Not So Amazing Amazon

I picked up on a nice little news item the other day which lays to rest a great deal of misinformation that has been bandied about over the years. It is from a former CSIRO scientist Professor Paul Jarvis and in the main discusses why life support doesn’t grow on trees. People have long claimed that the Amazon rainforest generates approx 20% of the oxygen that we breath and can therefore be rightly called , “the lungs of the Earth”. Tropical rainforests cover about 7% of the Earth’s surface. The Amazon makes up nearly half of all rainforest land, about 6 million square kilometres, just a little smaller than Australia. This area however is being reduced by about 5% annually according to Professor Jarvis. (I’ve got to say here that the idea of clear felling the rainforest from an area the size of Australia in 20 years is pretty worrying.)

It is true that living plants do release oxygen. When they die however, their decay uses up as much oxygen as they generated when living. So the Amazon rainforest is about neutral with regard to making oxygen. Instead, most of the oxygen that we breath comes from tiny plants called phytoplankton in the ocean. Indeed the oceans make up about 70% of the surface area of our planet, so it really should be called Planet Water , not Planet Earth. The Amazon rainforest has many fine qualities (e.g.: rainforests account for about 90% of the biodiversity of living species and as such are a hugely valuable resource to be protected and treasured) but the making of surplus oxygen for us to breath is not one of them.

However there's new protection afoot for some of the richest rainforests on Earth, thanks to a new agreement between Peru and the United States. The agreement, called a "debt-for-nature swap," was signed in Washington, D.C. this year. The deal commits the Peruvian government to provide local currency funding for Peruvian conservation groups, giving them the money they need for critical conservation work in 10 rainforest areas covering more than 27.5 million acres -- an area the size of Virginia or Cuba. These areas are really the heart of the western Amazon. They're the most pristine, the richest in terms of the species they contain.

Under the agreement, $5.5 million of Peru's debt to the United States is cancelled, saving the Peruvian government about $14 million in future payments. They instead will pay $10 million in local currency into a trust fund in Peru that will benefit conservation. The U.S. funding is authorized by the Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998, which encouraged the reduction of foreign debt in exchange for a financial commitment to forest conservation.

Saving Peruvian rainforests is a major challenge for conservationists. In Peru there are some 20,000 species of vascular plants and nearly 1,800 species of birds, many of them found nowhere else. Their habitats are threatened by destructive logging, agricultural clear-cutting, mining and exploration for oil and gas. Peruvian conservationists will use their new funding for a wide variety of conservation work, including establishing and maintaining protected areas and reserves, conservation training, research, and supporting the livelihoods of indigenous people in the forests. Well that’s my little bit on the topic of conservation bit and it will have to take the place of a book review this month. Too little time and to many fish to fry.