1. The global ice melt from the past decade would flood the entire U.S.  (TreeHugger)
2. Wild salmon are not holding up a new study suggests.  (Green)
3. A newly discovered relative of the ‘corpse flower,’ smells like …  (National Geographic)
4. The Americas are on a collisions course with Eurasia, will create next supercontinent.  (NPR)
5. Do we finally know why zebras evolved their black and white stripes?  (BBC)

1. The EPA warns beach sand may contain illness-inducing bacteria. (TreeHugger)
2. Two teenagers are helping Girl Scouts end deforestation. (Grist)
3. Will global warming ruin football in the southern US? (Climate Progress)
4. Electric bicycles take on San Francisco’s famous hills. (Green)
5. Teaching students about climate change proves to be tricky for teachers. (Dot Earth)

February 10: A Visit to a Bai, and a Lesson in Law Enforcement

Today I visited a bai, the traditional men’s meeting house in Palau. A bai is a long, spectacularly decorated wooden structure with a triangular roof that rests on beams and is built without nails, so that it can be disassembled. They are amazing. I’ve wanted visit one ever since I first visited Palau seven years ago, and it did not disappoint.

We visited the bai for Melekeok state, home to the high chief Reklai, the second highest ranking chief in Palau.  During my visit I learned about traditional Palauan decision-making processes as well as how laws here are enforced, which gave me some new insights into why it’s so difficult to protect the environment in many parts of the world.

Palau is comprised of 16 states, each with 10 chiefs and all of whom are ranked by clan status.  The highest-ranking chief from each state, the paramount chief, sits on the Council of Chiefs.  When chiefs gather to discuss problems of the village, they enter the bai and do not come out until they have reached consensus. If they cannot reach a decision, the four highest-ranking chiefs step outside the bai and sit on designated rocks, where they come to a decision.  This is then shared with the rest of the chiefs and the village.

Today’s focus was on enforcement of environmental laws, and so I heard about how offenders are dealt with. Village elders recounted specific stories, naming names along the way and describing various offenses, including fines and other penalties… usually for taking fish that wasn’t theirs to take.

When someone violates rules of the village, they come before the chiefs — but they don’t come alone.  They come with their families — mothers, uncles, sisters, etc., and the families plead their case. It is a great shame upon your family to bring them before the village elders.

And that peer pressure and shame have proven to be very effective in enforcing norms in Palau. Think about it: How would you feel if your father had to be humiliated in his community for something that you did — as well as share in the punishment?  Wouldn’t you think twice?

Palauans believe that environmental transgressions are social ones, too; they understand that, when someone takes or destroys a natural resource, it affects everyone, and the impacts can be long-lasting or even irreparable. How do you measure that? How do you exact a penalty that matches the crime? In Palau, there are monetary and material penalties (hefty fines or loss of equipment, including things such as boats).  Their fines match the crime. Not surprisingly, repeat offenders are rare.

Choosing proper penalties for environmental degradation is a perennial topic of conversation for marine conservationists all over the world. Such penalties are weak in many places and for many situations; judicial systems also often don’t enforce the laws already on the books. We see this at every level, from poacher to corporate polluter.

A big part of the problem is that most contemporary societies don’t really view most actions that hurt the environment as social acts. From driving a mile to the grocery store to polluting a waterway to not buying energy that’s renewable when you have the option, people see their habits as individual ones, not ones that add up and have a social cost. But most societies don’t have collective penalties for environmental transgressions, either. In Palau, the environment is everything, and the country’s social norms reflect that. It will probably take something drastic to make the rest of us realize that our resources really are limited and that we need to take greater measures to hold people accountable. Palau’s resort to social shaming in the service of the greater good might seem drastic to us; but it clearly works.

[Images: Two views of the Melekeok bai. Image credit: Stephanie Wear]

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February 8, 2012:  A Sea That Unites Us

Here on Palau, I am just back from our first day of a learning exchange between several communities spread across the Hawaiian Islands, the country of Palau, and the territory of American Samoa.  Today we went to Palau’s Capitol Building, which was modeled after the U.S. Capitol and was built as a symbol of Palau’s democracy. The neoclassic architecture, complete with a domed building, stands out in a landscape surrounded by forest and crystal clear blue waters.

We were welcomed at the Capitol by Palau’s Council of the Chiefs.  There are 16 high chiefs in Palau, and we heard from many of them about values they and we share in protecting the environment for people.  We brought gifts and shared in some amazing moments — like when our Hawaii delegation chanted oli’s (Hawaiian chants) to connect their ancestors to those of the Palauans, and to share their gratitude for the welcome extended by the high chiefs.

