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Indonesia's rapid deforestation continues?
by Staff Writers
Jakarta (UPI) May 24, 2012

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Indonesia needs to address loopholes in its moratorium on deforestation, Greenpeace said.

The two-year moratorium, announced last May by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was part of an agreement with Norway.

Under that agreement, Norway had committed up to $1 billion in assistance funds in 2014 if Indonesia is successful in reducing levels of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions under REDD+, an internationally agreed mechanism for compensating countries that reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Indonesia has the world's third-largest area of tropical forest after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Deforestation is mostly attributed to logging for the conversion of forests to plantations for palm oil and to supply the pulp and paper industry.

While globally deforestation accounts for up to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, in Indonesia that figure is up to 85 percent, making it one of the highest emitters in the world.

"The existing moratorium only suspends the issue of new forest use permits, it did not order a review of existing permits," Yuyun Indradi, forests policy adviser for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, told reporters this week, as Indonesia marks the first year of the moratorium.

Greenpeace says the ban is being undermined because the legislation and enforcement of it is weak.

"There are other glaring loopholes in the moratorium which need to be addressed if Indonesia is to honor its international commitments," said Indradi.

A Greenpeace report estimated that since the moratorium has been in place, Indonesia has lost nearly 5 million hectares of forest and peatlands out of a total 71.01 million hectares covered by the moratorium.

If Indonesia's deforestation were to continue averaging more than a million hectares annually, Greenpeace says, all of the country's forests will have been destroyed within the next 50 years.

But Agus Purnomo, a presidential special aide on climate change, told Antara news agency the Greenpeace report was misleading and the Forestry Ministry's records indicate the deforestation rate over the past few years "has drastically decreased to around 500,000 hectares annually."

In September, Yudhoyono said he would dedicate the final three years of his presidency to protect his country's rainforest.

In a related development, World Wildlife Fund and Indonesian non-governmental organization coalition Eyes on the Forest announced a Google Mapping Tool on Wednesday that shows the impact of deforestation on Indonesia's Sumatra Island.

"Our conviction is that if we empower people with the information, the forests of Sumatra cannot only be saved, but we can restore them," said Carter Roberts, WWF president and chief executive officer.

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Rousseff under pressure to veto Brazil's new forest code
Brasilia (AFP) May 24, 2012 - Activists on Thursday said they handed Brazil's president a petition with nearly two million signatures urging her to veto a new forestry code that could result in increased Amazon rainforest deforestation.

The bill would open huge areas of the country to farming if they were illegally logged before July 2008, and would allow farming along environmentally sensitive riverbanks.

President Dilma Rousseff has until Friday, less than one month before the Rio+20 UN summit on sustainable development, to veto the controversial measure.

The bill has support from Brazil's powerful agribusiness sector.

Avaaz, a global activist group concerned with issues of climate change, human rights and poverty, said the government was handed a petition with nearly two million signatures collected online from dozens of countries.

"Veto everything, Dilma," said more than 150 environmental groups and several other representatives of Brazil's Bar Association, the Catholic Church, small farmers as well as politicians and even former environment ministers.

Avaaz spokeswoman Regina Tavini said Rousseff however did not receive the petitioners.

The activists called for a festive vigil from late Thursday until the president announces her decision.

The bill was initially intended as a bid to rein in unfettered logging and increase protection of Brazil's forested areas, which play a key role in reducing greenhouse gases.

But farm-based economic interests prevailed, and the bill was reshaped to ease restrictions that have been in place since 1965 and are credited with curbing deforestation.

Brazil is a major beef and soybean producer, and with international crop prices high and in many cases rising, farmers are keen to cash in.

A government source said Rousseff plans to veto part of the bill approved by Congress a month ago, removing any amnesty for those who logged illegally in the past and restoring protection of environmentally sensitive areas such as riverbanks.

More than 60 percent of Brazil's 8.5 million square kilometers (3.3 million square miles) are jungles and forests, but two thirds of it is either privately owned or its ownership is undefined.

In the sprawling Amazon River basin region, the existing law requires that as much as 80 percent be kept as woodland.

The proposed reform threatens 690,000 square kilometers (some 266,000 square miles) of vegetation, which would prevent Brazil from reaching its goal of reducing deforestation by 80 percent, according to Climate Observatory, a network of 26 groups set up in 2002 to promote civil society participation on climate change issues.



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Hacking code of leaf vein architecture solves mysteries, allows predictions of past climate
Los Angeles CA (SPX) May 25, 2012
UCLA life scientists have discovered new laws that determine the construction of leaf vein systems as leaves grow and evolve. These easy-to-apply mathematical rules can now be used to better predict the climates of the past using the fossil record. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, has a range of fundamental implications for global ecology and allows researchers ... read more


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