sachya-Jangnates Mountains are permanently shrouded in mist. Uninhabited and mysterious, most of the area has never been mapped. Hidden beneath the canopy of the mountain is a golden sanctuary of moss, orchids and other plants.
Orchids in the Panamanian cloud forest.
Although the coverage is small, the ability of the cloud forests to collect moisture from the air makes them important "water reservoirs", without which many capital cities in low-altitude river valleys and lowlands would lack piped water supplies, such as Tegucigalpa in Honduras and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
But cloud forests are also more vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures raise the cloud floor, and forests can only cope in one way, which is to retreat up the hillside.
2 Crazy logging
Let's learn more about what went wrong with the rainforest and how to turn things around before they can't be recovered. Start with Indonesia, where jungles are destroyed faster than elsewhere.
For thousands of years, Indonesia's vast island of Sumatra has been a jungle world where people harvest their products without destroying the forest. They made furniture out of rattan, harvested honey from hives, cut down trees to build houses, and cultivated crops in clearings in the woods. Over the past century, those commercial loggers have cut down only a handful of trees, and the vast majority of forests are intact, which, in WWF's words, is "conservation-compatible."
But the clearing of the island of Sumatra over the past 30 years has been different. Sumatra's forest cover has been reduced by at least half since 1985.
Thousands of square kilometers of dense jungle were cut down to meet two of the world's largest pulp mills owned by two competing Indonesian oligarchs. These pulp mills consume about 2 million tons of wood per year, and the pulp is used to produce printing paper for supply worldwide. When the trees are cut down, most of the land is transferred to palm oil producers.
Nor is the situation on the adjacent island of Kalimantan, whose jungle is one of the oldest in the world, with over 130 million years old. Until the most recent 1970s, three-quarters of the island was covered with forest, and today, one-third of the island's forests have disappeared, mainly due to the harvesting of precious hardwoods.
The slopes of Central Africa's Rwanda are a forest usually shrouded in mist, made up of giant heather trees. Some of these trees are nearly 20 meters tall, and their branches are covered with moss and ground money, which are kept moist due to fog and rain.
Logging dominates the local economy. In Central Kalimantan, the most remote forested area on the island of Kalimantan, there are six times as many sawmills recorded by local telephone yellow pages than taxi companies. As a result, the island's forest cover is already below 50 per cent, and many of the pristine forest areas have been replaced by extremely vast oil palms, with vanished forest areas equivalent to the entire greek region.
Farmers periodically create large forest fires to clear forests of oil palms, leaving the entire area in a deadly haze that causes schools to close or even planes to crash. During the dry season caused by El Niño, fires are even more severe.
The smoke becomes particularly severe when the fire reaches the deep peat swamps beneath the forests of the two islands. Swamps are insindulged (a slow burning phenomenon without obvious flames) for months, releasing huge amounts of smoke and carbon dioxide into the air, far more than the burning of trees. For a time in the fall of 2015, Indonesia, a country that includes Sumatra and most of Kalimantan, released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day than the United States.
The most famous inhabitants of these two islands are the orangutans, sumatra has two species and Kalimantan has one.
The habits and culture of these highly intelligent primates appeal to researchers because they resemble us humans so much. Each of their ethnic groups has its own unique way of life, passed down from generation to generation by mothers. Some orangutans will teach their descendants to use twigs to dig honey from their hives or pull ants out of their nests, while some orangutans will blow leaves to make a sharp sound, or hold the vines across the river like "Tarzan" like Tarzan. These lifestyles are now at stake.
One of them, the Dabanuri orangutan, was only considered the third species of orangutan until recent years, and is found only in this one forested area. This orangutan has curly hair than Sumatran or Bornean or Bornean orangutans, and males have more prominent beards and flat cheek margins, and older females have beards.
Now, a hydropower project is planned to be built in this area with the highest density of orangutans, potentially making the species the most endangered great ape in the world.
A male Dabanuri orangutan and a juvenile female orangutan look down from their rainforest shelter in Batanturu, Sumatra.
3 Try to change
Deforestation is not inevitable, and the rule of law can take effect in the most remote jungles if people so wish. Brazil, especially under former President Lula, has done this well, and they banned deforestation more than 10 years ago.