I got emotional at times like this, I must admit. Something really special happened in that room. It was powerful to be sitting among so many like-minded folks, in a formal government building while oli’s were exchanged by people using words of their ancestors. I won’t soon forget it.  We felt fortunate to hear from the chiefs as they shared their passion for protecting their region’s natural resources for the future.

The words of one chief continue to resonate with me. He said, “The sea does not divide us — it brings us all together, it unites us.” He spoke of the ocean’s waves, and how the same waves that reach the shores of Palau also make their way to American Samoa and Hawaii.  He’s right: the ocean connects all people to all places.  The theme of connection is sure to resonate throughout our week together, and what it means will be something I continue to discuss with my colleagues.

But it’s a theme that has yet to resonate with most people elsewhere. Even though people depend for their very lives on the sea, most still don’t understand that. We might understand how deeply we all need clean air or productive land, but the ocean as a symbol of global unity is basically invisible to the public — and that lack of visibility diminishes whether people think about the ocean as a place that needs protection and care.

Maybe we need to frame the importance of the ocean in terms of self-preservation. In protecting the oceans, we protect and care for ourselves. The planet’s “circulatory system” of ocean currents functions much like the arteries of the human body, nourishing and rejuvenating life at sea and on land. Oceans are absolutely vital to how the planet stays alive, and we should have a much better understanding of it than we do.

All of us struggle in conservation with how to make these connections real, meaningful and immediate to people who can’t see the underwater wonders of Palau or hear the passion of these exchange participants. How do we connect the sea to the most basic needs that we all have as humans — and in doing so, create an opportunity to preserve those resources for the future?  I have a feeling this week will give me a lot of opportunities to ponder this immense challenge.

[Image:  Stephanie Wear and her colleagues in Palau. Image source: Stephanie Wear]

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February 6, 2012:  Greetings from Palau!

I’ve just returned to one of my favorite places on the planet: Palau, a tiny country with less than 20,000 citizens in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — a tiny speck on the map. For what it lacks in size, Palau makes up for with some of the most stunning scenery both above and below the sea’s surface.

Stepping off the plane, I was greeted by the sweet smells of the tropics, salty humid air and darkness. Coming and going from Palau seems to always take place in the middle of the night, which means I’ve never managed to get an aerial view. In fact, I’ve only seen it from above in scenes from episodes of Survivor: Palau! Before that television show, most people had never heard of this wonderful country. Now it’s clear the secret is out. Each time I return, tourism has expanded — the tour boats are full — and the local people seem as happy as ever to share this long-kept secret.

It’s easy to see why Palau’s coral reefs have been named one of the seven underwater wonders of the world. The reefs are thriving; in fact, coral colonies can be seen growing on top of each other. This was not the case 14 years ago when, in 1998, Palau was hit by a global mass bleaching event. Within weeks, the vibrant, colorful, teeming-with-life reefs were barren, colorless and quiet.

Yet, those vibrant reefs are back and showing signs of incredible recovery. This is one of the most exciting and hopeful things a coral reef scientist can hear. Given the state of much of the globe’s coral reefs, it is easy to lose hope and hand down the death sentence for reefs — but there are reefs in Palau and around the world that just keep coming back, giving us real hope and a rationale to keep on working.

This week I am in Palau with a group of community members and Nature Conservancy staff from the Hawaiian Islands. Our Conservancy colleagues from Palau are hosting us, and together we are going on a journey of discovery to better understand what is happening in Palau, both on land and in the sea. We will be visiting villages, speaking with village elders and chiefs and learning about how Palau is managing its natural resources using traditional methods and laws. What we learn on this journey is sure to provide insight into how to best protect and ultimately save coral reefs from their threatened demise.

Follow us on our journey — if it is anything like Palau’s coral reefs, it will be colorful and inspiring.

