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O C T O B E R
 2 0 0 9Issue 33
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CARIBBEAN AGENCIES CREATE PARTNERSHIP FOR NATURAL DISASTER MANAGEMENT
To a large extent, many of natural disasters result from the failures of development policy to mitigate vulnerability to hazard events. Climate change, considered as the most pervasive and truly global of all issues affecting humanity, is likely to increase the incidence of natural disasters by causing extreme weather events to be more intense and to occur more frequently. With this in mind, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalising a partnership to facilitate capacity building and to develop strategies for mitigating the physical and socio-economic impacts of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, on countries in the region. The signing took place on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at the offices of the Caribbean Development Bank in Bridgetown, Barbados. Milo Pearson, Chairman of CCRIF signed on behalf of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility while Jeremy Collymore, Coordinator, CDERA signed for the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency. The objectives of the MOU are to promote the use of catastrophe risk modelling tools, to introduce new products and initiatives to assist Caribbean governments in better understanding and financing catastrophe risk exposures and to share information on real time hazard and impact information.  In his remarks, Pearson said that the CCRIF’s participation in this partnership will enable the governments in the region to access financial resources in a timely manner to jumpstart their countries’ economic recovery in the aftermath of a major catastrophe disaster. In the past two years, the CCRIF paid out approximately US$500,000 each to Dominica and St. Lucia after an earthquake occurred in 2007, and US$6.3 million to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The CCRIF continues to work on developing new products, such as an extreme rainfall coverage, that will benefit countries throughout the region. Collymore added that the Memorandum of Understanding strengthens CDERA’s ability to implement the Hyogo Framework for Action that aims to reduce countries’ vulnerability to natural hazards. He noted: “the MOU represents the launching of a platform to minimise the hemorrhaging of regional assets, particularly in relation to hydrometeorological hazards.” Nineteen Caribbean governments will benefit from this MOU: Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago and the Turks and Caicos Islands who are current members of both the CCRIF and CDERA, as well as CCRIF members, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and Haiti and CDERA members the British Virgin Islands, Guyana, and Montserrat.  "THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads." That might sound like an eco-terrorist's threat, but they're actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil's most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: "Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction." They are quite right. Roads are rainforest killers. Without rampant road expansion, tropical forests around the world would not be vanishing at a rate of 50 football fields a minute, an assault that imperils myriad species and spews billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. We will never devise effective strategies to slow rainforest destruction unless we confront this reality.  As my colleagues and I reveal in a forthcoming article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, these are just a small sample of the many new road projects slicing through tropical frontiers. Why are roads so bad for rainforests? Tropical forests have a uniquely complex structure and humid, dark microclimate that sustain a huge number of endemic species. Many of these avoid altered habitats near roads and cannot traverse even narrow road clearings. Others run the risk of being hit by vehicles or killed by people hunting near roads. This can result in diminished or fragmented wildlife populations, and can lead to local extinctions. In remote frontier areas, where law enforcement is often weak, new roads can open a Pandora's box of other problems, such as illegal logging, colonisation and land speculation. In Brazilian Amazonia, 95 per cent of deforestation and fires occur within 50 kilometres of roads. In Suriname, most illegal gold mines are located near roads. In tropical Africa, hunting is significantly more intensive near roads. Environmental disasters often begin as a narrow slice into the forest. Rainforests are found mostly in developing nations where there are strong economic incentives to provide access to logging, oil and mineral operations and agribusiness. Once the way is open, waves of legal and illegal road expansion follow. For instance, the Belém-Brasília highway, completed in the 1970s, has developed into a 400-kilometre-wide swathe of forest destruction across the eastern Amazon. Beyond the forest itself, frontier roads imperil many indigenous peoples, especially those trying to live with limited contact with outsiders. As I write, indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon are stridently protesting the proliferation of new oil, gas and logging roads into their traditional territories. The roads bring loggers, gold miners and ranchers who often subjugate the indigenous people. Even worse, the invaders can bring in deadly new diseases. Throughout the tropics, infections such as malaria, dengue fever, enteric pathogens and HIV have all been shown to rise sharply after new roads are built. Some indigenous groups, such as the Surui tribe of Brazilian Amazonia, have been driven to the edge of extinction by roads and the invading loggers, colonists and diseases they bring.
