A new tool from the Center for Global Development, Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA) tool, uses satellite data to monitor tropical deforestation on a monthly basis. Using publicly available feeds from NASA and other sources, FORMA detects the spread of deforestation in areas as small as 1 square kilometer. The video above uses FORMA to animate the rapidly growing damage in Indonesia over the last four years.

An interactive tool from Columbia University, the Gridded Population of the World (GPW) database, makes it easy to combine population and geographic data, explains Marc Levy, director of CIESIN at Columbia, in an interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.

The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.

A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.

In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.

DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security

A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.

Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.

Raising a REDD Flag

A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.

For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.

REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.

The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.

Jim Jarvie is director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps. In a recent video interview, he spoke to ECSP about how humanitarian groups are responding to new climate challenges.

Photo: Stoves that are more fuel-efficient not only help curb rapid deforestation, but help women spend less time gathering wood in dangerous areas. Courtesy Dee Goluba/Mercy Corps.

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The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which integrates federal government research on climate change, released Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States this week. The report examines climate’s likely impacts on various regions of the country.

The Guardian examines ongoing conflicts over natural resources between indigenous people and governments.

In her final dispatch from the Bonn climate negotiations, Population Action International climate director Kathleen Mogelgaard notes the conspicuous absence of demography in international climate discussions.

A webcast is now available of the Johns Hopkins University-Population Reference Bureau symposium “Climate Change and Urban Adaptation: Managing Unavoidable Health Risks in Developing Countries.”

A new policy paper from the World Bank seeks to answer the question, “Do the households in game management areas enjoy higher levels of welfare relative to the conditions they would have been in had the area not been designated as a game management area?”

A Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, led by John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and Lincoln Chafee, former Republican senator from Rhode Island, has been formed to advise President Obama on how to reduce tropical deforestation through U.S. climate change policies, reports Mongabay.com.

Wildlife trafficking is the third-largest criminal industry worldwide—after drugs and the sex trade—involving $20 billion in global trade each year. Illegal wildlife traffickers are difficult to track down, as they employ increasingly sophisticated methods, showing higher levels of organization and technological savvy. In addition, the resources devoted to halting wildlife trafficking are extremely limited, due in part to other issues—such as terrorism and climate change—dominating the international dialogue. Animal trafficking has become a forgotten crisis, and with devastating impacts on species’ survival and ecological health, said experts at a May 20 Wilson Center meeting.

Global Traffic Problems

The extent of wildlife trafficking is difficult to assess, in part due to the large legal trade in wildlife that often acts as cover for smugglers. Laurel Neme, author of Animal Investigators: How the World’s First Wildlife Forensics Lab is Catching Poachers, Solving Crimes, and Saving Endangered Species, pointed out that every year 25,000 primates, 2-3 million birds, 10 million reptile skins, and more than 500 million tropical fish are legally traded, and it is believed that illegal trade at least matches, and probably exceeds, these numbers. Rare and endangered species are in particular danger of being trafficked, since rare animals generally fetch a higher price on the black market. For instance, ounce for ounce, rhino horn is worth more than diamonds, fetching $50,000 per kilogram.

The scope and complexity of trafficking is the primary obstacle to confronting it. Wildlife trafficking knows no borders and involves countries in every region of the globe. Traffickers are also diverse, ranging from petty criminals to criminal organizations to terrorists. While wildlife trafficking is a global problem, the two largest participants are China and the United States.

Jamming Traffic

Kevin Garlick of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) outlined the challenges facing U.S. law enforcement officials investigating the supply side of trafficking. For one, the industry is very lucrative; a sea turtle skin that sells for $70 in Mexico can be made into boots that sell for $500 in the United States. Organized crime has become increasingly involved, resulting in detailed planning and financial support for trafficking operations, sophisticated forgery of permits, and international management of huge shipments.

In contrast, enforcement officials lack human and financial resources. The FWS has 115 wildlife inspectors who staff only 38 of the nearly 300 points of entry into the United States, as well as 199 criminal investigators who pursue leads from confiscations and tips. By way of comparison, the FBI has 2,000 and the Drug Enforcement Agency has 5,000 investigators.

China’s Wildlife Challenges

WWF’s Crawford Allen explained that increasing affluence in China is leading to increasing demand for traditional medicines, which often include parts of rare animals; unusual meats, which are considered delicacies; and luxury products such as tiger bone wine. Rising demand in China has fueled a number of wildlife crises, particularly for tiger, elephant, and freshwater turtle populations.

China’s Southeast Asian neighbors have been affected by China’s growing wealth. For instance, the pangolin, a nocturnal anteater that is sought after for its meat, as well as its skin (for fashionable leather) and scales (an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine), is now highly endangered. Today, the pangolin trade is so profitable that organized traffickers have set up processing plants to butcher and package the meat, which is shipped out via airplane and is difficult to identify. The 100 tons of pangolin seized last year in Southeast Asia are only “the tip of the iceberg,” according to Allen.

Despite the seriousness of the global wildlife-trafficking situation, the speakers agreed that there is hope in the increasing international cooperation that is taking place and in scientific improvements in investigative techniques.