[Image: Aerial view of Kmekumer, Rock Islands, Republic of Palau. Image source: Jez O'Hare]

1. States are requiring insurance companies to plan for climate change. (Grist)
2. Nissan is shipping it’s electric cars on a low-emission, solar-diesel ship. (Clean Technica)
3. A special powder will soon be able to turn your grass clippings into solar cells. (Future of Technology)
4. The worst spate of stranded dolphins in a decade on Cape Cod baffle scientists. (Guardian)
5. After 20 years, Russian drill nears 14-million-year-old Antarctic lake. (Wired)

1. Teens send a Lego 80,000 feet into the clouds (and they have video!). (Los Angeles Times)
2. Marine mammals are showing up on more dinner plates than you may except. (Huffington Post)
3. What country takes first prize on the environmental performance index? (Green)
4. Sea cucumber poo may be key to saving the world’s coral reefs. (TreeHugger)
5. NASA video shows the Earth’s rise in temperature over the past 131 years. (Mongabay)

1. School-bus-sized asteroid to buzz Earth Friday, closer than the moon. (Christian Science Monitor)
2. The world’s giant trees are declining, face a dire future due to climate change & other factors. (Mongabay)
3. NASA nearly doubled their list of confirmed planets beyond our solar system in one day. (Cosmic Log)
4. Jumping spiders hunt with deadly accuracy thanks to 3-D vision. (Wired)
5. Yosemite is having its driest winter in 30 years, forcing tourist destinations to get creative . (LA Times)

Mark Tercek is the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. This week he’s at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where he was invited to participate in a panel on innovative ways to tackle water, food, mineral and energy challenges.

See interviews with Mark and all of his blog posts from Davos on nature.org.

Resource scarcity has been a frequent topic at the World Economic Forum in recent years, and for good reason.

Between now and 2050, the world’s population will grow by an additional 2 billion people. Over the same period, millions of people will be lifted out of poverty. By 2030, nearly two thirds of the global population–as opposed to today’s one quarter–could be middle class.

Rising incomes, of course, are a good thing. But a rapidly growing and more affluent population are straining the natural systems on which natural diversity, human health and prosperity depend.

The good news is that corporations and governments increasingly recognize the need to balance development with sound ecological standards and are seeking advice on how to effectively achieve these twin goals. I saw strong evidence of that trend today in Davos, where I led a panel that included CEOs of multinational beverages, food and mining companies, and senior government environmental ministers, and leaders of international aid organizations.

Despite the diverse range of perspectives, the panelists all agreed on one thing: Nature conservation isn’t just an aesthetic “luxury”–it’s an essential investment in human well-being and economic growth.

Take water, for example–a resource already in short supply. More than 1 billion people worldwide currently lack access to clean water, with rising temperatures only further compounding the problem.

And water challenges affect more than basic human and ecological health. Water is essential to economic productivity and virtually every aspect of our quality of life, including growing the food we eat, manufacturing the products we buy and supplying electricity to our homes. As global water scarcity intensifies, multinational corporations are increasingly concerned about their water-related business risks. Companies risk running out of clean water for their operations, and their water use can impact other water users and ecosystems.

Until recently, diverse stakeholders–governments, businesses, development organizations, and conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy–have tended to address these challenges in a one-off “siloed” manner. That doesn’t work. As one panelist noted, companies can save enormous amounts of water by using more energy, or save energy by using more water. The key, however, is figuring out how to do both. Likewise, reducing carbon emissions can unintentionally hurt the food industry’s ability to feed hungry people, as more and more lands are converted for biofuel production.

Balancing such tradeoffs isn’t easy. But it’s clear that we need more integrated approaches to resource management. And integration must go both up and down the supply chain. Panelists agreed that reducing resource use should continue to be a top priority for their companies — and they are making great progress — but their suppliers are also key players. Companies must tackle resources challenges on an integrated basis with suppliers and customers.

Fortunately, tackling these challenges doesn’t always require high-tech, expensive intervention. For example, according to one panelist, better roads in developing countries — in order to reduce extraordinary traffic jams — could be an important way to address air pollution and carbon emissions in many emerging markets. Likewise, wasteful water leakage in agriculture can be addressed most quickly and effectively by better valves and pipes rather genetically-modified crop varieties that require less water.

What’s also clear is the need to move quickly. As one CEO noted, for example, it’s time to stop debating the future impacts of climate change. We are already seeing those impacts. From rising sea levels to rivers running dry, rising temperatures pose urgent and serious threats to natural systems and to the people, plants and animals, and economies that they sustain.

I’ve been encouraged by the sense of urgency, coupled with cautious optimism, that I’ve seen in Davos this week. Key players in government, business, and civil society understand that integrated approaches to resource management need to be accelerated and prioritized. Positive impacts are already being achieved. If we can enhance and improve collaboration, focus on holistic approaches, scale up programs, and recruit more participants, there is reason to be encouraged.

The good programs we’re hearing about this week really do work. Now they need to be taken to scale, urgently.

