The Amazon rainforest represents a “resource” of considerable importance in the fight against climate change. Unfortunately, the greatest threat it is facing is the very high rate of deforestation: to date, about 17% of the entire Amazon basin has been deforested and converted into crops and pastures. Forest cover, which largely determines the albedo rate, the water cycle and CO 2 storage, has a strong influence on the climate. In order to maintain the current rainfall regime (which has already significantly reduced compared to the past), the Amazon tree cover must not fall below the 70% threshold. Beyond this limit, the increasingly marked aridity due to an increasingly low forest cover and, therefore, to a lower rate of evapotranspiration, will start a process of irreversible fragmentation of 60% of the Amazon, which will transition into a vegetation characterizing the African savannah biome (Soares-Filho et al., 2006).
During the last few minutes before landing in the capital of the Peruvian Amazon, the city of Puerto Maldonado, I look out the window and I get goosebumps. Beneath me, the Amazon rainforest. The plane descends in altitude and seems to touch the canopy of the tallest trees. The joy turns into dismay when a few seconds later I notice several bare areas, scattered here and there in that vast expanse of a thousand shades of green. The amount of deforestation is easily visible even before the arrival on site.
Arial view of Peruvian Amazon and deforestation. Photo by Elena Chaboteaux
With the expansion of the roads, the rate of illegal logging and destruction have increased dramatically. The Interoceanic Highway, which cuts across South America and connects the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, has made it easier for people to reach more remote areas. Although thanks to it sustainable tourism and public awareness are now facilitated and some jungle communities are better connected to the closest towns and services, the exploitation of those pristine jungle areas has become extremely simple. It is very common to see massive trucks carrying logs of +300-year-old trees and crossing smaller rivers by boat. I’ve already seen too many of them…
Between October 2017 and November 2018, in Peru only, OSINFOR identified the illegal extraction of 389.000 m3 of timber - more than 40 million dollars (154 million Peruvian soles) - equivalent to 7.000 loaded trucks. The illegal logging industry is a business that is close to 100 billion dollars and, in the Amazon region, takes place mainly in Brazil and Peru. The illegal cutting of species of economic interest, often, anticipates the conversion of entire forest territories into pastures and crops.
Forgery causes many of these wood products, obtained as a result of illegal activities, to be certified and subsequently exported (especially to Asia and the United States). Frequently, this certification process is accompanied by a falsification of GPS coordinates so that illegally harvested trees fall back into areas where logging is permitted by law. Sadly, compared to the deforestation of entire territories, selective illegal logging represents an even harder threat to counter: the felling of single tree species of high economic value, their transport and entry on the market should be activities registered on specific documents that certify a reliable chain of custody and aim to prevent fraud as a result. Unfortunately, the shortage of audit personnel and the size of the areas to be checked (e.g. 55 audit forestry operators in all 1.24 million km 2 of the Parà Region - Brazil) not only do not allow an efficient technical inspection but end up encourage illegal logging operations (Brancalion et al., 2018).
Illegal selective extraction, normally perfected through “fishbone” patterns, has a strongly negative impact on the ecosystem; in addition to indisputably threatening countless animal species, the dense network of lianas that connect the canopy of a tree to its neighbor, very often, leads to the felling of one and involuntarily to the collapse of many others; not to mention that the lack of forest cover exposes the soil to a greater aridity, with a consequent risk of fires and the disappearance of many symbiont microorganisms in the soil, essential for decomposition and the fixation of nutrients. The use of tractors for the subsequent removal of felled trees also greatly damages the soil and increases erosion.
Elena by a logged tree in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Photo by Elena Chaboteaux
Illegal felling is a phenomenon that can be found even in protected Reserves, where not constantly and rigorously monitored, with consequent transport of the cut material by river. The wood is often entrusted to the current and subsequently recovered by the loggers or more simply tied to the pirogue, with which it travels until it reaches the first driveway for logging.
In order to facilitate an adequate inspection of the wood material being exported, the control officers should ask the companies to register in the appropriate documents the scientific binomial of the cut species, while most of the companies declare only the quantity of wood without reporting the species from which the raw or finished products were obtained. The few that indicate them use their common name, sometimes making it difficult to identify by border agents and to collect data on the total quantity of timber traded globally for each species. Most of the illegally obtained wood is shipped to Peru, where it is processed and eventually sold.
To better understand the situation, between 2009 and 2017, nearly 8.000 people in Peru were investigated for cases of illegal timber extraction and trafficking. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear the story of a former logger, whose father had passed away. Few months after the incident his mother had a mental breakdown and never fully recovered. All of the sudden he had to take care of her and his young sister and realized he needed more money in order to do so. He has been a taxi driver and a logger for 10 years, has risked his life more than once and yet what he made was barely enough to survive. Honestly, who wants to be a logger? Who wants to get up in the morning and illegally cut as many endangered trees as possible? No one. I’ve heard of at least three former loggers who now work for NGOs. Give them another option and with all their knowledge they acquired during years spent in the forest they will turn out to be the best protectors of the Amazon.
Written by Elena Chaboteaux
Logged tree in Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Elena Chaboteaux
Sources:
Brancalion Pedro H. S., de Almeida Danilo R. A., Vidal1Edson, Molin Paulo G., Sontag Vanessa E., Souza Saulo E. X. F. and Schulze Mark D. (2018). Fake legal logging in the Brazilian Amazon. Science Advances, Vol. 4, no. 8.
Soares-Filho, B. S., Nepstad, D. C., Curran, L. M., Cerqueira, G. C., Garcia, R. A., Ramos, C. A., Voll, E., McDonald, A., Lefebvre, P., Schlesinger, P. (2006). Modelling conservation in the Amazon basin. Nature 440(7083):520-523.