Tag Archives: logging

Cambodians prevented from protesting destruction of their forest

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Jeremy Hance for mongabay.com

Cambodian villagers fighting to save their forest from rubber companies have been rebuked by the local government. Two days in a row local authorities prevented some 400 Cambodian villagers from protesting at the offices of the Vietnam-based CRCK Company, which the villagers contend are destroying their livelihoods by bulldozing large swaths of primary forests. Authorities said they feared the villagers would have grown violent while protesting.

But, according to village representative, Chheang Vuthy, speaking to the Cambodia Daily: “The villagers would not have acted violently. The companies should not be clearing forest even though they have licenses from the government because it affects people’s livelihoods.”

The Cambodian government has granted a concession of over 6,000 hectares to the rubber company from the 200,000 hectare forest known as Prey Lang. Located between the Mekong and Stung Sen River, nearly half of Prey Lang has never been logged, making it an incredible rarity in Southeast Asia. Tigers, Asian elephants, banteng, gaur, and Asiatic black bears are all still found in Prey Lang. In all 26 to 50 endangered mammals, birds, and reptiles may live in Prey Lang. Still provincial authorities have dubbed Prey Land a ‘dull forest’.

In addition to its wildlife, the largely unprotected forest is also home to a quarter of million people who are dependent on its resources.

At a press conference held by a group comprising over 100 local NGOs, villagers said authorities were using intimidation tactics to halt protests, including send police to gather names of those villages inciting protests.

“[Police] have tried to find many ways to threaten us, but we were protesting to save Prey Lang forest,” Chheang Vuthy told the Phnom Penh Post. Governor of the Sandan district, Sim Vanna, denied any knowledge of police gathering names in the villages.

Local authorities say the concession in question is not in communal land and therefore open for development. But the protesters say the companies involved are not being forthright.

“This bulldozing of the forest is done without any environmental impact assessments,” Chet Ton, a community organizer with a local NGO, told the Cambodia Daily, “and the companies try to hide [information].”

Yesterday a national lawmaker, Son Chhay, stepping into the fight by appealing to Cambodia’s National Assembly President Heng Samrin to come to the villages’ aid.

“Please, National Assembly president, use the power of the legislative branch to stop destroying Khmer forests by Vietnamese companies, in order to preserve what’s left of the forest for the next generation,” Son Chhay said in a letter.

Cambodia is experiencing a rubber boom after the Vietnamese Rubber Enterprise Federation (VREF) invested $600 million. VREF was awarded 100,000 hectares in 2009 and is expected to gain 70,000 hectares more by 2012 according to the Phnom Penh Post.

However, Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has spoken out against going too far with rubber plantation.

“Rubber is at a good price, but it is [wrong] for us to cut down the high trees to plant rubber,” he told university students. “We can protect the forest to help reduce climate change.”

However, the Prime Minister recently signed over 9,000 hectares of Vereak Chey National Park for conversion to rubber plantations despite it being a protected area.

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Images of the protest here courtesy of kiletters.

Forest carbon stores may be massively overestimated

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Fred Pearce for The New Scientist

Rainforests may store much less carbon than we thought. It could be time to dramatically revise our estimates following the discovery that apparently similar forests hold vastly different amounts of the stuff.

The finding is important because there are plans for governments worldwide to compensate tropical countries for protecting their forests as “carbon sinks” to curb global warming. If carbon cannot be counted, then dollars cannot be disbursed.

Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, and colleagues say they used satellite mapping, laser probing of forest undergrowth from aircraft and local ground surveys across a large area of Peruvian rainforest to crack the problem of estimating how much carbon is locked up in forests. But the new technique has revealed a large, previously unknown variability in the density of carbon stored in apparently similar forests.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that there should be about 587 million tonnes of carbon stored in the study area, 43,000 square kilometres of lowland forest in the Madre de Dios region of Peru.

But after dividing the area into 40 million individual grid squares and estimating for each the carbon stored as well as the rate at which it is being fixed and released, Asner says the real figure is just 395 million tones, a third less.

Hidden patterns

“What really surprised us was how carbon storage differed among forest types and the underlying geology,” says Asner. For instance, where the underlying rocks are younger, the soils and forests contain more carbon. “There has been no way to uncover these incredible patterns till now.”

The study also reveals major carbon loss due to logging, farming, mining and road construction – even in areas still covered by forest. This “forest degradation” made up almost 50 per cent of all carbon lost from the forest. But the study also found substantial carbon accumulated through natural forest regrowth on abandoned land.

Asner is now conducting similar studies elsewhere round the world, which he says can be used to police the United Nations’ proposed initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This scheme would compensate countries that protect their forests to store carbon. It’s important that countries with large rainforests do this, because around 15 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions come from tropical deforestation.

Markku Kanninen, a forest scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research, a World Bank-backed body based in Bogor, Indonesia, agrees: “This research shows the importance of improving our data on forest carbon. The IPCC global default values are not precise enough for national inventories.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004875107

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