Tree Huggers

• Brazil’s President Lula apparently lives in a “disinformation space” surrounded by ministers promoting projects that destroy the Amazon Rainforest and lock in petroleum extraction for decades to come, a new opinion piece argues.
• Among these projects are the BR-319 highway and its associated side roads; the distribution of government land to known deforesters; and opening new oilfields at the mouth of the Amazon River.
• Lula’s support for these proposals is leading Brazil to a climate catastrophe that would devastate the country, the author writes, and the two key ministers who should be the ones to explain to the president the consequences of these projects are apparently not penetrating Lula’s disinformation space.
• This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

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• Grassroots organizations are settling new areas in the Brazilian Amazon amid disappointment that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been slow to jump-start the stalled land reform agenda.
• According to the federal land agency, Incra, about 145,000 people are inhabiting camps all over Brazil, waiting for a plot of land.
• In one of the Amazon’s deadliest regions, a group fighting for land was besieged by a dozen armed men hired by ranchers; even in established settlements, harassment by land grabbers and lack of government support drive settlers out of their plots.
• The stalling of the land reform agenda pushes Amazonian people further into the forest, driving the cycle of deforestation, or else to the outskirts of cities, where many struggle to make a living.

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• Macaúba, a palm tree found across the Americas, is tipped as a new biofuel feedstock to decarbonize transport and aviation. The macaúba palm produces an oil when highly refined that can be made into renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
• Bolstered by hype and billions of dollars of investment, companies are planning to plant hundreds of thousands of hectares on reportedly degraded land across Brazil. Firms are also investing in major refining facilities. This macaúba gold rush was triggered by major financial incentives from the Brazilian government.
• Macaúba’s potential green attributes are similar to jatropha, a once promising biofuel feedstock that bombed a decade ago. Macaúba is widespread but currently undomesticated. Whether macaúba plantations can achieve the yield and scale needed to help satisfy the world’s sustainable energy needs remains unknown.
• Industry proponents state that it can be produced sustainably with no land-use change or deforestation. But other analysts say that very much depends on how the coming boom, in Brazil and elsewhere, pans out.

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• A new dataset and analysis released by World Resources Institute finds global tropical forest loss jumped to a record high in 2024, with 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) worldwide.
• In total, the area of forest lost in 2024 is nearly the size of Panama.
• For the first time, fire, not agriculture, was the primary driver of primary tropical forest loss, with Latin America badly hit.
• Non-fire related tropical forest loss also increased, by 14%.

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• Located at the edge of the western Pacific Ocean, New Guinea is a vast island where the biota of Asia and Australasia meet, making it a melting pot of unique plants and animals that occur nowhere else on the planet.
• Development pressure is ramping up across the island, however, opening up landscapes to new roads, industrial logging and agricultural conglomerates pushing biofuel agendas.
• New Guinea’s low-elevation forests, which represent some of the world’s last vestiges of ancient lowland tropical rainforest, are particularly imperiled, according to a new study.
• To avert tragedy, the authors urge policymakers to improve land-use planning systems, focus on retaining intact forest landscapes, and strengthen the rights of the people who live among them.

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• A new report by Brazilian nonprofit Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) states that Casino Group’s beef supply chain could be linked to up to 526,459 hectares (about 1.3 million acres) of deforestation in Brazil between 2018 and 2023.
• The data are being used in a $64.1 million lawsuit filed in 2021 by environmental and Indigenous groups that accuse the French retailer of contributing to illegal deforestation.
• Among the plaintiffs are Indigenous communities from the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory in the Brazilian Amazon that have faced decades of land invasions by illegal cattle ranchers.

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• Mongabay article
• report cited

• In central Belize, the Maya Forest Corridor, a narrow section of forested land, is key for wildlife movements across Belize, conservationists say.
• A land acquisition by the Maya Forest Corridor Trust in 2021 was a major step forward in protecting the corridor.
• Members of the Trust are now working on ways to secure and bolster the ecological integrity of the land, but face threats like roads, fire and even a national sporting event.

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The president’s push to expand timber and fossil fuel production “is a double whammy on the climate.”

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In the Cerrado — the largest and most plant-diverse savanna in the world — scientists have discovered that just 30 tree species account for almost half of the ecosystem’s trees.

