Deforestation Rates In Guyana Triple In One Year, Despite Funding For Climate/Forest Protection

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, March 7, 2011 (ENS) - Deforestation rates in the South American country of Guyana have increased during the last year, despite a 2009 agreement with the Norwegian government aimed at supporting forest protection to avert climate change, the nonprofit watchdog organization Global Witness said today.

Signed in November 2009 and worth up to US$250 million over four years, the agreement was initially welcomed as a potential breakthrough, and a blueprint for other countries to follow to preserve forests. Deforestation and land use change contributes 20 to 25 percent of the carbon emissions that cause climate change.

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However, once the technical details were made public, initial optimism gave way to widespread concern since a clause in the agreement allows deforestation rates in Guyana to increase, at Norway's expense. Located on the northern coast of South America, Guyana is about the size of Great Britain. One of the world's last intact tropical rainforests covers some 18.5 million hectares, about 87 percent of the country's land area. Guyana has one of the highest levels of biodiversity of any country, with some 8,000 plant species, half of which are endemic.

"Over the past year, deforestation rates in Guyana have increased 300 percent," said Laura Furones of Global Witness. "It's too early to say if this increase is a direct result of the flawed data in the agreement, but there is undoubtedly an incentive for Guyana to both profit from expanding forestry activities and simultaneously get paid by Norway to reduce deforestation."

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http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2011/2011-03-07-01.html

due to bio-ethanol have anything to do with increase rates of deforestation.

:eyes:

http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/news/stories/10/13/mining-deforestation-nearly-tripled-between-2000-08-%E2%80%93wwf/

The deforestation rate due to mining activities in Guyana from 2000 to 2008 increased 2.77 times according to an assessment by the World Wildlife Fund-Guianas.

Despite this increase, this rate is the lowest within the three Guianas: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, Regional Goldmining Pollution Abatement Coordinator, Rickford Vieira said. The WWF yesterday unveiled the results of an assessment which was done to determine the deforestation rates of small and medium scale mining in the Guianas. The project was funded by several agencies and falls under the Gold mining Pollution Abatement component of the Guianas Sustainable Natural Resource Management Project 2007-2011.

In a presentation, Vieira said that 5335.1 hectares of Guyana’s forest was deforested due to mining activities in 2000 and this increased to 14 781.9 hectares in 2008. This was a rate of 0.02% in 2000 increasing to 0.06% in 2008, an increase of 0.04%. The assessment focused only on mining activities and excluded roads, agricultural activities, settlements and so on.

Quizzed on whether this rate may have increased since 2008, Vieira said he suspected that this may be so given that more people have entered the sector given high gold prices.
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Here is a good site for info on deforestation. THe site lists the major causes as:

Logging for Tropical Hardwoods
Fuel Wood and the Paper Industry
Grazing Land
Subsistence Farming



http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm

THE DRIVING FORCES OF DESTRUCTION

Commercial logging is the single largest cause of rainforest destruction, both directly and indirectly. Other activities destroying the rainforest, including clearing land for grazing animals and subsistence farming. The simple fact is that people are destroying the Amazon rainforest and the rest of the rainforests of the world because "they can't see the forest for the trees."

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Leading the Threat: Governments

Directly and indirectly, the leading threats to rainforest ecosystems are governments and their unbridled, unplanned, and uncoordinated development of natural resources. The 2000-2001 World Resources Report put out by the United Nations reported that governments worldwide spend $700 billion dollars a year supporting and subsidizing environmentally unsound practices in the use of water, agriculture, energy, and transportation. In the Amazon, rainforest timber exports and large-scale development projects go a long way in servicing national debt in many developing countries, which is why governments and international aid-lending institutions like the World Bank subsidize them. In the tropics, governments own or control nearly 80 percent of tropical forests, so these forests stand or fall according to government policy; and in many countries, government policies lie behind the wastage of forest resources. Besides the tax incentives and credit subsidies that guarantee large profits to private investors who convert forests to pastures and farms, governments allow private concessionaires to log the national forests on terms that induce uneconomic or wasteful uses of the public domain. Massive public expenditures on highways, dams, plantations, and agricultural settlements, too often supported by multilateral development lending, convert or destroy large areas of forest for projects of questionable economic worth.

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