Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.

But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world’s most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means that steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 per cent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America’s oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, lies entirely within the city’s boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.

There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio’s international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half Rio’s population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.

With the eyes – and, more to the point, the noses – of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.

But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotráfico. This boom will damp down violence from criminals and the police (there’s a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.

And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city’s population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.

This will be most acute in the southern beachside neighbourhoods of Barra, Recreio and Vargem Grande, which were booming for years even before the Olympics. Many of the new sporting facilities in Rio’s bid, including the Olympic village, will be built here. As recently as the 1970s this area was still largely undeveloped, the stupendous beach of Barra fringing an unspoiled expanse of mangroves, coves and headlands ending in Barra da Sepetiba, a scalloped and shifting promontory of dunes and beaches pointing twelve miles into the Atlantic and the glorious (now rapidly overdeveloping) coastline south of Rio.

This oasis of nature so close to a megacity couldn’t last. From the late 1970s, a gigantic real estate boom saw Barra transformed into a depressingly Americanized complex of malls, highways, condominiums and apartment blocks. As the only reasonably flat area with land available anywhere in the city, it was inevitable this area would be earmarked for Olympic development, but the key issue is what impact this will have on the coast’s surprisingly strong zoning and development controls.

Rio’s governments, appalling as they often are, occasionally get some things spectacularly right – the 40% drop in driving deaths since a well-enforced ban on alcohol and driving began last year is a current example. In the late 1990s, in the nick of time, a municipal park called Prainha put the coast immediately south of the real estate boom off limits to developers, preserving the two stunning beaches of Prainha and Grumarí and linking them up to the still pristine coastline around and including Barra da Sepetiba, long preserved by the Brazilian Navy, to whom the promontory belongs. Ironically, a few months before the success of the Olympic bid, the developers had managed to get the zoning laws in Prainha relaxed. Now, with blood already in the water, the level of development is about to spiral. It could well spiral out of control — and if it does, the last piece of properly preserved coastline within the city’s boundaries will go.

Those of us who know and love Rio feel torn. On the one hand, there’s no denying this is a great city with a great talent for spectacle, and it has all the potential to stage a great world event like the Olympics, perhaps more memorably than has ever been done before. But Rio is a memorable place in other, less positive ways. Many local politicians would shock even Tony Soprano, and their corruption and incompetence has mismanaged the city into the ground. Many of its well-known problems are directly traceable to the city’s dreadful politics. With Brazil’s international image on the line, the federal government may have to step in.

The stakes for Rio’s environment are even higher. An image taking a hit is, in the final analysis, a trivial thing –  but once a coast or a forest goes, it almost never comes back. Fingers crossed.

(Image: Prainha, Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Credit: Rodrigo_Soldon/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. We’ve been talking a lot about the term “green” lately (see yesterday’s blog post), and here’s another green question to ponder (from Green Inc., of course): Do green jobs create greener Americans?
2. Do you know who the world’s top 3 carbon polluters are? The United States and China are pretty obvious, but the The Vine points out that few people know what the third country on the list is. And this third little country makes it all the more important that world leaders come up with an agreement to curb deforestation at Copenhagen.
3. Speaking of keeping forests intact, Ecuador is hoping its plan to stop drilling for oil in the Amazon will get global support before Copenhagen. The plan hinges on countries coming forward to fund Ecuador the money it would have made from the oil.
4. Scientific American showers a little optimism on us this morning: Even if Copenhagen isn’t fruitfull, 2009 has been a year of great progress toward increasing global support and addoption of renewable energy sources.
5. Scientists have a new piece in the puzzle of how birds migrate. A study of European robins found that light-sensing cells in the eyes are responsible for the birds’ ability to find north and migrate – not magnetic-sensing cells in the beak, as hypothesized.

Mark Tercek is president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

Over the last few months, I have been participating in a bipartisan commission — The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests — that is focused on the connections between climate policy here in the United States and protecting tropical forests. The commission comprises some of the country’s leading government, business, conservation, science and national security experts, and is co-chaired by former Senator Lincoln Chafee and John Podesta, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former White House chief of staff.

Today, the commission unveiled our report highlighting a cornerstone of the policy debate: We cannot win the battle against climate change without protecting our forests.