The phenomenon is called “hyperdominance” and has major implications for the understanding and conservation of the Cerrado, a press release from University of Exeter said.

For the study, researchers from Brazil, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom drew upon data from more than 200 field plots, along with spatial modeling and satellite imagery.

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• EcoWatch article
• research cited

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Carbon credits are a scam. Governments and corporations will fail the forest and its inhabitants every time.

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You’re helping nature — but nature also has ways to help you, make you more resilient, and relieve the stress caused by environmental destruction.

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The Brazilian government blocked 545 rural properties in the Amazonian state of Pará from selling crops and livestock both domestically and internationally, citing illegal deforestation, according to a May 6 announcement by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

The announcement marks one of Brazil’s largest uses of remote sensing to sanction agriculture activity associated with deforestation. The move signals a shift toward more aggressive antideforestation tactics. Instead of blocking, or embargoing, properties flagged for deforestation one by one, the government used satellite monitoring alerts to issue hundreds of penalties across a wide area all at once.

Most of the land now barred from markets lies near Castelo dos Sonhos district in Altamira, a municipality currently ranked as one of Brazil’s most violent. The region has seen multiple execution-style killings of environmental defenders and has high rates of deforestation.

“[The deforested areas] are embargoed with the aim of preventing new infractions, safeguarding environmental recovery and ensuring administrative processes see real results,” Jair Schmitt, the director of environmental protection at IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, wrote in the order.

The 615 ranchers and farmers named in the order will have until June 6 to remove all livestock from the land.

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• Monoculture palm oil production has come at the cost of rainforest habitat, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia.
• Researchers are conducting experimental trials in Malaysian Borneo to see if native trees can be planted in oil palm plantations without significantly reducing palm oil yields.
• While still in the initial stages, the experiment is so far showing there are no detrimental effects to oil palm growth.
• In fact, interplanting with native forest trees may benefit oil palm, with the researchers finding oil palm trees had more leaf growth in agroforestry plots than in monoculture ones.

Well... it's a start.

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A new Human Rights Watch report alleges abuse and human rights violations in an Indigenous community in Malaysia’s Sarawak state. The report finds Malaysian timber company Zedtee Sdn Bhd (Zedtee) destroyed culturally valuable forests without the consent of Indigenous people, who are facing an eviction notice from their land.

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The destruction of the forest is recorded with forensic precision.

Environmental activist Ma Chetra photographs the stump of each felled tree. In each shot, there’s a global positioning device to display each tree’s coordinates and a tape measure showing the width of each trunk – up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) in some cases.

The evidence appears indisputable that about 200 towering sentinels of the Preah Roka Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province have been cut down. Ma Chetra’s video shows felled tree trunks waiting to be dragged away, already-sawn timbers and charred remains where loggers appear to have set controlled fires to remove undergrowth.

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Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were convicted of causing more than £620,000 worth of damage to the tree and more than £1,000 worth of damage to Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.

On 27 September 2023, the pair drove 30 miles through a storm to Northumberlandfrom Cumbria, where they both lived, before felling the tree overnight in a matter of minutes.

In Morovis, a town in the center of Puerto Rico’s main island, lies the Las Cabachuelas nature reserve, a green labyrinth of approximately 1,950 acres. This place — known for its numerous caves — holds pre-colonial stories, rock art and petroglyphs, plants studied by paleobotanists, unique Caribbean fauna, and many other stories of what life was like in Puerto Rico before Spanish colonization and subsequent industrialization.

These stories can be heard on one of the many tours offered by the Cabachuelas Project of the Cabachuelas Workers Cooperative, a community-based cooperative co-founded by Morovis residents in 2018 to protect and manage the land where the nature reserve is located. Today, the cooperative has positioned itself as an alternative and effective model that contributes to conserving the natural environment and the mountain area’s sustainable economic development.

Las Cabachuelas is an area of high ecological value, with a large number of trees that help sequester carbon dioxide and preserve the island’s biodiversity. Today, it serves as an ecotourism area that supports eight people employed by the Cabachuelas Project and the cooperative. These people also help residents and visitors of Puerto Rico learn about the natural and cultural heritage of the archipelago, thanks to their ecotours and various social development and service works.

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