The Brazilian government has enacted laws on trade in products that can cause deforestation – beef, soybeans and leather – and many of the 385 indigenous groups have been given more powers to control access to their places of residence. Between 2004 and 2016, the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon decreased by 70% per year.
The Government of Indonesia has also made a major statement on ending illegal logging and clearing of forest land. President Joko Widodo issued a ban in 2011 suspending the removal of some forests deemed to have high conservation value. He hopes that future forest removal efforts will focus only on those forests that have been degraded. At the same time, he set up an institution to restore peatlands damaged by fires, in his words, "so that we can convince the world that we are very serious about solving the problem of forest and peatland destruction".
Satellite photographs of the 2016 guatemala-Belize border show different effects when there are large differences in government land policy. On the left is Guatemalan farmland, crossing the border, and on the right is the dense forests of Belize. Such landsat images show that between 1991 and 2014, Guatemala's forests decreased by 32 percent, while Belize's forests decreased by only 11 percent.
But can this be achieved on land that has already been overused? Examples include the areas on the edge of the surviving Amazon rainforest that are densely occupied by ranchers and soybean growers. This is not hopeless.
The first thing to keep in mind is that there are still many forests that can be restored. Even though forests are severely degraded by loggers and farmers, and the population size of species is greatly reduced, the species of species is largely preserved. El Salvador, for example, lost more than 90 percent of its forests, but only 3 of its 508 species of birds have disappeared.
Similarly, 80% of the Malaysian part of Kalimantan is deforested – usually many times, but even in the logged areas, most forest species survive.
In addition to the legal system, when people discover the value of forests and find that they do not have to cut down forests to obtain economic benefits, they will actively protect them.
Brazil has created a number of large collection reserves in the Amazon, protected by local groups that harvest forest products such as Brazilian chestnuts and natural latex from natural rubber trees. The area of the reserve is now the size of England.
The work of Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper from western Amazon who advocated for such protected areas to protect forests, was adopted by Western environmental groups in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he was assassinated by a local rancher in 1988.
Evidence from the Xingu River valley suggests that locals may already be doing ecological restoration. One of the largest tributaries of the vast Amazon River, the Hingu River has caused the world's fastest rate of deforestation in the past 1/4 century in its long, British-sized river valley. As a result, the river dried up and the fish disappeared from the river.
The worst of these places was the Xingu Indigenous Park, at the headwaters of the river in the state of Mato Grosso, where more than 12 indigenous groups live. In cooperation with Brazil and international organizations, about 400 indigenous women in the park collect seeds from the forest. They sell their seeds to landowners in deforested areas, who in turn begin to restore forests to comply with Brazil's Forest Law and protect their water supply.
A young indigenous person in the Hingu River Basin examines seedlings collected by his group in the Hingu Indigenous Park in mato Grosso, Brazil.
The project sows seeds to mimic natural regeneration and aims to restore up to 3,000 square kilometers of forest and create "the world's largest continuous rainforest corridor." This is a rare example of ranchers working with indigenous peoples to protect and defend their common land. As this idea spread, new seed networks were established in the Amazon. This could be the first signal of the amazon's organized rainforest recovery.
4 Return
But the most far-reaching reason for optimism about the regenerative potential of the Amazon and other rainforests is that they have recovered from human destruction.
For example, the Amazon Basin was already fairly densely populated before Europeans arrived in the Americas. The first Spanish conquistadors recorded chronicles of all the cities along the river, but due to the mass deaths of the local population due to disease and war, the cities quickly emptied, and the jungle quickly regained its territory.
Jungle soils in the Amazon and other regions contain "dark earths," a primitive woodland mulch that is made up of a mixture of domestic waste mixed with burned wood. They also often contain a lot of pottery, which suggests that they are undoubtedly man-made, and these small pieces of improved soil cover at least 1% of the Amazon Basin.
Archaeologists have also found that the Mayan civilizations of Central America, the urban civilization of Angkor Wat in Southeast Asia, and the ancient and complex societies of West Africa, such as Benin, have all cleared forests on a large scale. About 1500 years ago, most parts of the Congo were cleared of forests to grow crops, produce charcoal, and smelt metals. Thanks to the regeneration of the forest, these ruins are buried today in what at first glance looks like a primeval jungle.