Destruction of the world’s forests each year produces 17 percent of all carbon emissions released into the atmosphere. Each year, roughly 50,000 square miles of forest — an area larger than the state of Pennsylvania — disappear.

Today’s report calls on Congress to pass legislation that will help cut emissions from tropical deforestation in half within a decade and achieve zero net emissions from the forest sector by 2030.

While this sounds like an ambitious goal — and it is — forest protection requires no technological breakthroughs and is one of the most cost-effective strategies we have to address climate change.

Currently, cash-poor but forest-rich nations can earn more money by destroying their forests than by conserving them. But the United States can lead in the global climate battle by providing the incentives and support developing countries need to protect their forest resources and lower emissions.

The report is particularly timely now, because the Senate is considering a climate change bill that offers a significant opportunity to implement a number of these recommendations. And by offering to partner with developing countries to reduce emissions from forest destruction, the United States could help other countries undertake more ambitious efforts to reduce emissions as the countries of the world head into climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

The commission calls for the United States to mobilize $14 billion each year by 2020 to protect the world’s forests, largely from private funds. This mobilization could be accomplished by enacting comprehensive climate policy legislation that caps and steadily reduces U.S. carbon emissions and provides incentives for U.S. companies to invest in forest conservation. In this way, such a program would create a win-win opportunity for businesses, consumers, forests and the people who inhabit them.

In the global effort to contain climate change, it is important to take steps to reduce all major sources of carbon emissions. Yet a ton of carbon emissions reduced through forest protection is just as important for our atmosphere as a ton of carbon reduced from a tailpipe or a smokestack.

The commission also recommends that the United States commit to early and sustained public investments — starting with $1 billion by 2012, and increasing to $5 billion annually by 2020 — to unlock these cost savings and begin to reduce deforestation in nations that cannot initially attract sufficient private capital. A well-designed cap-and-trade program, supplemented by bold commitments through the appropriations process, would provide an effective mechanism for providing this sustained public financing. (See a recent speech I gave at Yale University to learn more.)

At the Conservancy, we have seen first-hand how forests can be a powerful tool against climate change. For more than 10 years, the Conservancy has worked with some of the country’s leading businesses to launch programs that protect threatened forests, lower emissions, benefit local communities and fight climate change.

Our Noel Kempff project in Bolivia is the world’s first — and only — forest carbon project to have its emissions reductions verified by a third party. By bringing together AEP, PacifiCorp, BP, the Bolivian government and local communities, the project is protecting 1.5 million acres of tropical forest and will prevent the release of 5.8 million tons of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

In Indonesia, The Nature Conservancy is currently working with government agencies, private businesses, local communities and other partners to launch a massive forest carbon program that will span the entire governmental district of Berau – equal to the size of the country of Belize.

And in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Para, which account for 70 percent of Brazil’s deforestation, we are moving forward with two large-scale reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) pilot projects that have the potential to halt millions of acres of deforestation and reduce emissions of millions of tons of carbon dioxide. These programs will demonstrate to U.S. and international climate change policymakers how REDD can work in practice.

Along with reducing emissions, stopping deforestation protects biodiversity as well as the food, water and economic resources communities rely upon for survival.

Halting the destruction of the world’s forests is within our grasp. The United States can and should lead in this effort, and the report released today shows the path forward.

(Image: Arcoiris waterfall at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in Bolivia, South America. Credit: Hermes Justiniano.)

We are headed into Week Two of international climate negotiations here in Bangkok. Progress is slow…but there is some progress. I asked Andrew Deutz, The Nature Conservancy’s director of international government relations, to provide some context on what’s going on…and what it means for a climate-change agreement in Copenhagen this December:

Q: What progress has been made in the first week of these discussions?

Deutz: While the week started out with optimistic and hopeful speeches, buoyed by the international momentum coming out of the UN Climate Week in New York, it’s been challenging to bring that high-level momentum into these negotiations to really break through the major political sticking points.

While there has been some progress on certain aspects of the text, for example reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), the pace is not nearly fast enough to get where we need to be by Copenhagen.

