06
Oct 2008 - Antananarivo, Madagascar: Up
to 500,000 hectares of moist and spiny forests
in Madagascar are to be protected or restored
in a pioneering project which will include
testing ways to measure climate impacts.
The research could potentially
provide precious information to many other
forest-carbon projects around the world.
The three-year project
is funded by GoodPlanet – with Air France
as sole sponsor – and implemented by WWF.
GoodPlanet is a French foundation which
aims to raise public awareness on the world’s
current main issues and promotes sustainable
development.
“With deforestation
responsible for 20% of global greenhouse
gas emissions, there is a growing interest
to use forests as an instrument to fight
against global warming,” said Matthieu Tiberghien,
Programme Officer at GoodPlanet. “However,
we must ensure that we have the proper methodologies
to assess the level of greenhouse gas emissions
that can be reduced by reducing deforestation.”
Activities to be carried
out include the creation of new, community
managed, protected areas, the transfer of
forest management rights from Government
to local communities, the establishment
of fuelwood plantations to reduce pressure
on natural forests and the restoration of
forests in some key degraded landscapes.
WWF and GoodPlanet will
join efforts and expertise to acquire as
much knowledge as possible on verifiable
ways to measure how much the emission of
carbon can potentially be reduced by reducing
the rate of deforestation and degradation,
and how much carbon can be effectively and
permanently sequestered by complementary
forest restoration activities.
According to estimates
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and various studies in Madagascar,
the carbon storage potential of the forests
in the project area could be between 61
to 68 million metric tons.
The current deforestation
and degradation of forests in the project
area is mainly caused by local slash and
burn agriculture. The project seeks to reverse
this situation by giving the farmers and
communities direct, better, access to the
management of forests and their natural
resources, and by promoting alternative,
sustainable and income-generating agricultural
practices, such as agro-forestry.
“When local communities
have the responsibility to manage their
natural resources, they tend to protect
them better and use them in a sustainable
way,” said Nanie Ratsifandrihamanana, WWF’s
Conservation Director in Madagascar. “This
in turn ensures them additional revenues
and improves their living conditions.”
Farmers in the project’s
key landscapes will be trained to establish
and maintain tree nurseries for reforestation
activities and restoration of degraded landscapes.
Plantations will also be established in
degraded areas close to urban areas in order
to provide fuelwood for the cities and towns
where there is high demand, thus providing
an alternative to the wood that would otherwise
be directly extracted from the natural forests.
Olivier van Bogaert
Project Manager and Communications –
Congo and Madagascar
WWF International
+ More
Trouble in the pipeline
for Grey Whales
10 Oct 2008 - Sakhalin,
Russia - The fate of the world’s few remaining
Western Grey Whales now rests on the outcome
of appeals to Russian authorities and courts
following the refusal of an oil consortium
to consider alternatives to a proposal to
lay an oil pipeline through a shallow lagoon
crucial to the whales’ food supplies.
Last month the Russian
government ignored an outcry over project
impacts on Piltun Lagoon to grant approval
for the pipeline, part of the Sakhalin-1
project which includes oil giant Exxon and
Russian, Japanese and Indian oil companies.
Only around 130 Western
Gray Whales are left worldwide, including
some 20 females able to reproduce. They
gather in the seas around Sakhalin in Russia’s
far east for four months to feed and build
up the fat to survive the rest of the year.
Piltun Lagoon produces
organic matter crucial for benthos such
as as sea stars, oysters, clams, sea cucumbers,
brittle stars and sea anemones which form
the Grey Whale’s main food source.
The Moscow Tagansky
Court last week accepted an action from
local Sakhalin NGOs including the Sakhalin
Association of Indigenous Peoples and Sakhalin
Environmental Watch, as well as the Rodnik
Law Centre demanding revision of the state
environmental expertise conclusion which
ignored scientific advice that the pipeline
route should be changed.
That report, commissioned
by WWF-Russia, Greenpeace and the International
Fund for Animal Welfare, was presented to
Russia’s minister of nature resources, Yury
Trutnev, earlier this year after the consortium
rejected an offer to negotiate a new route
for the pipeline.
WWF-Russia has this
month written to Minister Trutnev, asking
him to stop the Exxon project.
“Exxon cannot be considered
an environmentally responsible company if
it constructs a pipeline contrary to the
opinion of Russian and international conservation
experts,” said Alexey Knizhnikov, WWF-Russia
oil and gas environmental policy coordinator.
WWF is currently negotiating
with the government on the creation of a
marine protected area in the Piltun lagoon.
If the protected status is confirmed the
oil pipeline construction should be forbidden
in the lagoon.