What can we do to slow the onslaught? First, we must vastly improve environmental impact assessments for planned roads. In many developing nations, EIAs focus solely on the roads themselves, completely ignoring the knock-on effects. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for Amazonian highways focus only on a narrow swathe along the route, often recommending only paltry mitigation measures, such as helping animals to relocate before building begins. EIAs for certain mines, hydroelectric dams and other large developments focus only on the project itself while ignoring the impact of the roads it will invariably spawn. New roads will continue to drive rainforest destruction so long as the EIA process is so fundamentally flawed. The second thing we have to do is fight to keep the most destructive roads from being built - the ones that penetrate pristine frontier areas. There is no shortage of battles to wage. A proposed highway between Colombia and Panama, for example, would expose one of the world's most biologically important areas, the Chocó-Darién wilderness, to rampant destruction. Likewise, Brazil's BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon like a zipper. Brazil's BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon region like a zipper. Finally, we need to pressure those promoting these frontier roads. These include timber corporations like Asia Pulp & Paper and Rimbunan Hijau, international lenders such as the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks, and massive infrastructure schemes such as Brazil's Programme to Accelerate Growth. In their scramble for tropical timber, minerals, oil and agricultural products, China and its corporations have become perhaps the biggest drivers of destructive road expansion. Restricting frontier roads is by far the most realistic and cost-effective approach to conserving rainforests and their amazing biodiversity and climate-stabilising capacity. As Pandora quickly learned, it is far harder to thrust the evils of the world back into the box than to simply keep it closed in the first place. William Laurance is a research professor at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. |
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FROGS DISAPPEARING FROM CENTRAL AMERICA RAINFOREST DUE TO FUNGUS
Like neighborhood coffee shops and independent movie theaters around the United States, unusual varieties of frogs are rapidly disappearing from rainforests in Central America. A fungal infection seems to be hitting those rare species of frogs harder than common ones, found a new study, leading to local extinctions and a homogenized version of nature where everything is more similar than it used to be. The result is both a less interesting world aesthetically and a less resilient one biologically. The decline in diversity could end up harming larger ecosystems since frogs are an important part of the food web -- other creatures eat them and their eggs. It could also impact the tourist industry since the amphibians' variety of shapes and colors has been a tourist draw to Central America.  Finally, a decline in species could even limit medical possibilities since scientists have found potential cancer therapies in amphibian skin. "Everyone knew that amphibian declines were really bad," said ecologist Kevin Smith, of Washington University in St. Louis. "But it looks like it's worse than we actually thought." Smith and colleagues looked for patterns of extinction in frogs from eight rainforest sites around Costa Rica and Panama. The researchers compiled several years worth of data from previous studies, in which scientists had painstakingly surveyed frog diversity both before and after the arrival of a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). Bd has swept through amphibians around the world in the last decade, often decimating populations. In Central America, Smith said, infections can wipe out half of the species at a given site. Evidence has been growing, however, that some species are more vulnerable to the fungus than others, and Smith wondered which ones were most at risk. His results, published in the journal Ecology Letters, showed that in Central America at least, the fungus seems to target the rarest of species, which often exist only in one or two sites across the region. It's not yet clear why rare frogs are succumbing most frequently to the Bd fungus. But as they disappear, so often do the roles they fill in the ecosystem. "If you knock out a very rare species from the only place it exists, of course that's going to be an extinction," Smith said. "In terms of conservation, that's the opposite of what we want." The new findings add another disheartening dimension to the biodiversity crisis, said Tom Rooney, an ecologist at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. The loss of variety, he said, makes it increasingly hard for the species that are left behind to deal with further environmental change. On a more positive note, documenting which species are most vulnerable to infections and other threats might help scientists predict which creatures are most at risk now, allowing them to focus future conservation efforts on the most vulnerable ones. "If you're thinking globally, studies like this are telling us that losing rare species is not a local phenomenon," Rooney said. "If they are disappearing locally, there's a good chance they're disappearing regionally, and local efforts can be even more important." In the meantime, the study points out how similar the natural world is to the more cultural parts of our lives -- particularly in the way that people value diversity and mourn the loss of it. "We no longer have all the little hardware stores, little coffee shops, and little bars where everyone knows your name," Smith said. "What we see across the world is that it's decreasingly the case where you see different things in different places." In celebration of World Tourism Day, September 27, the Rainforest Alliance, an international conservation organization, is releasing the results of a study that examines whether tourism businesses in Latin America benefit from applying sustainable practices to their operations. The study, titled "A Cost and Benefit Analysis of Best Practice Implementation in Tourism Businesses," was conducted earlier this year with 14 tourism businesses in Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Ecuador. The data shows that businesses working with the Rainforest Alliance's sustainable tourism program gained tangible benefits from the application of best management practices for environmental and social improvement, and in doing so they created networks that helped all parties involved establish more responsible relationships with their surroundings. For example, all the businesses surveyed purchase goods and services from small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with an average of 20 SMEs supplying each tourism business; 64 percent of the survey's respondents said that this arrangement generates savings for their hotel, and 79 percent said it results in better security and more respect from the local community.  The survey also found that the tourism businesses lowered their operational costs by cutting their consumption of water and energy, placing bulk orders and improving waste management. For example, 71 percent of the business owners said they decreased their water consumption, saving an average of $2,700 per year."All of the hotel owners surveyed believe that their quality and appeal to tourists has improved thanks to biodiversity conservation. The preservation of natural areas has also made them more competitive and has improved their tourism destinations," observed Silvia Rioja, a Rainforest Alliance technical manager. She added, "In 93 percent of the cases, the environmental education we provided resulted in higher levels of responsibility among the hotel's suppliers and their guests." The analysis also describes a series of measures that have increased employee motivation, which results in lower staff turnover. The hotels have taken steps to improve health and security, and as Rioja explained, most of the hotels reported that by contracting suppliers who implement best practices, they have improved the quality of the goods and services they purchase. The Rainforest Alliance has spent ten years promoting best manage practices for sustainable tourism on a global level. To date, 320 hotels, 127 tour operators and 43 tourism organizations have earned the right to display the conservation organization's logo by adopting social and environmental best practices, and the number of tourism enterprises involved in the program grows every year. |
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