Global Concerns Increasing With Fires

Forest fires in Indonesia and Brazil are speeding global warming by pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the World Wide Fund for Nature said Wednesday as it launched a campaign to curb the logging behind the blazes.

Two practices - destructive logging and the clearing of land with fire - are accelerating the disappearance of native forests around the globe, fund officials said.

“Two-thirds of the world’s forests have been lost forever,” said Francis Sullivan, director of the fund’s Forests for Life campaign. The fund is trying to persuade governments around the world to protect those forests that remain untouched.

Four countries together have more than half the remaining original forests - the United States, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil. And widespread logging, accompanied by fires, are jeopardizing the forests in Brazil and Indonesia, Sullivan said.

“It definitely accelerates global warming” by releasing carbon dioxide, methane and other so-called greenhouse gases, Sullivan said.

Conservationists estimate the fires burning now in Indonesia are yielding between 100 and 500 million tons of carbon dioxide - at least half of Indonesia’s annual carbon dioxide emission.

The situation is much the same in the more thinly populated Amazon basin, said Garo Batmanian, the fund’s executive director for Brazil.

“This year, unlike other years, we have started to notice problems on the health side,” said Batmanian, appearing at a news conference with Sullivan and other fund officials.

A cloud of smoke now hangs over the Amazon River port of Manaus, and health officials there report a 40 percent increase in respiratory diseases, he said.

The smog has been so dense at times that airplanes have needed instruments to use the Manaus airport, he added.

Elsewhere in the Amazon Basin, “airports in Porto Velho and Rio Branco have closed down between 20 and 30 times in the last month alone because of the smoke,” he said.

The fires cause water as well as air pollution. The only thing that could quench the flames would be prolonged heavy rains, but they would wash ash, debris and mud from denuded hillsides.