Category: Forest

The Danforth Street Woods

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Lucille the dog and I have been fortunate for over thirteen years to walk a lovely woods across the street from our house.

It’s small…perhaps 60 acres…but amazingly diverse and interesting.

It’s also beautiful.

The woods exist because of the conservation effort of a neighbor.

Our favorite trail starts in a pine uplands with scattered large boulders. Some of the boulders are glacial aggregates – locally known as puddin’ stones.

Mixed in with the pine are maples and a few oaks giving the trails a nice bed of leaves in the late fall.

We go up a short hill to where the trail flattens and wanders. It is distant from roads, so you get pristine quiet.

There is a fork …and the more interesting trail is to our right (Lucille knows all of this!).

We quickly go down into a wetland woods of bush and small immature trees.

The trail narrows to just walking width and traverses several small waterways…all of which are walkable on stones.

Immediately you feel deep in the woods. The trail darkens and you are constantly brushing against vegetation.

The wetlands have some small fern forests and several vegetation ‘tunnels’.

After fifteen minutes or so you turn right and walk along the Palmer River (a small stream).

A large log of perhaps ten feet goes over a waterway. Lucille finds it easier than I – the advantage of four feet.

The River pools on the other side of the log and gives an opportunity for a wade/swim in good weather.

In ten minutes we’re on the exit trail through another pine woods abutting a pond.

She and I have done this for a long time.

It is as interesting today as it was fourteen years ago.

A Greenpeace Scientist on Forest Carbon Offsets

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From the Macau Times:

Including forest protection measures in carbon markets would cause carbon prices to crash, and could undo efforts to rein in global warming, according to a Greenpeace report released earlier in the week.
Prices in a future carbon market would plummet by 75 percent, making it cheaper for industries in rich nations to buy deforestation offsets than reduce their carbon output at home, a study commissioned by the green group found.
It would also starve developing countries of investments for clean and renewable technologies, said the report, released on the margins of climate talks under the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change.
“Cheap forest credits sound attractive, but a closer examination shows they are a dangerous option that won’t save the forests or stop runaway climate change,” said Roman Czebiniak, a forest expert at Greenpeace International.
Negotiators from 175 nations have gathered here to hammer out a climate treaty – slated for completion by year’s end – to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.
Finding a way to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries – an effort known as REDD – has emerged as a key element in the negotiations.
The continuing destruction of tropical forests accounts for 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and it will be virtually impossible to curb global warming unless forests are protected, scientists say.
Brazil and Indonesia each account for about one third of forest-related emissions, making them the world’s top carbon polluters after China and the United States.
“There is broad consensus now that the post-2012 agreement will include some sort of incentives for tropical countries to reduce their deforestation,” said Steve Schwartzman, a forests expert at Environmental Defense, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C.
But sharp differences remain on whether these aims are best achieved primarily through market mechanisms, including a future global carbon market, or varvious forms of public funding and grants.
“Forests are the wild card in these negotiations – it could be used to bring us closer to our goals, or to water them down,” said Czebiniak.
Currently, the largest functioning carbon market operates within the European Union. The market has proven fragile, and has been hit hard by the economic crisis and the drop in oil prices.
The Greenpeace report argues that flooding carbon markets with offsets would devalue carbon even further, and make it too easy for the industrialised world to avoid making necessary energy reductions.
“Of the many options for forest financing currently on the table, this one ranks as the worst,” said Czebiniak.

REDD and Forest Protection

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From an article in the Guardian:

International proposals to protect forests as a way of tackling climate change could displace millions of indigenous people and fail to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, environmentalists warn.

In a report to be published on Thursday, Friends of the Earth International (FOE) will argue that current plans to slow the decline of forests by making rich countries pay for the protection of forests in tropical regions are not fit for purpose, as they are open to abuse by corrupt politicians or illegal logging companies in the parts of the world where the money will end up.

Forests lock up a significant amount of carbon and cutting them down is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, currently accounting for around 20% of the world’s total.

Deforestation also threatens biodiversity and the livelihoods of more than 60 million indigenous people who are entirely dependent upon forests.

Working out a way to protect forests will be one of the key issues for next week’s UN climate change summit in Poznan, Poland, which marks the start of global negotiations to replace the Kyoto protocol after 2012. Government representatives at the meeting will consider adopting the “Redd” mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries, which is based on the idea that richer countries could offset their emissions by paying to maintain forests in tropical regions.

Bioplanning

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Ms. Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together aboriginal healing, Western medicine and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.

She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.

For the enitre article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12prof.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin