The temptation to moralise on social media is so strong among footballers, actors and politicians alike that it is actually doing harm. Get the economic incentives right and the world will save its forests. 

Cristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese expert on forests who also plays football, so when he shared a picture online of a recent forest fire in the Amazon, it went viral. Perhaps he was in a rush that day to get out of the laboratory to football training, because it later transpired that the photograph was actually taken in 2013, not this year, and in southern Brazil, nowhere near the Amazon.

But at least his picture was only six years old. Emmanuel
Macron, another forest ecologist who moonlights as president of France, claimed
that ‘the Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 per cent of our
planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’ alongside a picture that was 20 years old. A
third bioscientist, who goes under the name of Madonna and sings, capped both
their achievements by sharing a 30-year-old picture. […]

I sometimes wonder if the line wrongly attributed to Mark Twain,
‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’, is
now taken as an instruction by environmental pressure groups. They operate in a
viciously competitive market for media attention and donations, and those who
scream loudest do best, even if it later turns out they were telling fibs.

Around the world, wild fires are generally declining, according
to Nasa. Deforestation, too, is happening less and less. The United Nations’
‘state of the world’s forests’report concluded last year that ‘the net loss of
forest area continues to slow, from 0.18 per cent [a year] in the 1990s to 0.08
per cent over the last five-year period’. A study in Nature last
year by scientists from the University of Maryland concluded that even this is
too pessimistic: ‘We show that — contrary to the prevailing view that forest
area has declined globally — tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km² (+7.1 per cent relative to the 1982
level).’

This net increase is driven by rapid reforestation in cool, rich
countries outweighing slower net deforestation in warm, poor countries. But
more and more nations are now reaching the sort of income levels at which they
stop deforesting and start reforesting. Bangladesh, for example, has been
increasing its forest cover for several years. Costa Rica has doubled its tree
cover in 40 years. Brazil is poised to join the reforesters soon.

Possibly the biggest driver of this encouraging trend is the
rising productivity of agriculture. The more yields increase, the less land we
need to steal from nature to feed ourselves. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller
University has calculated that the world needs only 35 per cent as much land to
produce a given quantity of food as 50 years ago. That has spared wild land on
a massive scale.

Likewise, getting people on to fossil fuels and away from
burning wood for fuel spares trees. It is in the poorest countries, mainly in
Africa, that men and women still gather firewood for cooking and bushmeat for
food, instead of using electricity or gas and farmed meat.

The trouble with the apocalyptic rhetoric is that it can seem to
justify drastic but dangerous solutions. The obsession with climate change has
slowed the decline of deforestation. An estimated 700,000 hectares of forest
has been felled in South-East Asia to grow palm oil to add to supposedly green
‘bio-diesel’ fuel in Europe, while the world is feeding 5 per cent of its grain
crop to motor cars rather than people, which means 5 per cent of cultivated
land that could be released for forest. Britain imports timber from wild
forests in the Americas to burn for electricity at Drax in North Yorkshire,
depriving beetles and woodpeckers of their lunch.

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The post Matt Ridley: The Most Dangerous Thing About the Amazon Fires Is The Apocalyptic Rhetoric appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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August 29, 2019 at 07:11AM