There are a number of organizations that seek to fight deforestation in the Amazon. The Amazon Fund is one organization that seeks to protect regions of the forest by paying natives to maintain and protect the land. The World Land Trust is another organization that funds smaller organizations so that they may buy land and establish reservers. The PPG7 was a program launched in Brazil with the support of Germany, the Netherlands, France, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy and the Brazilian government. The program goals involve disseminating information and involving the public in the preservation of forests. The PPG7 has received 428 million dollars, which it has given to over 200 community projects that seek new ways to preserve and sustainably use the Amazon.
The Amazon Fund recently began a new type of project aimed at getting farmers involved in the preservation of the Amazon. The Para project got a promise of 1000 million US dollars by 2015 from Norway. Farmers who do not deforest their land will receive monthly checks for doing so. This could offset the economic hardships on farmers that Smith et. al. (1999) identified as being caused by mandatory maintenance of forests on farmland. This project is expected to reduce GHG emissions by 2015 by 3.1 million tons at a cost of 5 dollars per ton of carbon.
The Kyoto Protocol introduced Certified Emissions Reductions (CER) credits as another attempt to slow deforestation. The Kyoto Protocol indicates that monetary credits can be given for CER’s, if the reduction in emissions is real and above what would have occurred naturally in a given area. According to Tschakert, Coomes and Potvin (2005), farmers who maintain secondary forests on their land could sequester 4 t C per hectare in a given year. Estimates of how much they could get paid for this carbon range from 2 to 5 dollars per ton. An issue with this attempted solution is that lower income farmers are often too constrained by daily food needs to be able to participate in such a program (Tschakert et. al. 2005).
Tomich, Noordwijk, Vosti, and Witcover (1998) provide a good framework for understanding potential solutions. They point out the important divide between the interests of the international community (higher income countries) and the interests of local users of land. Whereas the international community prioritizes forest biodiversity and the forest’s role as an important carbon sink, the local users prioritize private interests like making a living by extracting from the forest or clearing the forest for agriculture. The key concerns the authors define for any solutions that are to be successful are as follows:
1. The alternative must be more profitable than what the farmers can do now (i.e. agriculture or renting land).
2. The alternatives must increase the food security of the farmers either by allowing for sufficient production of food or by allowing for trade for sufficient food.
3. The alternatives need to be within the labor capacities of the locals. If they require excess labor, the alternatives must provide the funding for this labor.
4. The alternatives need to be agronomically sustainable. That is, they cannot drain the resources on which they rely.
The authors also point out that though most of the interests of the international community are centered around forest felling, the international community should also pay attention to land uses following deforestation. These land uses vary in their impacts on the environment (Tschakert et. al., 2005; Tinker et. al., 1996; Kotto-Same et. al., 1997; Kato et. al., 1999). Tomich et. al. advise that alternatives need to give farmers a central role, especially in Brazil, where farmer experimentation is necessary due to lack of knowledge about what is effective in the new frontiers of the Amazon.
This graph by Tomich et. al. (1998) outlines the estimates of potential solution and their benefits in orders of magnitude with relation to the primary forest. Click on the image to make it larger.
A last route that is important to consider is using policy and government regulation. Fearnside (1998) suggests that governments take an active policy-based role in fighting deforestation by de-incentivizing cattle ranching and land speculation in forests by removing subsidies and applying heavier taxes. Fujisaka et. al. (1998) also recommend policy approaches that remove incentives for cattle ranching. The IPCC (2007) asserts that the most important mitigation policy in the tropics is slowing deforestation, and that policy approaches have been somewhat successful in doing this. The IPCC also recommends that government support be given to argoforestry and afforestation*, because of high initial costs and delayed returns. All of these policy options need to keep the interests of both the international community and the local users in mind if they are to be successful solutions (Tomich et. al., 2005). As mentioned above, this is especially important because of the potential of forest maintenance regulations to place further hardship on low-income farmers (Smith et. al., 1999).
This is most likely not a problem that will involve one solution. Every solution that has been identified so far will involve certain benefits and harms to one end of the spectrum. Also, the diversity of the regions where deforestation occurs means that there are many diverse needs. The solutions need to be as diverse as the needs that must be met.
*Afforestation is the planting of seeds to establish forests.
