The argument for deforestation has always been that the economic
benefits to local communities are too great to overlook. But now a new
study in the current issue of
Science suggests that's not true.
A team of researchers from Portugal, France and Britain studied nearly
300 Brazilian municipalities on the frontier of the Amazonian rain
forest, assessing their development levels — based on income, life
expectancy and literary rates — before deforestation and afterward.
Researchers found that logging forests and converting the land to
pasture and agriculture initially raised development levels in a burst
of prosperity. But in the years that followed deforestation, that
bubble of prosperity popped, and development levels declined until on
average the communities were no better off than they had been before
the trees were destroyed.
(Read "The Amazon Gets Less and Less Green.")Please value the writer & producer of these words by paying a visit to:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1904174,00.html?iid=tsmodule
Read about all forest issues in Brazil:
http://forestpolicyresearch.org/category/latin-american-tree-news-2/brazil/
It's not hard to see why deforestation pays off, at least initially.
As trees are cleared, they can be sold for timber — and the buzz of
activity surrounding deforestation attracts migrants who capitalize on
newly available land, timber and minerals. As the human population
increases, so does the demand for roads and other transportation that
can connect once isolated communities with valuable markets, and vice
versa. That also leads to better access to education and health care,
which helps boost literacy rates and life-expectancy levels.
Eventually, development levels in newly deforested communities can
match and even exceed the Brazilian average.
But those improvements are transitory. The denser population quickly
uses up the new natural resources, as timber is sold, and the Amazonian
soil, never rich to begin with, is rapidly exhausted. (The researchers
note that by the early 1990s, more than 75% of the land that had been
deforested up to then had been converted to pasture — and that
one-third of that territory had already been abandoned.) Per-capita
income, life expectancy and literacy rates all drop, as jobs disappear
and the better-educated, better-off migrants move onto the next
frontier. "In net terms," the authors write, "people in municipalities
that have cleared their forests are not better off than those in
municipalities who have not."
(See a graphic of the effects of climate change on the world by 2020.)Please value the writer & producer of these words by paying a visit to:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1904174,00.html?iid=tsmodule
Read about all forest issues in Brazil:
http://forestpolicyresearch.org/category/latin-american-tree-news-2/brazil/
