Logging in tropical forests can't be both sustainable and profitable
"We are facing a global biodiversity and a climate change crisis and we cannot afford to continue to lose primary tropical forests — they are central to resolving both crises," authors Barbara Zimmerman with the International Conservation Fund for Canada and Cyril Kormos, vice president for policy with the WILD Foundation, told mongabay.com.
"Despite decades of trying to log sustainably, the rate of deforestation has barely dipped over the last 20 years, from 15 million hectares per year to 13 million hectares per year — and these are low estimates. Industrial logging has shown no capacity to keep forests standing. On the contrary, logging is usually the first step towards total clearing to make way for agricultural use."
The study found that just three rounds of logging in tropical forests resulted in the near-extinction of target trees in all major rainforest zones—South and Central America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia—resulting not only in ecological disturbance but economic fallout.
The very ecology of tropical rainforests — their rich biodiversity, unparalleled variety, and hugely complex interconnections between species — makes them particularly susceptible to disturbance. Targeting only a few key tree species in the forest, loggers quickly plunder these species while leaving the rest standing, rapidly changing the overall structure of the ecosystem. In this way, loggers undercut the very ecological system that allows their favored trees to replenish.
"Virtually all currently high-value timber species, are exceptionally long lived and slow growing, occur at low adult density, undergo high rates of seed and seedling mortality, sustain very sparse regeneration at the stand level, and rely on animal diversity for reproduction, all of which point to the conclusion that tropical trees probably need very large continuous areas of ecologically intact forest if they are to maintain viable population sizes," Zimmerman and Kormos write in their paper.
The particular ecology of these trees has resulted in most logging companies simply entering a primary forest, cutting all high-value species, and then leaving it to colonisers or razing everything for cattle pasture or monoculture plantations (such as pulp and paper, rubber, or palm oil).
"Logging in the tropics follows the same economic model as is evident in most of the world’s ocean fisheries," Zimmerman and Kormos write. "The most-valuable species are selectively harvested first, and when they are depleted, the next-most-valuable set is taken, until the forests are mined completely of their timber."
Source: Mongabay.com, to read more, click here.