Photographing Global Warming Ⅱ

2007-04-11 14:43:30 [ Big Normal Small ]  Mark Berthold  　Comment

Tropical rainforests now cover just 3% of earth’s surface. But they remain home to 50% of its plants and animals- at least a quarter of which are under threat, according to the comprehensive new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Accompanying this biodiversity are complex systems to regulate its water flow-20% of world’s water runs through Amazonian.

Cutting it down will have an incalculable impact. Yet the Amazon basin continues to lose an area the size of Switzerland every year. Destruction of the Amazon is for cattle-grazing and the farming of new varieties of soy suitable for its conditions-replacing the thousands of plant species with just one. Russell Mittermeier, President, Conservation International opines in the magnificent but sobering 2006 BBC nature documentary Planet Earth that whereas Southern and Eastern Amazon rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, if any place on earth is likely to sustain tropical rainforest a hundred years hence it is the Amazon’s far North. Yet this picture was taken by me in 1991 in the Amazon far North, in an area adjacent to the remote Manu National Park.

The burning of forests contributes significantly to global warming. Conversely, deforestation denies the atmosphere cleansing leaves that breath in warming carbon dioxide.

It is not all doom and gloom. Costa Rican farmers are paid to allow their land to return to forest on the basis that forests are water factories. These reforested areas are outside the national forests and provide an additional 60% of their area. British billionaire Johan Eliasch bought a piece of Amazon the size of greater London and he closed down the saw mill consuming the trees-sparing it the fate of these denuded and hence eroded slopes in Madagascar [see also my other articles in this space on the lemur and chameleon species unique to that great island].


The world’s population is expected to increase approximately 50% by mid-century. James Leape, Director General WWF International says: “If we all live on this planet the way Americans currently live, we would need three planets to support the Earth’s current population”. So it is interesting that China- already the world’s second biggest contributor to global warming -is being urged to increase its consumption of western goods. Presently China exports far more than it imports from the US. A major factor is the present disposition of the Chinese to save rather than spend. Its savings levels are historically unprecedented. Prudence has been important in a country that still lacks a social safety net. But its government has-rightly- embarked on increasing its spending on areas such as health and education. It is a complex equation.

Mark Berthold copyright 2007

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