Volume 14, Number 9
May 4 - 17, 2008

Emerging threats and research challenges in the tropics
by Eric Jackson

So what concerns a scientist who studies tropical forest ecology and has watched Mother Nature take a beating in Amazonia and elsewhere over recent decades? First, consider that Dr. William F. Laurance was speaking mostly to other scientists, colleagues at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and that part of his lecture at the Tupper Auditorium was a species of shop talk, as in advice to his juniors about new subjects that ought to be looked into.

First on Laurance's list was the rapid globalization of industry. The industrial drivers of deforestation have grown markedly over the past 20 years, he noted, and it's expected that there will be a three- to six-fold increase in worldwide industrial activity by 2050. That includes factories in countries that hardly had them before, large-scale agribusiness replacing both small farms and forests, and a growth in mineral extraction in remote areas. These developments, in turn, "often provide the impetus for road building," which in turn brings in more established drivers of tropical deforestation, destitute people looking to carve a little farm out of the woods to survive. "The fundamental causes of deforestation are really changing," Laurance pointed out, from millions of small farmers to a few vast enterprises, and with these changes the per capita deforestation rate is accelerating.

The changing nature of the economic forces behind deforestation creates some new opportunities for those who would resist the trend, however. "It's easier to shame a big corporation or industry group than many smaller farmers," Laurance noted. Big companies that want economies of scale pick bigger countries because they have to deal with fewer public entities than if they work in several smaller countries, and that makes it easier for activists to focus on them.

However, such companies tend not to be standing targets. They set up elaborate swarms of corporations, in order to play legal, political and public relations shell games to detach themselves from responsibility for what they do. They have become adept at "greenwashing" propaganda. "The corporate entities out there are not dumb --- they know the language."

Second on Laurance's list is China's role in illegal logging.

"China has really changed the nature of tropical logging," he said. Half of all timber going anywhere in the world is imported by China, and much of this is re-exported in the form of manufactured products with wooden or paper components.

"China, up to this point, has not been a good citizen," Laurance opined. "People are starting to lose patience."

Third on the list is the explosive growth of biofuels.

"This is where we're going to see the growth in the future," Laurance predicted. "The economic forces are going to be seismic in nature." He noted to the relationship between US corn prices and deforestation in the Amazon, and noted that the place where the Brazil's forests are being burned off the fastest are precisely the soybean growing areas.

Fourth, there is the long-known factor of population growth.

"The 'birth dearth' is only a reality in industrialized places," Laurance said. Everywhere else populations are growing, becoming more urbanized and taking more land and other resources to maintain themselves.

Fifth, there are emerging pathogens.

Here in Panama, the chytrid fungus is killing off all the frogs. In Africa, rinderpest is laying waste to both wild and domestic animals. Ebola is an emerging threat to humans and animals. Avian malaria and phytophthora are other plagues that will require the attention of many a researcher in years to come.

Sixth, Laurance points out the climatic and atmospheric changes, "the 900-pound gorilla in the corner." It's going to be especially bad for tropical highland species. A lot of these are endemic to relatively small areas at specific higher elevations, and when those areas warm up to the point that they are no longer habitable, the fauna and flora will quite frequently have no place to retreat and go extinct. Such extinctions will ripple up and down food chains and along other complex ecological networks. Those are the things to expect, Laurance said, even though "there is huge uncertainty" about precisely how global warming will affect tropical climates.

Seventh, there is the complexity of it all, expressed in environmental synergisms. "We're not changing the earth in one way, we're changing it in a lot of ways." Fires, logging, hunting, forest fragmentation and climatic changes will surely combine to shift the natural ranges of many species, some of which are going to run into hostile landscapes that prevent their migration to other areas. There are "unknown unknowns" that keep popping up, Laurance noted, citing logging in West Africa, wherein cut trees are floated down rivers to the coast, with inferior trunks and random strays being discarded along the way to float where they will. They end up littering beaches along the seacoast, where they then pose obstacles that interfere with endangered sea turtles' nesting.