Land use change. The enemy identified?

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 identified land use changes as one of the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss.

Red is always bad you know...

This diagram shows how much of an impact each driver has in each forest biome. Darker colours indicate how much of an impact each driver has had on biodiversity over the last century and the direction of the arrows indicate how rapid the increase (or decrease if the arrow is downwards) has been. The box we are most interested in is the habitat change in tropical forests. This usually consists of land use change, for example, chopping down forests to make way for cattle ranching (beef burgers have got to come from somewhere right?). The dark red box with an arrow pointing straight up means that it's had a very high impact on biodiversity and it has occurred rapidly.

So what are some of the major land use changes that have occurred in the rainforest?

The majority of the land use changes are moving from areas of forest to areas which are used for farmland (both pasture and arable land) although there are some situations where forestry has made way for urban settlements. One particularly striking statistic from the Amazon is brought up by Laurance (1998) in that deforestation rates were over two million hectares a year in the mid 1990s. These were largely being used for cattle ranching and industrial soybean farms. Laurance goes further on to mention that the areas being deforested are not centralised around one region but have been migrating as sorts. This then means that forests could become more fragmented leading to a forest that could more easily be devastated by fire or climatic variations. One example of this occurring happened during the El Niño drought of 1997-1998 where fires spread through 3.4 million hectares of land in Northern Amazonia.

Brazil's cattle ranching industry is the biggest in the world producing over $5 billion a year

But is it right for us to tell people what to do with their land?

You may be happy to hear that partly due to international pressures the amount of rainforest that is protected from logging is increasing. An example can be found here. However, a thought has struck into my head. Is it right for us, and by us I mean an international community in general, to tell countries that have rainforest in their political boundaries, what to do with their land? During our industrial revolution in Britain did anyone tell us what to do with our resources or land? Didn't think so...Is it therefore right for us to put huge pressure on these countries with rainforest to manage it the way we want them to manage it rather than help their economic development? Just a thought...before I open a can of worms on myself.

That's all for now.