(Image: A wood products processing plant glows during the night shift at the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River near Old Town and Bradley, Maine. Image credit: © Bridget Besaw)

Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the wide spread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

And the same rain that brings mercury pollution down from the sky falls on us, too. So are these species a kind of canary in the coal mine for mercury’s effects on other vertebrates, including people? And will strict new federal standards limiting U.S. power plant pollution be enough in a world where mercury pollution is on the rise from China and other nations? I talked with two co-authors of “Hidden Risk” — BRI’s executive director, Dave Evers, and Tim Tear, the Conservancy’s director of science for New York — to find out more. (Download the report here.)

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Q: Some are going to be surprised that mercury pollution is still a problem — didn’t various agencies and industries take steps to reduce mercury emissions over the last decade in the United States? So why are high levels of mercury still a problem in many wildlife species?

DAVE EVERS:  Yes, a lot of mercury has been taken out of air pollution over the past few decades — but our understanding is growing of how just a little mercury can adversely affect wildlife and how many species have been affected. More species are being impacted than we had thought, and the toxicity of methylmercury to those species is at lower threshold levels than we ever realized.

TIM TEAR: Many of these species and many of the places affected are in people’s backyards. People used to think that mercury pollution was a problem isolated to remote areas of the Northeast. No more.

Q: So, would someone see a bird or a bat acting strangely because of mercury pollution? Or is this something that data is telling you?

EVERS: The effects are difficult to see in the field for the average observer. Mercury doesn’t create physical mutations, and an individual animal with mercury will probably die from predation first. But mercury is a neurotoxin that does impact wildlife behavior, and that behavior impacts their survival and reproduction. We focus on data to really quantify the impacts of mercury on the reproductive success of species.

For example, we quantified mercury impacts on the common loon. Common loons need to spend about 98 percent of their time on a nest incubating their eggs to have those eggs successfully hatch. We’ve quantified with over 5,000 hours of observation that loons with high mercury levels spend only 85 percent of their time incubating those eggs. So they spend less time in an incubation posture, and because of that, eggs do not hatch, and because of that, the species reproductive success goes down.

Q: Where is the mercury pollution still coming from? And what U.S. regions are of most concern? 

TEAR: Most of the research has really focused on the Northeast United States — an area that’s been really hard hit by acid rain, which makes mercury a bigger problem. But mercury pollution is happening all over the world. It comes globally from Asia as well as nationally from power plants in the Midwest to locally from waste incinerators. We’re going to need to address all sources of mercury to be successful in stopping these impacts.

Q: And in different habitats, right? Most people in the United States who know about mercury in nature know about it through warnings about the fish they eat.

EVERS:  Yes, there’s been a paradigm shift in new findings. In the past, most of the scientists assessing risk from mercury in an ecosystem would be looking at fish-eating birds and fish-eating mammals — because we knew methylmercury (the organic form of mercury) moved through the food web in aquatic organisms. But there’s been a missing link in looking at mercury in terrestrial ecosystem food webs and looking at how species that eat insects and spiders — what we call “invertivores” — can be affected.

In the invertivore food web, the key pieces are no longer fish, but spiders. A bird that eats a spider that ate a spider that ate a fly — that’s four different changes in the trophic food web. We’ve established that a little songbird like a northern waterthrush or a sparrow that eats spiders can actually be higher up in the food web than a bald eagle, which eats fish — and so that songbird has more mercury in its body than does the eagle.

TEAR: We’ve also discovered that mercury is in many more food webs than we realized.  It is not just in lakes and ponds. It’s in our forests, our estuaries; it’s in the lowlands and on the mountaintops. It’s in the spiders in the Adirondacks, and it’s in backyard birds in New York City.

Q:  You mentioned effects on reproductive success. What are some of the other impacts of mercury on terrestrial wildlife?

EVERS:  For example, bird song is affected. Two recent studies show that birds with high mercury can’t hit the high notes, and their songs are simplified. I also worry about long-distance migration, because high mercury has been shown to affect the symmetry of development. If a bird’s left wing is 5 percent different in shape than its right wing, that bird is going to fly in a crooked way to compensate for it, which requires more energy to make a flight of thousands of miles to its wintering area. Ultimately, that’s going to affect its survival.

Q: That’s sad. But ultimately, why should humans care?

TEAR: First, if you care about the environment and you care about birds and bats and bugs, then you should care that many of these animals are being heavily impacted.

But the second answer is that the neurotoxic rain that contains mercury falls on humans as well as wildlife. We already know that mercury can be a big problem in human health. This research establishes that the effects of mercury are happening all over the planet, all over many habitat types, to vertebrate species other than ourselves. So people should be concerned about these effects, because there’s a link between human health and ecosystem health.