There has also been a lot of talk about the “elephants in the room” – such as what overall emissions reductions targets and financing will come from developed countries, how much common responsibility developing countries should share, and whether the Kyoto Protocol will continue independently or be merged with a new agreement. These political issues are also getting more clearly defined and out on the table, which helps the negotiations move forward in other areas.

Q: What needs to happen in the next week in these negotiations?

Deutz: We are going into Week Two with some consolidated texts and hopefully some energy to find the key areas of convergence that will make up an agreement in Copenhagen. But the elephants in the room could rear their heads at any point and prevent further progress. Parties must continue to look for areas of agreement, move towards reduced texts, and provide a vote of confidence that the elephants will start moving by Copenhagen.

At the same time, it’s important is that everything that has been agreed to date is not lost as parties work to shorten the text. We don’t want to through the baby out with the bathwater. Guiding principles and annexes that capture what has been learned should be retained to support a political agreement — and to facilitate implementation once an agreement is reached.

We should come out of Bangkok with a single consolidated negotiating text or a clear mandate to the chairs to put such a text on the table before we get to Barcelona [the next stop for the negotiations]. If negotiators can get a series of elements in place by Copenhagen – around REDD, adaptation, technology transfer and other areas – it will create a foundation for a political deal to be struck in Copenhagen.

Q: Looking outside the negotiations, what needs to happen in the next months to reach an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Getting a solid foundation in place for Copenhagen will push ministers and heads of state to focus on the overall level of ambition of the whole agreement, and keep them from blaming the negotiations for not paving the way for a decision.

In particular, leaders need to deliver on a strong emissions reductions targets and a clear commitment for public financing from developed countries. The G20 did not provide substantial guidance on finance, so leaders must quickly find a forum where they can pull a solution together.

And progress in the United States is crucial. The prevailing opinion here is that momentum is slowing for comprehensive climate legislation in the United States being adopted before Copenhagen. Without that, the U.S. will not be able to bring emissions reductions targets or billions of new dollars to the negotiating and those are the twin keys to unlocking the negotiations.

So much of the first week was characterized by delegates reassessing the perspectives of U.S. leadership and recalibrating their expectations for Copenhagen. The best possible adrenaline shot for these negotiations would be for the U.S. Congress to adopt the climate bill.

Q: What can negotiators here do to facilitate an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Resolving the legal structure and how to merge the two negotiating tracks (one for the Kyoto Protocol and one for Long-term Cooperative Action) is also a crucial step to bring clarity around the level of overall emissions targets:

• Developing countries want to keep the Kyoto Protocol alive because it defines the world into two simple camps — developed and developing countries — with developed countries carrying all the responsibility for emissions reductions.
• Developed countries are keen on the agreement on Long-term Cooperative Action because it opens the door for counting developing countries actions to reduce emissions as part of an overall agreement.

Finding a structure that brings together the commitments from the Kyoto Protocol with efforts undertaken by the U.S., China, India and others would create a global framework that captures efforts from all of the major emitting countries.

(Image: Elephants at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (LWC) in the Laikipia District of Northern Kenya in East Africa. The Conservancy is partnering with LWC to help protect the grasslands and savannas of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Credit: Josh Knights/TNC)

1. What are the must-read climate books to get you ready for the UN conference in Copenhagen in December? Climate Feedback surveys some leading climate experts.
2. More Arctic mammals than just the polar bear are under stress from climate change — the Pacific walrus is suffering from the loss of Arctic sea ice, reports Andy Revkin on Dot Earth.
3. Can the orangutan be saved from conversion of rainforests into palm oil plantations? Mongabay reports that conservationists and palm oil companies are meeting in Malaysia on the issue. (Former Conservancy scientist and Cool Green Science blogger Erik Meijaard is quoted in the piece.)
4. The decline of large predators worldwide is leading to an increase in smaller predators — and that’s wreaking havoc on ecosystems and economic systems, says a new report in Bioscience. (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)
5. What about an ATM that recycles your old cell phones and gives you money if they’re still worth something? If you live in Omaha, you’ve got one — called the EcoATM — reports Crave.

There might not be much hope for the Goose Creek milkvetch, but at least you can now heat your home with an ethanol fireplace. Read on for that and weightier topics like sunspots, the Peruvian Amazon conflict and REDD (one of the most important strategies in fighting climate change, says Conservancy president Mark Tercek).