Ruins of pyramid-shaped tombs towering in the rainforest of southeastern Mexico. It was part of the city of Karakmur, the capital of the Mayan "Serpent Dynasty" in the 7th century AD, where drought and war combined to bring about the decline of the city and the rebirth of forests.
All these examples prove that nature used to have the ability to restore its wildness. Today, forests are being reborn in the same way where loggers leave, cattle ranches lose their fertility, or farmers leave for the cities.
In Panama, for example, natural rainforests are decreasing by 1.3 percent per year, according to estimates by the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research, while 4 percent of land that was previously forest is beginning to recover each year. When farmers in central Cameroon left their land, "the forest soon returned," said Ed Mitchard of the University of Edinburgh. In less than 20 years, the new trees grew to 30 meters high and the intact canopy was re-formed.
Deforestation is usually sudden and easy to see from satellite imagery; but natural forest recovery takes time, which can go unnoticed.
However, it takes longer for the restored forests to provide a full range of habitats, including huge habitats of old trees. Some species will not come back because they are extinct or isolated from reborn forests. Once separated, relationships between species that once made forests resilient may be difficult to regenerate.
We need to better share land with nature, and the "parallel strategy" is proposed to create space for small-scale forests and humans to develop together.
A male gorgeous bird of paradise in the Bird's Head Peninsula (Vogelkop) unfastens its cloak as the female approaches. Its feathers have a special structure, so that they appear black, complementing the glittering shield feathers and prosthetic eyes.
This strategy is nothing new. For thousands of years, African elephants, buffalo, giraffes and lions have managed to live around human societies that raise cattle or they would not have survived. There are many high-yielding modern agricultural systems that coexist with the surrounding rainforest, including rubber plantations in Indonesia, cocoa farms in Cameroon, and small plots of rice-grown farmland in Asia and Africa.
The confrontation between agriculture and forests is often won by agriculture, but in tropical countries, forests and small patches of woodland form a productive part of the agricultural landscape at some point.
Agroforestry complex systems provide timber, form valuable shade, protect watersheds in floods, provide other free nature services (such as pollination), and provide alternative feed for livestock and fertilize soils. The agroforestry complex itself contains a natural part and can provide a migration route for large animals. Christian Kull of Monash University in Australia says such a system "blurs the boundaries between man-made and natural, indigenous and non-indigenous, production and conservation." They are not a substitute for the vast natural environment, but they help to maintain the natural environment, which is good for both humans and the planet.
In Mount Kinabalu, Kalimantan, a mountain tree shrew (Tupaiamontana) licks nutrient-rich honey gland secretions on Nepenthes Laurie. The structure of this pitcher is so special that if the mountain tree shrew wants to lick the delicacies in the upper lid, it must point its butt at the "specially designed toilet" below. When feeding, the mountain tree shrew defecates into the cage below, adding nitrogen to the liquid inside the cage. In this peculiar exchange process, each species provides each other with nutrients that are lacking in the mountain habitats they share.
Therefore, those who remain optimistic about the recovery of the rainforest have their own foundation.
In addition, some of the drivers of deforestation are losing their strength. The birth rate outside Africa is falling rapidly – the average Brazilian woman now has only 1.8 children per woman, up from 2.1 in Indonesia. In many Western countries, consumers are changing their habits, with some eating less meat.
Under pressure from consumers and voters, governments and businesses have pledged to shift from deforestation to reforestation. Global actions to protect the jungle include the Forest Stewardship Council's certification of the sustainability of harvested timber and the establishment of industrial standards to stop forest loss, such as those developed by the Round table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which now cover more than one-fifth of the world's palm oil production.
None works perfectly, but all of these actions can contribute to the restoration of rainforests around the world.
Humanity came from the jungle, and our great journey to rule the planet began with climbing down trees and running across grasslands. Thus, somewhere in our collective memory, the jungle still holds a place, and the jungle is a reminder of the need to be at peace with our planet more than the rest of nature. Their future will test our determination to make a grand restoration of nature.
Uncle Ku welfare
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