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Foreign Affairs
Seeing the Forest
By Eugene Linden, Thomas Lovejoy and J. Daniel Phillips
Eugene Linden writes widely on global environmental issues and is the author of The Future in Plain Sight. Thomas Lovejoy, a tropical biologist, is President of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. J. Daniel Phillips is a former U.S. Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he worked on tropical forest conservation projects, including the creation of the Nuabale–Ndoki National Park. Linden first presented this idea at a June 2002 conference hosted by Brazil’s president.
The Ndoki rainforest is nestled in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bordered on three sides by vast swamps. The Ndoki was long so inaccessible that its animals were naive of humans. In recent years, though, it has come under threat from logging, political upheaval, and civil war in the Congo Basin. Fortunately, the forest has also received protection, since the area, covering 4,000 square kilometers, was designated the Nuabale–Ndoki National Park in 1993. Given the tumultuous politics and endemic corruption of the region, the protection of the Ndoki would seem a conservation triumph.
There’s just one problem: the forest appears to be drying out. Rainfall records are spotty, but other worrisome developments—changes in flora and the more frequent appearance of harmattan dust—point to a serious decline in moisture levels. And with logging consortia continuing to cut other unprotected forests throughout the Congo Basin, reducing the system’s capacity to store and recycle moisture, regional rainfall may drop and stay below the threshold needed to sustain a wet tropical forest.
The message from the Ndoki experience is that protecting only parts of an ecosystem is not sufficient. Conservationists must find ways to preserve the vitality of the systems that protect a forest, not just the forest itself, lest factors such as regional climate change trump even the most effective legal protection. Moreover, the pace of deforestation is such that conservationists will have to implement large–scale measures without perfect knowledge of what it is they are trying to save. What is needed, then, is a plan that is comprehensive enough to provide wal–to–wall coverage of an entire rainforest system, simple enough to bypass the usual rounds of endless study and negotiation, and attractive enough to draw in new kinds of donors to areas currently starved of funds.
Diseconomies of Scale
Since the early 1990s, the problem of scale in conservation has risen into bold relief. Presently, only about five percent of the world’s tropical forests have effective protection. And in recent years, the annual rate of wet tropical forest loss and degradation has actually accelerated. Meanwhile, new discoveries have underscored the interdependency of the earth's ecosystems. Deforestation in Sumatra and Kalimantan, in Indonesia, has contributed to regional drought and wildfires; in Brazil’s Mato Grasso, the rainy season has diminished, some believe as a result of the retreat of the Amazon.
The international response to accelerating deforestation, however, has been anemic, even as the disparity between the scale of the problem and the scale of the efforts has become clear. A lack of follow–through has plagued almost all conservation efforts in recent years. The so–called Earth Summit, the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, brought together heads of state to address global environmental problems; by the time the fleet of presidential jets left the runway, the commitments made at the conference had already been forgotten. Of the $1.2 billion that the G–7 group of advanced industrialized nations promised for the preservation of the . . .