1. Goose Creek milkvetch (pictured above) is a rare plant found in a small area on the border of Utah, Nevada and Idaho. After five years gathering data and debating, the USFWS recently decided that while the plant deserves protection, it won’t be added to the endangered species list because of other priorities.
2. Heat your home with biofuel? Ethanol fireplaces are the latest in green heating… Treehugger questions whether they’re really green or not.
3. The dispute between indigenous tribes and the Peruvian government continues. In the latest development, Ecopolitology reports that the government has incorporated some communities into a new national reserve without their consent – and tribal members fear this will limit their rights to natural resources there.
4. Climate change skeptics like to point to sunspots as a possible explanation for global warming… now The Economist raises the question again: could sunspots have an influence — good or bad — on Earth’s temperature?
5. Marc meets Mark… journalist and author Marc Gunther talks with The Nature Conservancy’s president and CEO Mark Tercek about REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) — potentially the most effective strategy in dealing with global climate change.

(Image: Goose Creek milkvetch. Credit: Jody Fraser/USFWS. Source: Nevada Natural Heritage Program.)

1. What’s a low-carbon zone? And how will such zones help London reduce it’s overall carbon output? Environmental Leader explains the new system, which should help the UK meet it’s recently launched goal of reducing emissions by 10 percent.
2. Meanwhile, France is trying a different tactic to reduce carbon emissions — taxing individual household users per ton of CO2 emitted. The tax would start next year at a price of 14 euros ($20 dollars) per ton.
3. Cooler heads prevail in Bangladesh, where the prime minister has mandated that male government employees should stop wearing suits, jackets and ties to work – all in the name of helping save energy by using less air conditioning.
4. Google saves the day again. Researchers report that an algorithm similar to the one used by Google to rank web pages could help scientists identify which species extinctions will have the biggest impact on ecosystems.
5. Flying lemurs, bearcats, orangutans and rat-eating plants face an uncertain future on the island of Borneo, where a plan to build 12 hydroelectric dams across the rainforests of Sarawak state is moving forward despite protests.

I am presently lodged in a small frontier town of ~30,000 called São Felix de Xingu, in the Northeastern state of Pará, Brazil. The roads are mostly dirt, but it is very lively on a Friday night, with motorbikes driving everywhere and crowds of people at the local boîtes. We had dinner (delicious fish pulled from the Rio Xingu that flows through the town) with the local mayor, who governs a municipal region that is the size of Panama (or about the size of Maine), the second largest municipality by area in Brazil, and perhaps in all the world. According to the mayor, it is less than 14 percent deforested, which marks it as among the best preserved areas in Pará, the location of nearly half of the deforestation in Brazil.

The Conservancy is working here with the local, state and national governments and with local meatpacking companies to assure compliance with environmental laws. Cattle ranching is one of the largest causes of deforestation in Pará, and the federal government is enlisting the meatpackers to impose restrictions on their suppliers, the ranchers, to document their compliance with the Brazilian forest code, which requires 80 percent of land parcels in the Amazon region to be reserved as native forest.

This law is routinely violated, in part because records of land ownership have historically been poor, much of the land is lacking title, and in some cases there are competing governmentally sanctioned claims on the land. The government is now focused on rectifying this situation by regularizing the land titles, and encouraging the reforestation of degraded land.

The level of engagement by all parties is impressive for such a lightly populated area. No fewer than six federal and state environmental officials joined us in São Felix. The local government is also significantly engaged on the issue, with a staff of three dozen working on deforestation and environmental issues.

Earlier in the day, we visited a slaughterhouse near Marabá that was featured in a recent Greenpeace report on the destruction of the Amazon. We met with the very sophisticated sales manager and their sustainable projects coordinator. They are taking a great interest in the prospect of some sort of green label that would certify that the beef comes from a cattle producer who is complying with the law, or perhaps going further by reforesting part of his land.

The meat industry is not without controversy, and arguably a contributor to deforestation, but they are also an important lever in the process of changing behavior in the Amazon. One reason is that cattle ranches in Pará typically graze only 4 cows for every 10 acres, about 1/2 or less of the density elsewhere in Brazil. The government is working with these ranchers to use their relationships with the suppliers to help with regularizing land tenure, improving land management and compliance with the forest code and reforesting degraded areas.

