2011 – The International Year of Forests
It is estimated that the Earth loses 80,000 acres of its forest each day. To put this into perspective, forest areas practically the size of England are disappearing from the planet each and every year. If the current rate of deforestation continues, we will see the world’s rainforest vanish entirely within a hundred years. Therefore in a bid to raise awareness of sustainable forest management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests, the United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Forests, an initiative that Elephant Family fully supports.
Forests are some of the biologically richest environments on Earth, but they are also among the most threatened. These crucial ecosystems are of global importance, not solely for their biodiversity but also for regulating the global climate and sustaining human life: over 1.6 billion people’s livelihoods depend on their existence.
The principal threats to the world’s forests are agriculture, illegal logging, resource extraction, human settlement and poor governance. The destruction of rainforests is resulting in the extinction of hundreds of species, many of which have never been scientifically documented. Much of the world’s remaining forest is now increasingly fragmented and degraded. It is within forest fragments like these that the Asian elephant is struggling to survive.
Asian elephants are a migratory species. Their existence depends on age-defined forest routes that allow them to migrate seasonally to feed and reproduce. These forest lifelines are rapidly being severed and elephants are being forced into ever-decreasing pockets of land, sparking a devastating rise in human-elephant conflict.
Through our projects in India, Borneo, Thailand and Indonesia, Elephant Family is working to mitigate human-elephant conflict and protect Asian elephant habitat. For us, our work is about a great deal more than saving one endangered species from extinction: it’s about conserving some of the most important ecosystems on the planet. Asian elephants are not only flagship species for the landscapes they inhabit: as ecological keystone species, their very existence is important to maintain biodiversity within their particular environment.
Parbati Barua – the subject and inspiration of our founder Mark Shand’s book Queen of the Elephants – puts it succinctly: “Elephants are important for our survival. By saving them we are forced to save big forests. By saving big forests we save all animals. If we do not, all nature will disappear and we destroy ourselves”.
We are about to launch specific campaigns around issues such as palm oil. The demand for palm oil is ever-increasing and it is used in everyday food products, cosmetics and in biodiesel. The phrase ‘cheapest oil in the world’ is often used in relation to palm oil when the grim reality is that oil palm plantations are costing the world its tropical forests and having a devastating impact on vital ecosystems. Our Head of Conservation, Dan Bucknell, recently visited Sabah Province, Malaysia. Along the two-hour drive to the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary – where we’re working with Hutan to reduce human-elephant conflict – he witnessed the harrowing affects of the demand for palm oil first hand:
“It was a sobering sight. The plantations went on forever and so little forest is left in what is still widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots. Plantations have squeezed the wildlife – elephants, orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and some of the richest birdlife on the planet – into forest fragments that can barely sustain them. We really have reached the eleventh hour for saving these forests, yet still too few people realise that they are unwittingly consuming the culprit on a daily basis.”
There is an urgent need to prevent further concessions being granted that allow vast forest areas to be felled for oil palm plantations. It is also imperative that, internationally, we ensure all types of industry are using palm oil sourced from plantations that have not cost the Earth its rainforests. With this in mind, it seems incredibly fitting that 2011 is the International Year of Forests. We can but hope that increased awareness of the importance of the Earth’s forests will see declining rates of deforestation worldwide.
The above photo shows elephants within palm oii plantations in Sabah, taken by Sulaiman Bin Ismail, Head of Hutan's Elephant Conservation Unit
written by Jo Cary-Elwes on 12th January 11
