The world’s lungs (part3)

REDDy, steady, grow
Economic development both causes deforestation and slows
it. In the early stages of development people destroy forests for
a meagre living. Globalisation is speeding up the process by
boosting the demand for agricultural goods produced in tropical
countries. At the same time, as people in emerging countries
become more prosperous, they start thinking about issues
beyond their family’s welfare; their governments begin to
pass and slowly enforce laws to conserve the environment.
Trade can also allow the greener concerns of rich-world consumers
to in uence developing-world producers.
The transition from clearing to protecting, however, is occurring
too slowly. The main international e ort to speed it up
is an idea known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation), which pays people in developing
countries to leave trees standing. This is not an outlandish
concept. It is increasingly common for governments and companies
to pay for forest and other ecosystem services. To protect
its watershed, New York pays farmers in the Catskills not
to develop their land. REDD schemes aspire to do this on a
much larger scale. The only notable success of the Copenhagen
climate-change conference last year was a commitment to
pursue them. Half a dozen rich countries, including Norway,
America and Britain, have promised $4.5 billion for starters.
The di culties are immense. REDD projects will be e ective
only in places where the government sort-of works, and
the tropical countries with the most important forests include
some of the world’s worst-run places. Even in countries with
functioning states, some of the money is bound to be stolen.
Yet with su cient attention to monitoring, veri cation and,
crucially, making sure the cash goes to the people who can actually
protect the forest, REDDcould work. That will cost much
more than has so far been pledged. The most obvious source
of extra cash is the carbon market, or preferably a carbon tax.
Since saving forests is often the cheapest way to tackle carbon
emissions, funding it this way makes sense.
With global climate-change negotiations foundering, the
prospects of raising cash for REDD that way look poor. But the
money must be found from somewhere. Without a serious effort
to solve this problem, the risk from climate change will be
vastly increased and the planet will lose one of its most valuable,
and most beautiful, assets. That would be a tragedy.

The world’s lungs (part2)

A bad old habit

For at least 10,000 years, since the ice last retreated and forests
took back the earth, people have destroyed them. In medieval
Europe an exploding population and hard-working monks
put paid to perhaps half its temperate oak and beech woods
mostly, as is usually the case, to clear space for crops. Some
100m hectares of America’s forests went in the 19th century, in
an arboreal slaughter similarly reinforced by a belief in the
godliness of thus improving�� the land. That spirit survives. It
is no coincidence that George Bush junior, one of America’s
more god-fearing presidents, relaxed by clearing brush.
In most rich countries the pressure on forests has eased; but
in many tropical ones home to around half the remaining forest,
including the planet’s green rainforest girdle the demand
for land is increasing as populations rise. In Congo, which has
more rainforest than any country except Brazil, the clearance is
mostly driven by smallholders, whose number is about to
double. Rising global demand for food and biofuels adds even
more to the heat. So will climate change. That may already be
happening in Canada, where recent warm winters have unleashed
a plague of bark beetles, and in Australia, whose forests
have been devastated by drought and forest res.
Clearing forests may enrich those who are doing it, but over
the long run it impoverishes the planet as a whole. Rainforests
are an important prop to continental water-cycles. Losing the
Amazon rainforest could reduce rainfall across the Americas,
with potentially dire consequences for farmers as far away as
Texas. By regulating run-o , trees help guarantee water-supplies
and prevent natural disasters, like landslides and oods.
Losing the rainforest would mean losing millions of species;
forests contain 80% of terrestrial biodiversity. And for those
concerned about the probable e ects of climate change, forests
contain twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, in plantmatter
and the soils they cover, and when they are razed and
their soils disturbed most is emitted. If the Amazon went up in
smoke a scenario which a bit more clearance and a bit more
warming makes conceivable it would spew

The North Korean succession

Thanks Dad
Kim Jong Il may be preparing to hand his luckless country over to his luckless son.

NORTH KOREANS are by and large hungry, oppressed,
cloistered and treated as infants. But they have one
powerful stimulant to keep them going: the outsized cult of
hero worship surrounding their pot-bellied ruler, Kim Jong Il.
That is why outsiders will strain next week for a glimpse
into the hermit ef to see if Mr Kim uses the Korean Workers’
Party’s rst gathering in 30 years to designate his third son, Kim
Jong Un, as his heir. Whatever he does, the issue of succession
is likely to escape the secrecy in which it has been wrapped for
decades. For all the peephole excitement of watching a reallife
Dynasty in one of the world’s darkest places, the transition
could produce some dangerous moments��and not just
on the peninsula, but also for China, North Korea’s sole remaining
protector.
The older Kim, who has been in power since 1994, may be
frail, but it is not clear that he is yet ready to anoint his twentysomething,
basketball-loving boy, even though he has been
called a chip o the old block. Unlike the father, who was
groomed as dictator-in-waiting for over a decade, his third
son’s existence is still o cially unacknowledged. Reportedly
there is a trite song, called Footsteps , in his honour, and a
glowing published tribute to his excellence both in the arts of
pen and sword . But his quali cations for running a derelict
country with a nuclear arsenal and one of the world’s ve biggest
armies are seriously in doubt.

It is thus possible that the conference may pass with barely
a word about succession. Yet even in a country as batty as
North Korea, it would be odd to throw a lavish get-together of
the main party hacks for no reason. Even if it is a charade of a
ballot, it is probably sensible to assume that the stated purpose
of electing (read rubber stamping) a supreme leadership
body is important, and that some sort of profound, if hesitant,
handover of power is under way

The world’s lungs(part1)

THE summer dry-season, now drawing to an end, is
when the Amazon rainforest gets cut and burned. The smoke
this causes can often be seen from space. But not this year.
Brazil’s deforestation rate has dropped astoundingly fast. In
2004 some 2.8m hectares (10,700 square miles) of the Amazon
were razed; last year only around 750,000 hectareswere.
This progress is not isolated. Many of the world’s biggest
clearers of trees have started to hug them. Over the past decade,
the UN records, nearly 8m hectares of forest a year were
allowed to re-grow or were planted anew. This was mostly in
richer places, such as North America and in Europe, where
dwindling rural populations have taken the pressure o forestland.
But a couple of big poorer countries, notably China,
have launched huge tree-planting schemes in a bid to prevent
deforestation-related environmental disasters. Even in tropical
countries, where most deforestation takes place, Brazil is
not alone in becoming more reluctant to chop down trees.
The progress made in recent years shows that mankind is
not doomed to strip the planet of its forest cover. But the transition
from tree-chopper to tree-hugger is not happening fast
enough. Over the past decade, according to UN gures, around
13m hectares of forestland an area the size of England was
converted each year to other uses, mostly agriculture. If the
world is to keep the protective covering that helps it breathe,
waters its crops, keeps it cool and nurtures its biodiversity, it is
going to have to move fast.