Q:  Back to the science of this. How the heck do you measure mercury in a bird population, anyway?

EVERS:  It’s actually very simple and straightforward.  There are nice and easy ways to capture and/or take samples from an individual bird that are quick and are non-harmful to the bird and do very little disruption to its routine, other than just having it in a net or hand for a half hour or so. We take a blood sample — just a drop does the trick. We also can take a feather sample, which gives us more of a long-term picture of how much mercury has come into that individual over time.

Q: But how do you disentangle the effects of mercury on birds and bats from other factors? How do you know that it’s mercury that is causing the decline of the wood thrush or the little brown bat?

EVERS: It’s a question we’re still studying. There are multiple stressors at play for many species and habitats, and as conservation biologists, we are trying to understand those. We want to provide scientific information to landscape managers and policymakers, so we will have these birds around for a few more hundred years at least.

Take the olive-sided flycatcher. In the last 4 years, it’s declined by 80 percent, so 80 percent of this population is gone in comparison to 4 years ago. It’s a bird that lives in bogs.  Bogs are known to have high methylation rates of mercury, but they are not well studied as a habitat whatsoever. Neither is the olive-sided flycatcher. So here you have a species in a habitat that I think is at great risk to mercury as a potential driver and a primary stressor for why this decline is happening.  Mercury is an omnipresent stressor, but the question is always: Where is it a primary stressor?

TEAR:  I’d also add that, in some places where birds are declining, there has been no obvious habitat change, and many people think of the challenges as being primarily habitat loss, but we certainly know that, for example, some species like the wood thrush within the Adirondack Park, there are fewer wood thrush today than there were 20 years ago. They’re still there, but there aren’t as many.  The question is why, and this is part of the disentangling of those different stressors that Dave is referring to.

Q:  Is there any relationship between mercury emissions and greenhouse gas emissions? Is there a climate change connection?

TEAR: Well, many of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxides and other air pollutants — such as nitrogen and sulfur, which cause acid rain, and mercury, which brings us this neurotoxic rain — come from power plants, and all of these air pollutants have negative impacts on our environment. Our research shows that we should be factoring in these ecological impacts when we consider the cost and benefits of regulatory programs such as the recent Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule. But so far, estimating the ecological impact of these air pollutants that are coming from similar sources as CO₂ has not been done.

EVERS:  Climate change might also be causing great mercury methylation rates into ecosystems or even remobilizing mercury that was stored in the system. For instance, forest fires have become more predominant because of climate change in some parts of the country — and those forests hold a lot of legacy mercury in their systems, which can be released quite rapidly with a fire. Greater storm intensity and frequency could be increasing deposition of mercury from the global atmospheric pool to landscapes below. Increased wetting and drying cycles could be another factor in greater mercury methylation.

Q: It sounds dire. So what can anyone do?

TEAR:  First, while we need more research on this, there are definitely landscape and wildlife management actions that might help reduce the amount of mercury embedded in the environment.

Dave mentioned that hotter forest fires that occur for whatever reason can release a great deal more mercury than cooler burns — so using fire management in our forest systems could have a significant impact on the amount of mercury that’s released. How we manage artificial reservoirs is extremely important — if we manage those in a way to make the wetting and drying cycles greater, we might also be increasing the amount of mercury methylation.

EVERS: Another example: It makes a lot of sense not to log in a riparian area anyway—and it also makes sense from a mercury standpoint. There is a lot of legacy mercury and even new mercury coming into these forest ecosystems, and the less we disturb that mercury the better. There are studies right now quantifying the mercury effects of logging practices in Oregon.

Q: What else?

TEAR: We need greater investment in this country’s mercury monitoring network. A stronger network would help us gather data systematically and also help us know whether current efforts to reduce mercury pollution — like the EPA’s recent Mercury and Air Toxics Rule standard — are enough to improve these areas already damaged by mercury.

We also need continued research on this issue. We’re just beginning to understand the impacts of mercury on both ecological and human health. And we need to support efforts at all levels to reduce mercury — global, regional and local. Mercury is coming from multiple levels, and no single level will be enough.

EVERS: On the importance of a national network — I’ve been fortunate to work with both U.S. Senate and House representatives to introduce bills that would establish the first national mercury monitoring network, which we need from a federal accountability standpoint. But industry also has been supportive of this idea. Industry likes certainty, and a national monitoring network could really help provide a standard playing field for the industry in terms of installing emission protections on their smokestacks.

