Why are rainforests important?

Simon Counsell is Director of Rainforest Foundation UK

Perhaps the greatest benefit of rainforests is the role they play in maintaining Earth’s life-support systems. These essential environmental services include absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, producing oxygen, cycling essential nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, regulating temperature and precipitation and protecting watersheds from soil erosion.

Since the 1970s, an increasing number of national, international and non governmental organisations have been established to promote rainforest conservation.

But throughout this period rainforests have often been highly undervalued and the ecosystems that forests help to maintain, such as the water cycle and soil fertility have not generally been recognised.

International focus and support for forests related issues has been inconsistent over the last couple of decades. Warren Evans, Director of Environment at the World Bank, notes that there was a brief major focus in the late 1980s - early 1990s, during which considerable funding went into the forest sector and rural development issues relating to forest protection.

The recent realisation that deforestation is one of main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions has since helped to raise the international significance of rainforests.

In 2006 the Stern Review was published. This report, commissioned by the Chancellor, is the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change. One of the main conclusions of the review was the importance of reducing deforestation and highlighting the essential role of rainforests in combating climate change.

 The Stern Review

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that emissions from rainforest deforestation in the 1990s were 1.6b tonnes of carbon per year. This is 20% of global man-made CO2 emissions; more than the global transport sector combined.

The launch of both the HRH Prince Charles' Prince's Rainforest Project (October 2007) and The Eliasch Review on behalf of the UK government (October 2008), have aim to highlight the global importance of rainforests in mitigating climate change. Such initiatives highlight the vital role that rainforest conservation must play in future global climate deals.

 Gordon Brown launches the Eliasch Review     Prince's Rainforest Project

The next UN Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC) is to be held during December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. This conference will set the path for the successor to the Kyoto Protocol's targets in 2012 and create a new global deal on climate change.

 UNCCC Copenhagen 2009

Rainforests are also widely known to provide a habitat which sustains as much as 50 percent of the species on Earth, as well as supporting a great number of diverse and unique indigenous cultures.

This unparalleled biological diversity acts as a natural reservoir of genetic diversity offers a rich source of products including medicinal plants and high-yield foods.

Why haven't we succeeded so far?

Previous attempts to tackle the destruction of the world's rainforests have often focused on the symptoms of deforestation and not the drivers of forest loss. These drivers are often closely linked.

Drivers of deforestation differ between continents, countries and even within countries themselves. For example in Africa, deforestation occurs due to logging, mining, shifting cultivation and fuel wood harvesting. In areas of Indonesia, the dominant drivers are logging and expansion of palm oil plantations. While in South America, a combination of large scale farming to supply global markets, logging, mining and subsistence agriculture all contribute to the disappearance of forests.

Today, deforestation is increasingly driven by a growing worldwide demand for different globally-traded commodities, including soy, palm oil, beef and timber. The problem is being made worse by the recent increase in demand for biofuels across the world. 

A key failure to date has been to not fully understand the critical role of indigenous people in forests and their systems of tenure rights and control over there local environment. In rainforest countries such as Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, people living in forest regions have extremely low rates of legal rights to their land.

Indigenous peoples

It is often overlooked that most of the world’s tropical rainforests are inhabited, and have been for thousands of years, by indigenous peoples who depend on the forests for their livelihoods.

Most indigenous people depend on small-scale agriculture for food and medicinal plants. Using a practice called shifting cultivation, most indigenous peoples living in the rain forest clear small plots to plant gardens for food and medicine. Sometimes they clear the land by burning the forest, known as slash-and-burn agriculture.

Indigenous peoples have relied on these agricultural methods for thousands of years. In the past, the abandoned plots were allowed to regenerate for many years before they were cleared and farmed again. These traditional shifting cultivation practices did not significantly damage the rain forest because the rain forests were so vast and populations of indigenous peoples relatively small.

In the last half of the 20th century, indigenous tribes became vastly outnumbered by colonists migrating to the region. Attracted by seemingly unoccupied land, small-scale farmers and cattle ranchers threaten the survival of indigenous peoples and their rain forest habitat.

Logging, mining, and oil and gas extraction have also significantly reduced the size of rainforests around the globe, and as the forests shrink, indigenous peoples are forced to compete for the limited land that remains.

In this competitive environment, even the once-sustainable agricultural practices of indigenous peoples can cause significant damage to the fragile rain forest ecosystem.

The timber trade

We have to ensure the forests are worth more alive than dead

— HRH The Prince of Wales, Prince's Rainforest Project

Simon Counsell, Director of Rainforest Foundation UK, claims that both international and national policies have resulted in rainforests essentially being carved up into one of two uses: either (1) strict protection for nature or (2) use for industrial exploitation for timber.

He believes that industrial scale timber exploitation is not a sustainable way of managing forests and the belief that it might be is based on the ‘use it or lose it approach’. If the forest isn’t valued for careful and selective timber extraction, then the forest will be simply cut down and used for farmland.

The overwhelming majority of forest areas used for long term timber extraction are now no longer forests, a practice that Simon Counsell describes as ‘only being sustainable until it's gone'.

There is concern that in the haste to address climate change, we rush into what might superficially appear to be quick fixes to the problem of rainforest destruction that might make matters worse.

Vast sums of money, from the introduction of global carbon credit schemes, are predicted to be raised to help manage and sustain rainforests. Both Simon Counsell and Senator Marina Silva fear that the money will not find its way to local communities where it is needed, instead being consumed by central bureaucracies in these countries.