By China Environment Forum Intern Alan Campana. Edited by China Environment Forum Director Jennifer Turner.

Photo: Illegal medicinal products in China. Courtesy of Flickr user avlxyz.

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Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investment and international land deals in Africa, a study conducted by IIED, FAO, and IFAD, is the first detailed study to examine large land acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa.

The latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required) includes articles on land, education, and fertility in Kenya; indigenous women and fertility in the Ecuadorian Amazon; and the impact of chemical exposure on sex ratios in Greece.

A partnership between local villages and the Bonobo Conservation Initiative has led to the establishment of a 1,847 square mile reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reports Mongabay.

A new article in the Encyclopedia of the Earth lists population growth rates (including births, deaths, and migration) by country, based on CIA data.

“Kenya is destroying itself,” Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, told The Observer. “The population has reached an unsustainable level. We are killing ourselves by slowly destroying the forests and settling there.” Drought, poverty, and population growth have led large numbers of the rural poor to encroach on protected forests in search of arable land, reports The Observer, jeopardizing Kenya’s food and water security and hydroelectric energy production. The government’s inability to manage land tenure has further exacerbated the situation.

In response to these developments, a local conservation group called Rhino Ark has erected a 250-mile electric fence (see photo slideshow) around the Aberdare mountain range north of Nairobi. When members began the project in 1989, they were attempting to protect the area’s rhinoceroses. However, their efforts eventually grew into a broader campaign to safeguard the Aberdares’ critical water and forest resources.

Proponents of the Aberdare fence—including Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai—contend that it serves multiple purposes. First, it discourages settlers from grazing livestock in the forest or felling trees to make way for crop cultivation. Other regions of the country—notably the Mau Forest Complex, the water source for millions of people in Kenya, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan—have suffered severe deforestation and degradation, with serious consequences for human and ecological health. Forests provide a wide spectrum of essential ecosystem services, such as regulating the water cycle, filtering groundwater, and sequestering atmospheric carbon.

The fence also mitigates human-wildlife conflict, argue its supporters. According to a recent 60 Minutes report, some Maasai herdsmen have resorted to poisoning lions and other predators to protect their livestock. Farmers have targeted elephants and other animals that trample crops to safeguard their livelihoods. As a result, wildlife populations—the lifeblood of the Kenyan tourism industry—have been devastated. A study published in the Journal of Zoology found precipitous declines in wildlife at Maasai Mara, one of Kenya’s most renowned national parks. Robin Reid, a co-author of the paper, explains, “There appears to be a ‘tipping point’ of human populations above which former co-existence between Maasai and wildlife begins to break down.”

Following Aberdare’s example, the Kenyan government is considering building thousands of miles of fencing around similarly vulnerable forests and parks. Yet fences may soon prove inadequate. The country’s population has grown from 10 million to 36 million over the past 45 years, and it could exceed 65 million by 2050, given that the decline in its fertility rate has stalled. In addition, its GDP per capita has steadily decreased, leaving more than 55 percent of citizens below the official poverty line.

With more people clamoring for more resources, a sustainable future will depend on robust community conservation programs and land-rights reform. Successful models of community conservation in East Africa include the Lion Guardians and Il Ngwesi Group Ranch, as well as other efforts discussed at the Wilson Center last year. A 2008 report from the Rights and Resources Initiative argues that authorities should shift away from traditional forms of conservation, which focus on excluding people from protected areas, in favor of approaches that empower local communities to care for and benefit from the land through customary tenure or individual property rights.

Finally, Nairobi should craft national forest management practices with an eye toward ongoing international climate negotiations. Policymakers are poised to include provisions for compensating developing countries for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the next international climate treaty, to be concluded in Copenhagen this December. Kenya could benefit substantially if the government takes appropriate action.

Photo: A giraffe in Maasai Mara, where their population has declined 95 percent over the last 15 years. Courtesy Flickr user angela7dreams.

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Focus author Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who founded and directs the Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health, won the Whitley Gold Award (see video of her work) for her efforts to protect the endangered mountain gorillas while improving local communities’ quality of life. The other five finalists were also seeking to reduce human-wildlife conflict in diverse contexts.

In Seed magazine, seven experts—including Peter Gleick and Mark Zeitoun—weigh in on whether “water wars” are a serious menace or an improbable threat, inflated by breathless media coverage of water shortages.

A major report on managing the health effects of climate change, co-authored by University College London and The Lancet, claims that climate change is the biggest health threat of the 21st century.

On his blog, Signs From Earth, National Geographic editor Dennis Dimick has collected a variety of resources about the possibility of “climate refugees.”

It’s not news that the U.S. and U.K. militaries are studying climate change’s potential security impacts, or seeking to increase energy efficiency on bases and in combat zones. But Geoffrey Lean, the environment editor of the Independent, is surprised that legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap has come out against bauxite mining in Vietnam’s central highlands, which he says “will cause serious consequences on the environment, society and national defense.”

Photo: Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka receives the Whitley Gold Award from Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. Courtesy of the Whitley Fund for Nature.