Forest protection

• 1. Introduction

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  Forest protection is a branch of forestry, and in some places it is dangerous work. In South America, officials of the Brazilian National Agency for the Environment, known as IBAMA, have recently been shot while carrying out their routine duties. Their job is to guard forests that hold some of the largest rainforests on Earth. That raises a blunt question. What does it actually take to protect a forest from the people and forces that threaten it? Some answers sound obvious, like buying the land and fencing it off. Others involve living inside the trees. Researchers also argue over whether saving one patch of woodland simply pushes the chainsaws next door. This documentary follows those questions, starting with what the phrase even means.

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• 2. Two Meanings

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  In German-speaking countries, forest protection has a narrower focus than many English speakers expect. There it concentrates on living and non-living factors that have nothing to do with crime. Think of plant pests, disease, and harsh weather. The wider definition covers the preservation or improvement of a forest, and the prevention and control of damage from natural or man-made causes. Forest fires, plant pests, and adverse climatic conditions such as global warming all belong on that list. The field also carries a legal status. It is not only about stopping people from harming woods, because it includes forest pathology, the study of tree disease. Those different emphases produce widely different methods from one country to the next. English adds its own trap. A protected forest is not the same thing as a protection forest, a distinction other languages make more clearly. Non-experts reading English literature can easily conflate the two. The sharpest disputes, though, concern what people do to forests.

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• 3. Human Threats

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  Intensive farming and logging come first among the man-made abuses that forest protection tries to stop. When these are aggressive or unsustainable, they strip woodland faster than it can recover. Pollution of the forest soil is a second threat, and it works quietly from below. The third is the growth of cities. Population explosion drives urban sprawl, and sprawl eats into the forest edge. None of this is new, but the debate over how to respond is heated. There is considerable disagreement about whether the standard protection methods work at all. One reason is blunt. In most parts of the world, laws governing purchased forest land are weakly enforced or not enforced at all. That gap between a rule on paper and a rule in the field shapes the most common protection strategy, which is to buy the land.

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• 4. Buying the Land

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  Land acquisition by the state or by conservation organisations is the simplest form of forest protection. A buyer may secure a forest to replant it, or to plant trees where none grew before, which is reforestation and afforestation. Buying can also mean managing the forest. Or the buyer may designate natural reservoirs, areas meant to be left entirely to themselves. The weakness is that ownership alone does not keep anyone out. A purchased tract can still be used by poachers and illegal loggers. A title deed cannot stop a saw. That is why some people argue for a more hands-on approach, one that puts a human being on the land itself.

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• 5. Living on Site

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  Old growth forests in remote areas, the argument goes, are best protected by someone who buys a part of them and lives there. A resident can watch the land and see trouble early. Even so, the method has limits. In the United States, arson can burn a forest to the ground and leave the cleared area open for other uses. Housing is another problem. A standard home often needs a cleared site, and clearing the land defeats the whole purpose. The alternatives are a treehouse or an earthhouse. Indigenous people in South America are doing this now to protect large reservoirs. Earlier, Native Americans in North America lived in tipis or in Mandan earthhouses, which also take up less ground. Today a German company called TrueSchool treehouses is working to develop modern treehouses. Living on site still cannot solve the problem of scale, which becomes obvious when the protected area is small.

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• 6. Methods That Fall Short

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  Trade in certified wood is one of several protection methods that have been tried with less success. Size matters too. Protecting a small section of a larger forest may have limited value. Tropical rainforests show why, because they can die when they shrink. They depend on a moist microclimate that the forest itself creates, and a smaller forest cannot hold it. For a look at the struggle to maintain redwood forest and rainforest in California, the source points to an October issue of National Geographic. A compromise exists in agriculture and stock farming, or in sustainable wood management. This approach gives forest land and farmland different values, though many areas are still clear felled. A bigger question hangs over every one of these methods. Does protecting one place simply move the damage somewhere else?

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• 7. Neighborhood Leakage

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  Two studies disagree on whether forest protection only relocates deforestation, a effect called neighborhood leakage. Under what is known as the paradox of forest protection, rural settlements near protected zones grew at twice the rate of those elsewhere. The IUCN applies protocols covering more than 670 eco-regions. Yet 46% of those eco-regions had less than 10% forest protection. That suggests many areas are not being monitored as they should be, and that the protection is not working. Within global priority areas, the results were judged unsatisfactory. Biodiversity hotspots, for example, averaged only 8.4% protection. This matters for policy. The Convention on Biological Diversity, in a target reconfirmed in 2008, calls for effectively conserving at least 10% of each of the world's forest types. By these figures, much of the world was still short of that line.

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