1. 350 vs. 450? The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajenda Pachauri, has come down “as a human being” for a carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration of 350 parts per million as a target for Planet Earth. (Our concentration is now at 387.)
2. Why not just put up a bunch of solar panels in the Sahara Desert to power Europe? Some are trying, but Reuters says there are obstacles — not least of which is terrorism. (Hat tip: The Vine.)
3. Watermelon: the next biofuel source? 60-Second Science says one in every five is left to rot in the field, but the USDA is looking at them as fuel.
4. More than 20,000 orangutans have been poached, slaughtered or sold into the pet trade over the last decade, says a new report from Nature Alert Ltd. and the Center for Orangutan Protection — yet no one in Indonesia has been prosecuted for these acts. (Hat tip: 60-Second Science.)
5. The world’s largest fruit bat — the flying fox — flies between countries like a migratory bird, reports a new study in the Journal of Applied Ecology. But it’s being hunted legally and could be extinct within decades, reports DotEarth.

Here’s a guest post from Rane Cortez, one of The Nature Conservancy’s policy advisors on reducing emissions from deforestation, who is back in Bonn for more international climate negotiations.

Rane Cortez: It seems like just yesterday that I was here for the “Bonn II” round of international climate negotiations earlier this year. When we came out of that meeting, the draft text for a new global agreement on climate change had expanded from about 50 to 200 pages, including all the different options that different countries have put on the table. Since the final agreement to be reached in Copenhagen in December is expected to be about 20 pages, we’ve got a lot of work to do to narrow down these options.

So they’ve called us back here again for “Bonn III” to try and make progress and find areas of consensus. My focus is on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) which make up 20% of the world’s total emissions. Because this meeting is an informal meeting, no final decisions can be taken.

Despite this, the working group on REDD laid out an ambitious work plan for the week, conducting consultations with as many countries as possible in hopes of consolidating the currently unmanageable 20-page text on REDD.

But what’s the real prospect for making progress?

The news is encouraging: Most countries have indicated that progress had been made on some key issues and consensus could be reached around a smaller number of options.

The countries need to make good progress on consolidating options in the text at this meeting so that negotiations on some of the more difficult issues in REDD can be the focus of the next round of talks in Bangkok at the end of September. I have been meeting with many country delegations to share The Nature Conservancy’s views and experience with REDD and ensure that our preferred options survive the consolidation.

Our work here in Bonn is greatly facilitated by the strong relationships that our country programs build with governments in the various countries where we work. Through working with governments on implementing successful conservation projects on the ground around the world, The Nature Conservancy has become a trusted advisor on a wide range of policy issues. This link between our on-the-ground implementation activities, our work with various multilateral institutions, and our scientific research give us a unique and valued perspective in the negotiations.

REDD is a prime example of putting this integrated strategy to work. We implemented the world’s first and best known REDD project in the world — the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project in Bolivia. That project has provided valuable lessons that have shaped our current plans for REDD pilot activities.

We have also scaled our work up dramatically with our focus on the district of Berau in Indonesia and in the municipalities of Sao Felix de Xingu and Cotriguacu in Brazil. In each of these places, we are working at government levels, not just individual projects — an approach that we learned from Noel Kempff Mercado is essential for stopping the causes of deforestation.

We are also a core participant in the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF). The FCPF is a financing facility that is helping countries get ready to participate in REDD at the national scale by providing funding for development of baselines, monitoring systems, and national strategies. As the only NGO on the participants committee, we are able to both provide input to and learn from the valuable discussions on how to best “‘get ready for REDD” at the national level.

We draw on all of these practical experiences to shape policy positions that we believe will create effective, efficient and equitable incentives for forest conservation.

For the Conservancy’s policy team, it’s definitely a two-way street. We draw upon lessons learned from our work on the ground in order to help create effective policy that will, in turn, help create a supportive environment (through favorable incentives and increased funding) for us to do the work that is central to our mission and essential in reducing global carbon emissions.

(Image: Forest and fields in Indonesia. Credit: World Bank Photo Collection through a Creative Commons license.)