The Economist (August 3)
“Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.”
Tags: Buffer, Chainsaws, China, Climate change, CO2, Damage, Droughts, Ecosystems, Forests, Livelihood, Tropical rainforest, U.S., Wildfires
Bloomberg (September 22)
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s “preliminary recommendation is to let commercial fishing resume in the Pacific Remote Islands and in the nearby Rose Atoll Marine National Monument. Yet commercial tuna fishing is precisely what put these ecosystems under pressure. To thrive, the creatures need to be undisturbed, and this protection has to extend far enough to allow them to roam…. The Trump administration is wrong to be contemplating this backward step.”
Tags: Commercial fishing, Ecosystems, Pacific Remote Islands, Recommendation, Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, Trump, Tuna, Undisturbed, Wrong, Zinke