And a national monitoring network could also help the United States politically wrangle with other countries where mercury emissions are increasing. About 50 percent of mercury emissions have been taken out of U.S. sources between 1990 and 2005 — but the global pool of mercury continues to increase because countries like China are putting in a new coal-fired power plant once a week. A standardized mercury monitoring program provides us the way to really track our progress both spatially and temporally.

(Image: Wood thrush. Image credit: Dave Whitlock/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Controversial bird flu research put on hold. (Wired Science)
2. Climate change may claim another victim: California’s cattle rangelands. (Green)
3. Do the feathers in your down comforter come from live or dead birds? (Mother Nature Network)
4. An arctic ribbon seal flops up to a Seattle resident’s dock. (Huffington Post Green)
5. Washington, DC takes the prize for the most LEED-certified buildings. (CleanTechnica)

Mark Tercek is the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. This post was originally published for the The Huffington Post.

As we watch the world debate how best to address climate change, and as carbon emissions continue to soar, at least one climate strategy strikes me as a “no-brainer.” We should do everything we can to save the world’s forests.

There are many good reasons for protecting forests, from their intrinsic beauty to their ecologic and economic values. Tropical forests are storehouses of biodiversity, harboring more than one-half of the Earth’s known plants and animal species. And nearly 1 billion people worldwide directly depend on forest resources — fiber, fuel, food and clean water — for their livelihoods and well-being.

Forest destruction produces about 15 percent of the world’s manmade global carbon emissions — more carbon pollution than the entire global transportation sector. It is the primary source of emissions in two of the top five carbon-emitting countries: Brazil and Indonesia. Forests function as a natural air conditioner, pulling carbon from the atmosphere while cleaning and cooling our air. Yet each year more than 32 million acres of the world’s forests are destroyed — an area about the size of New York state.

The figures speak for themselves. When done right, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (known as “REDD+” in policymakers’ jargon) can be a triple win for nature, people and our world’s climate.

But REDD+ does have its critics. As head of The Nature Conservancy, it’s easy for me to explain why my organization wants to reduce deforestation. However, some question why we support another part of the REDD+ equation–improving forest management for the sustainable harvesting of wood. Why create incentives for cutting down trees?

Again, let’s turn to the numbers. Destructive logging practices, many of them illegal, are one of the most serious drivers of forest loss and resulting emissions. Research has shown that that transitioning from destructive logging to low impact harvesting practices can reduce damage to forests and lower carbon emissions by 30-50% while delivering the same supply of timber. Simply put, better forestry can be good for our climate.

In addition, encouraging smart replanting where logging has already occurred is an important part of keeping forests viable in the long term — for local communities, forest-dwelling species and future generations.

Finally, we also recognize that forestry activities today sustain millions of jobs around the world and provide people with wood and paper products. Recycling and development of non-timber alternatives can — and should — reduce demand for these goods, but well-managed forests and plantations also play an important role. They can provide a reliable, sustainable supply of paper and wood while diverting pressure away from pristine lands that contain the highest amount of carbon and serve as homes for endangered species and indigenous communities. And many of the world’s best-quality forests are managed by indigenous communities, who tend their land in low-impact ways while relying on its bounty for their livelihoods.

“Well-managed” is the operative phrase. Robust and transparent standards, accounting rules and independent verification must protect against converting primary forests to plantations under REDD+ programs that allow for planting and managing forests for the sustainable harvesting of wood. In fact, the Cancun Agreements adopted by 194 countries at the December 2010 UN climate convention require that REDD+ actions be “consistent with the conservation of natural forests and biological diversity, ensuring that the actions … of this decision are not used for the conversion of natural forests.”

Based on our 60 years of experience conserving forests around the world, The Nature Conservancy is committed to demonstrating how REDD+ can work to provide benefits for forests, local people and the global climate. For example, in Indonesia, we are partnering with the government in the district of Berau to protect its tropical forest and reduce carbon pollution by two million tons annually — which is like removing roughly 400,000 cars from the road each year. In this 5 million-acre area, we are also boosting economic progress by providing guidance on smarter, more sustainable farming and logging techniques. And we’re doing on-the-ground research to understand how much carbon pollution we’re preventing from going into the atmosphere.

REDD+ alone will not solve the climate change challenge — we must urgently address carbon pollution from all sources. But REDD+ is a critical piece of the puzzle in addressing this global challenge, and it has the potential to be transformative in benefiting communities, ecosystems, biodiversity and the global climate.

(Image: Rainforest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Image credit: ©Jez O’Hare)