Veröffentlicht am 19.05.2015
A Report to the Club of Rome by Claude Martin
Tropical rainforests have been at the centre of the environmental debate in the 1980s and 1990s. No other vegetation zone has generated as many books and films as the tropical rainforest, but since the start of the new millenium, public concern about tropical rainforests seems to have waned. Even though the scientific knowledge has virtually exploded resulting in thousands of scientific papers and countless research projects, if asked today, most experts would not be able to outline the current state of the world’s tropical rainforests. Others now see these forests simply as carbon sinks and a factor in climate change politics:
«This perception problem is made worse when some specialists publicly proclaim that tropical rainforests only persist in a handful of reserves, or consist only of degraded secondary forests. They declare an ailing patient in need of help to be dead already. The global primary forest area remaining today has been estimated at over 700 million hectares—¬ an area the size of Australia. Should we forget about it, discard it as valueless simply because we are overwhelmed by the bad news?»
Claude Marin does away with wrong assumptions about the dynamics of forest cover change, drivers of deforestation, biodiversity loss and the consequences for and of climate change. Eight leading tropical forest experts have contributed their own views in short sections on some of the most relevant aspects affecting the future of tropical rainforests.
More information at www.clubofrome.org
Tropical rainforests have been at the centre of the environmental debate in the 1980s and 1990s. No other vegetation zone has generated as many books and films as the tropical rainforest, but since the start of the new millenium, public concern about tropical rainforests seems to have waned. Even though the scientific knowledge has virtually exploded resulting in thousands of scientific papers and countless research projects, if asked today, most experts would not be able to outline the current state of the world’s tropical rainforests. Others now see these forests simply as carbon sinks and a factor in climate change politics:
«This perception problem is made worse when some specialists publicly proclaim that tropical rainforests only persist in a handful of reserves, or consist only of degraded secondary forests. They declare an ailing patient in need of help to be dead already. The global primary forest area remaining today has been estimated at over 700 million hectares—¬ an area the size of Australia. Should we forget about it, discard it as valueless simply because we are overwhelmed by the bad news?»
Claude Marin does away with wrong assumptions about the dynamics of forest cover change, drivers of deforestation, biodiversity loss and the consequences for and of climate change. Eight leading tropical forest experts have contributed their own views in short sections on some of the most relevant aspects affecting the future of tropical rainforests.
More information at www.clubofrome.org
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