Amazon Forest-英译汉2

Home to approximately 30 per cent of the world’s remaining forests, large-scale deforestation in Brazil has long been a major environmental issue. Illegal logging has been a big part of the problem, but also slash- and-burn agriculture has contributed: cattle farmers have cut down rainforest to create grazing land for their cattle, and grain farmers have cleared new land instead of using fertilizers and crop rotation to maintain their existing land. The result: an average of 19,559 square kilometers of rainforest (or half the size of Denmark) were cleared every year between 1996 and 2005. This implied huge carbon emissions: almost 1 billion tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere every year from Brazilian forests alone – approximately four times Germany’s emissions. Deforestation also led to other severe environmental issues such as soil degradation and loss of habitat for many animal species. And there were social issues; it is hard to create good housing, health care and schooling when families keep moving around.
Several factors contributed to this situation: many of the farmers are acutely poor and are not able to pay for fertilizers or modern agricultural equipment, and monitoring has been a real issue – there has simply not been a good way of detecting land clearing before it is too late. Issues of weak governance and corruption have not helped either. For all these complicated reasons, deforestation was long seen as near impossible to stop, in spite of its very harmful effects.
Until now. During the last years deforestation in Brazil has decreased dramatically: in 2014 deforestation was 5, 012 square kilometers, down 75 per cent from the 1996–2005 baseline, and the trend suggests it could soon stop altogether. Already, the CO2 emission reductions are down by more than 700 million tons CO2 per year, more than the combined UNFCCC climate pledges of the US and the EU until 2020. What’s more, several promising land rehabilitation approaches have now emerged, and there is a very real chance that Brazil will go into reforestation during the next ten years. Beyond solving many local issues, this would also mean Brazil would act as a large-scale carbon sink.
What has led to this great turn of events? Several factors: first, Brazil has pioneered a satellite-based monitoring system (DETER) which provides a deforestation update every second week, and it has established a rapid-response team that quickly takes action. Second, the large slaughterhouses and soybean producers adopted new codes of conduct, which made it hard for suppliers to get away with slash-and-burn agricultural practices. International food producers and restaurant chains also used their purchasing power to create more sustainable farming practices. Third, Brazil adopted a new forest code in 2010, establishing a stronger legal framework around deforestation and land use. Importantly, it contained innovative financing mechanisms to help boost farm productivity, reducing the need for farmers to slash and burn. The Amazon Fund was established in 2008 to help finance many of these changes. It is open to contributions from governments and philanthropy. The Norwegian government was the first contributor to the fund, and remains the largest. This example nicely illustrates the good disruption concept and its drivers: new
technology is coming together with a new powerful meso-economy (this time in the form of an industrial cooperation and an international fund) and improved governance to solve a massive issue that was broadly believed to be unsolvable only a decade ago.
Turning to land rehabilitation, the Clean Air Action Corporation (CAAC) is an interesting example. The CAAC works with subsistence farmers in Africa and India, supporting them to reforest their land. The CAAC provides a very modest upfront capital infusion for the tree plants, basic training, and it monitors the results. Farmers benefit primarily through a stable supply of fodder and firewood, but there are many other ‘co-benefits’ in the form of improved agricultural productivity, less soil degradation, and a more enjoyable landscape. The results of this simple approach are impressive: CAAC now works with 75,000 farmers, more than 90 per cent of whom stick with the programme. Carbon uptake is on average 22 tons per hectare per year in Kenya, and 31 tons in Uganda, according to the external verifications made – far beyond the 1-3 tons per hectare per year that the literature suggests is possible.
There are other approaches as well, for instance the Holistic Planned Grazing approach championed by the Savory Institute.17 As a thought experiment, if these and similar results could be scaled to only 10–15 per cent of the 2 billion hectares of degraded land globally, it would offset all of the US’s greenhouse gas emissions for decades. Again, these are not incremental changes but order-of-magnitude improvements.。