Paying to preserve trees helps

Zion park aims to require reservations

MIAMI, July 23, (Agencies): Paying small amounts of cash to convince landowners not to cut down their trees is a highly effective strategy for reducing carbon emissions that drive climate change, researchers has said.

Trees are important because they absorb lots of carbon dioxide, which is a by-product of fossil fuel burning and is the primary of driver of global warming.

The analysis of a system called “Payments for Ecosystems” in Uganda showed its benefits to the environment were 2.4 times as large as the program costs, said the study in the journal Science.

“The payments changed people’s behavior and prompted them to conserve,” said lead author Seema Jayachandran, associate professor of economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

“And we didn’t find any evidence that they simply shifted their tree-cutting elsewhere.”

The two-year study in western Uganda examined the impact of offering landowners 70,000 Ugandan shillings ($28 in 2012 US dollars) per year for each hectare (2.5 acres) of forest in which they left trees unperturbed.

Sixty villages were randomly selected to receive incentives, and 61 were not offered any cash to save the trees.

Satellite data was analyzed to measure tree cover, and forest monitors conducted spot checks on enrollees’ land to hunt for any sign of recent treeclearing.

“In the villages without the program, nine percent of the tree cover that was in place at the start of the study was gone by the end of it, two years later,” said Jayachandran.

“In the villages with the PES program,

by the robot on the floor of the primary containment vessel underneath the core of Fukushima’s No. 3 reactor, the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said.

“There is a high possibility that the there was four to five percent tree loss. In other words, there was still deforestation, but much less of it.”

Forests in Uganda provide precious habitat for endangered chimpanzees.

Between 2005 and 2010 Uganda had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with 2.7 percent lost per year, according to background information in the article.

A full 70 percent of forests in Uganda are located on private land, where poor farmers cut them for timber. Cleared land is also used to grow crops.

After the study, villages offered the incentive preserved 13.5 more acres (5.5 more hectares) of forest than villages in the comparison group.

Released

“This equates to 3,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere, at a total cost of just 46 cents per ton not released over the two years of the study,” said the report.

Because the amounts of money involved are fairly small, and because most deforestation today occurs in low-income countries, researchers said the savings can be big.

Paying farmers to conserve and plant trees was an estimated 10 to 50 times more effective per dollar spent than many energy efficiency programs in the United States, the study found.

“This is the first experimental study of its kind to show not just how effective, but how cost-effective, programs like this can be,” said Annie Duflo, executive director of Innovations for Poverty Action.

“Good science like this helps us understand how to combat climate change and preserve endangered habitats, while also helping poor farmers.”

It would be a first for a US national park: requiring reservations to get in. But it’s an option that Zion National Park is considering to manage an overwhelming surge of visitors to its sweeping red-rock vistas and canyons in Utah.

Zion, which welcomed 4.3 million people last year, is weighing online reservations for those who want to explore its main canyon. National Park Service rangers struggle to cope with overcrowded tour buses and alleviate damage to Zion’s natural wonders, including soil erosion and human waste near trails.

People without reservations could pay an entrance fee and drive through the park, but they couldn’t stop to hike or picnic.

“We have to do something,” said park spokesman John Marciano. With limited budgets, Zion’s Park Service rangers routinely see long lines and plants trampled by visitors who also have cut some 30 miles of their own trails.

Zion isn’t the only US national park with swelling numbers of tourists, and at least two national parks, in California and Hawaii, are testing more limited reservation systems for parking.

Overall, more than 330 million people visited US national parks in 2016, a record. Visits were bolstered by the improving economy, cheap gas and marketing campaigns for the National Park Service’s 2016 centennial.

Zion is the fifth-most-visited park in the national park system. It’s particularly susceptible to overcrowding because many of its iconic cliffs and trails are located in the narrow, 6-mile-long (10-km-long) Zion Canyon. The park already urges visitors to take a shuttle between March and November.

The three-day investigation using the small, remote controlled underwater robot, which is about the size of a loaf of bread, ended Saturday, the spokesman said. (AFP)

Brazil risks rodent-borne Hantavirus:

The risk of being infected by the potentially fatal, rodent-borne Hantavirus could jump in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state as climate change sends temperatures higher and farmers grow more sugarcane, said scientists.

More effective health education and pest control could help cut the risk of the disease in the area, along with forest restoration and better land use, wrote Brazilian and US researchers in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

“Studies that concern this disease look at the virus aspect and not the landscape and climate aspect which is very important as it defines the species that transmits the disease and how people get infected,” one of the study’s authors, Paula Ribeiro Prist of the University of Sao Paulo, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The virus, which can be inhaled or caught via contact with rodent droppings or urine, causes Hantavirus Cardiopulmonary Syndrome (HCPS), which is fatal in more than half of cases. No vaccine is available for HCPS and while the likelihood of catching it is rare, any potential rise in cases is significant given how deadly the disease is, said the report. (RTRS)