Maps Show Need To Shelter More Forests, Groups Claim

A decade-long mapping project unveiled Monday shows only about 6 percent of the world’s 13 million square miles of forests are protected against logging and other development.

“These maps are the first of their kind,” said Dominick DellaSala, forest conservation director for the World Wildlife Fund, a non-profit group based here.

“For the very first time, we can see the world’s forests are largely unprotected.”

About 94 percent of the world’s forests have no government or other form of protection, according to the maps compiled from weather satellite photos and satellite imagery as well as on-the-ground charts.

Officials for the World Wildlife Fund and the British-based World Conservation Monitoring Center presented the maps Monday to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Forests meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

The United Nations estimates that between 1980 and 1990, the world lost about 1.3 percent of its forests each year to logging, farming and development. The conservation groups are calling on the United Nations to advocate protection of at least 10 percent of the world’s forests.

“We are looking at a global deforestation rate of 1 percent a year,” DellaSala said in an interview. “That doesn’t sound like a lot, but at that rate, we’ll run out of unprotected forests in two to three generations.”

One of the biggest concerns is the Brazilian Amazon, where deforestation over the past four years has occurred at a rate about one-third faster than before 1991, DellaSala said.

In 1991, about 4,297 square miles were being logged annually in the Amazon, compared with an annual average of about 5,751 square miles in the four years following, he said. During that period, an area of Brazil equal to the size of Belgium has been logged, he said.

“The trend is alarming,” DellaSala said.

In other places where large areas of forest remain, such as Cambodia and Cameroon, few if any significant protection networks have been established, the report said.

In the U.S., in the lower 48 states, all but 2 percent of the native forests present around the time of Columbus have been logged at least once, the report said.

“You don’t have to go to the Amazon rain forest to see deforestation rates that are a major concern. We’ve got some right here in our own back yard,” he said.

Surprisingly, he said, tropical moist forests and mangroves appear to be the two best-protected forest types, with 8 percent and 9 percent protected, respectively.

Only about 5 percent or 6 percent protection is reported for the temperate needle leafs and temperate broadleaf forests that dominate much of North America, Northern Europe and Siberia, the report said.

In a separate report presented to the U.N. panel, the London and Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency called for regulation of the international timber trade, which it says is plundering the resource.

The EIA, a non-profit organization that investigates environmental abuses, said in its report that unless logging is regulated there will be a “disastrous impact upon national economies and the global environment.”

“The world’s forests are in crisis,” said EIA forest campaigner Juliette Williams. “The handful of companies controlling the timber trade have the economic and political might to log wherever they want. Once forests are exhausted in one region, companies simply move elsewhere.”

Even in areas such as Europe, where forest cover is more or less constant, natural forests were being replaced by plantations with a devastating effect on wildlife, said Francis Sullivan, leader of the World Wildlife Fund’s Forests for Life Campaign.

“We believe governments are shirking their responsibilities in taking the steps necessary to preserve forests for people,” he said.

“What we need is a dramatic increase in the number of legally protected forest areas as well as the controlled use of forests which fall outside the protective boundary.”