Rain-forests comprise of almost 60% of the entire area of Brazil at 477 698 000 hectares, which is comparable to 1 844 394 square miles or just under 3 million square kilometres. This means that Brazil is home to a third of the world’s rain-forests, making it one of the most intriguing and beautiful lands on earth. www. Brazil.org, (2020)
20 percent more than 20 percent of the Amazon rain-forest is already gone, and much more is severely threatened as the destruction continues. It is estimated that the Amazon alone is vanishing at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine(2015)
Peru holds the 10th-most-forested area of any country in the world; over half the country—some 260,000 square miles—is covered in trees. Only Brazil holds a larger area of Amazonian tropical forest. This helps make Peru one of the 10 most biodiverse countries in the world, with over 330,000 people who depend directly on the country’s forests for their livelihoods, and countless more who depend on the numerous product and ecosystem services those forests provide.© Nicolas Villaume
Medicine plants and cures
How many undocumented losses have occurred? We can glean a sense from the experiences of two botanists working with the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1978, Alwyn Gentry and Calaway Dodson surveyed a small ridge called Centinela in in the Ecuadorean rainforest and discovered about 90 previously unknown plant species that were endemic–that occurred nowhere else. They returned to find in 1986 that the ridge had been completely cleared of forest. There was no trace of the 90 endemic species, and they have been presumed to now be extinct. We can also reasonably expect that unknown numbers of associated insects and other species wiped out with the demise of these plants. This is an article about another rain forest but it is relevant for every rain forest on the planet. https://www.rainforesttrust.org/(2020)
How many times this catastrophe has been repeated in the human-dominated biosphere is unknown, but odds are that valuable biological and medical knowledge has disappeared at human hands into oblivion along with wonderful life-forms that evolved over untold ages of evolutionary struggle. Indeed, we have not a rudimentary knowledge what we are losing. There can be no more obligatory challenge than preserving life–all life–on Earth.
At the same time, the Amazon has just been listed by WWF as a top deforestation front—one of the 11 regions expected to have more deforestation and forest degradation than anywhere else by 2030. In the Peruvian Amazon, the main culprits of deforestation are small-scale agriculture, commercial mining and related road construction; forest degradation is cause primarily by illegal logging. Roughly 1,100 square miles of Peru’s forests are cut down every year—around 80% of them illegally. This forest loss hurts much more than just the trees there is also Peru’s amazing wildlife; it also accounts for nearly half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Worldwide, deforestation and degradation are the largest source of CO2, after burning fossil fuels.) /www.worldwildlife.org(2020)
I discovered a former WWF, 2015 report online anticipating that by 2020 deforestation would have stopped. Similar to the Paris agreement many international authorities were planning a possible intervention. Peru and Brazils deforestation was rapidly becoming a international concern. The planets lungs are being desolated at a rate of knots. Although the Paris agreement took place the Peru and Brazil intervention meeting has not.
The rain forests are carbon dioxide sink tanks for the planet. Deforestation entails burning of the wood, this releases the C02 that the trees absorbed back into the atmosphere. On a more positive note organisations like WWF and Greenpeace, Global Witness are fighting back with some success. There is a need for local governments in these countries to provide structured reinforcement.
Global Witness, which works to defend human rights and protect the environment, offered a panorama of the ways in which the timber is processed, the role of forest regents, and the participation of sawmills in the illegal industry. The report also includes the statements of some loggers who were recorded by hidden cameras. Some of them revealed that they know of many methods that are used to break the law.)worldwildlife.org (2020)
How illegal timber is processed
Many loggers in Peru have been transporting large quantities of illegally-sourced timber using methods that make the timber appear to be legal. They move the timber through a series of canals, often with the help and complicity of lax supervision, according to “The Forest Avengers.”
The report also provided details on a variety of logging permits that have been used to launder about $112 million in timber, including permits that allow land to switch between agricultural, forest, and private use. https://news.mongabay.com/(2020)
https://news.mongabay.com/ report how Julio Guzmán, a lawyer with the Ministry of Environment of Peru, is very familiar with the loggers who are on the hunt for different methods to help them continue with their illegal activities. “The illegality keeps changing,” says Guzmán. He says there is a need for the implementation of reliable mechanisms to assist in the traceability of timber, which could help to reduce these crimes.
One illegal activity involves “ghost trees.” The illegal loggers declare false locations in a forest, then move to a different location to secretly cut down trees. In the past decade, at least 88 million cubic feet of timber have been destroyed using this method. This corresponds to about 113,300 trees.
Another illegal method involves local forests, which are typically managed by municipal governments or small committees. About $85 million in timber has been processed from these local forests in all of Peru. Furones, of Global Witness, says that 95 percent of the operating plans inspected between 2010 and 2017 included timber taken from other locations.
Amazon Rain Forest
The Amazon is currently on fire as this man made catastrophe propels through the wondrous home to some of the most beautiful specimens of nature and God’s creation known to man. The fires are the worst they have had in decades possibly ever. They have been made worse by the lack of rain fall over the Amazon this year. This is down to climate change.
But there is concern about a surge in blazes last month, earlier than would normally be expected.
“If we consider the average number of fires in July over the period from 2010-2019, then the number of fires in July 2020 represented an increase of 55.6% of the average,” says Prof Marcia Castro, a Brazilian scientist based at Harvard University.
“An increase also happened in June (19.6% compared to June last year, and 36.1% compared to the average for the month of June between 2010-19). The peak of the fire season is often seen in August to September.
What could make it worse this year?
Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre says there are two main issues contributing to forest fires this year.
The first is that this year’s dry season is much drier than usual.
“The waters of the tropical north Atlantic are warmer this year and when that happens, we have less rainfall over the southern Amazon,” says Professor Nobre.
The second is that there is a lot of felled forest left over from last year’s logging – this is chopped wood that can fuel fires.
A lot of it didn’t get burned as there was a military campaign to stop illegal activity in the forest
This year, the army has been conducting an operation to stop deforestation since June, and in July, President Bolsonaro imposed a four-month ban on forest fires.
Vice-President Hamilton Mourao recently launched a campaign against the fires, including an app for the public to report them.
“We will be out in the field in August to try to stop these fires becoming worse than last year,” he told the BBC.
Activists and government critics remain sceptical, says Camilla Costa, a BBC World Service journalist.
According to the Brazilian defence ministry, 28,100 cubic metres of illegal wood has been confiscated with fines totalling 407.2 million Brazilian reais ($72.6m; £55m).
However, fires have continued in the region and critics complain about a lack of sufficient enforcement.
Is the forest on fire in other countries?
The number of forest fires in the Amazon regions of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela is up on this time last year.
This is just a short page I compiled to get the reader of my blog to google these websites and educate themselves this really is criminal. We just sit back and do nothing. Half of worlds population do not even know about this.
Please visit the below website for more important information. These websites hold important information which will help you in the coming years so please at least peruse it. Thanks
Please visit http://www.newmessage.org for in depth information on climate change and how it will affect you.
Thanks for reading my blog
Sybella Loram
References of source
www. Brazil.org
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-53893161
Peruhttps://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/fall-2015/articles/deforestation-in-peru
Sybella Loram's Climate Change Blog 