More than 40 percent of the Brazilian Amazon protected under new plan
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
November 20, 2001
By MICHAEL ASTOR; Associated Press Writer
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - More than 40 percent of the Brazilian Amazon will be protected after a joint project by the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund is completed, a leading conservationist said Tuesday.
Speaking before the third Parliamentary Conference of the Americas, uniting some 500 lawmakers from more than 20 countries,
Thomas Lovejoy, a tropical biologist and chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank, said the figure included national parks, Indian reservations, and reserves where natives live by extracting fruits, nuts and other rainforest products without cutting down trees. He did not say when the new World Bank/World Wildlife Fund project, to protect 10 percent of the rainforest, would be completed, but it would mean a total of 17 percent forest will be a national park.
The remaining 23 percent is Indian reservation or has been declared as a reserve.
The Brazilian Amazon covers 4.9 million square kilometers (2 million square miles), or 60 percent of Brazilian territory. It crosses Brazil's borders to enter Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Suriname, Guayana and French Guayana.
Environmentalists say the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness is disappearing at a rate of about 17,000 square kilometers (6,800 square miles) a year.
According to the World Bank an area the size of France has already been cut down.
Lovejoy cited rainforest protections as a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy environmental scenario. He cited global warming as the most pressing threat.
"We will need to reduce greenhouse gases on a timetable much more ambitious than currently proposed," Lovejoy said. "The process needs to be hastened and the U.S. has to make a serious contribution."
The Bush administration in March said it was withdrawing from the 1997 Kyoto agreement, arguing that its mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases would hurt the U.S. economy.