Silence of the birds
deforestation in the tropics is causing massive extinction of bird species. Many of these species, endemic to insular Southeast Asia, may soon be lost if rapid and effective conservation measures are not undertaken, claim ecologists. During a workshop sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society ( wcs ) and the Bolivia Sustainable Forestry Management Project ( bolfor ) in Bolivia, concern was also raised that even low-intensity logging (harvest of only three trees per hectare) could pose serious threats to Venezuelan bird communities.
The increasing operations of aggressive timber firms have led to the systematic denudation of forests in the region. Nearly six million hectares of tropical forests are being selectively logged every year, the bulk of which constitutes old growth forests ( Conservation Biology , Vol 11, No 2). In a short span of time, many timber firms have intensified their operations in South and Central America, western Africa, the Pacific islands, and Papua New Guinea. In recent years, in the Amazonian region of Brazil, some Asian and Malaysian timber firms have purchased land and logging concessions totalling over 4.4 million hectares. Brazilian loggers hold additional concessions for logging in the Amazon region.
The ecologists observed that the main impediments to sustainable logging in the tropics are generally more economic, social and political in nature that scientific. Reduced impact logging systems such as those developed in Queensland, Australia, have shown that damage to forests from harvest operations can be sharply reduced, with only a modest reduction in harvest levels. Such systems, however, require trained forest officers to supervise harvest operations and incentive systems to reward careful logging. Till date, few developing nations have more than "paper rules' regarding logging operations, and the vast majority of timber harvests are unsupervised, leading to excessive forest damage.
Francis Putz of the Center for International Forestry Research and the University of Florida, usa , says that selective logging often has minor impacts on forest ecosystems, compared to slash-and-burn agriculture and large-scale clearing. To improve forest management, biologists should learn to cooperate with foresters and loggers rather than adopting an antagonistic attitude, he suggests.
The outcome of the workshop suggests that the development of sustainable logging in the tropics will require developing nations to reinvest some of their profits from logging into forest management. As such, it is important for industrialised nations to help cash-strapped countries in bearing some of the costs of management and training.