Environmental Groups Re-emphasize World Forests Threatened

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

9/10/96

OVERVIEW & SOURCE by EE

At the current meeting of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on

Forests, NGOs reiterated the mounting threat of uncontrolled logging for

forests and the ecosystem processes they provide. WWF contended that only

6% of the world's 8.155 billion acres are protected. The $100 billion

dollar industrial timber industry is held to be largely responsible for

accelerating forest loss. The failure of national government's to act to

reign in forest destruction is noted.

g.b.

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Environmental groups say world forests threatened

9/9/96

GENEVA (Reuter) - Environmental groups warned Monday that the world's

remaining forests were under mounting threat from uncontrolled logging by

international companies and a refusal of governments to extend protected

areas.

The charges were issued as delegates from 53 countries to the United

Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) began a two-week meeting

in Geneva to discuss ways of halting increasing forest destruction.

In a report to coincide with the meeting, the Swiss-based World Wide Fund

for Nature (WWF) said latest figures showed that only six per cent of the

8.155 billion acres of forest left around the globe were protected.

Francis Sullivan, leader of WWF's Forests for Life Campaign, told a news

conference solutions to the problem were obvious "but governments are

refusing to act.

"What we need is a dramatic increase in the number of legally-protected

forest areas as well as the controlled use of forests which fall outside

the protective boundary," he said.

At the same time a British- and United States-based group, the

Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), said the international timber

trade -- valued at around $100 billion a year -- played a critical role in

the decline of forest cover.

"The vital ecological, economic and social functions of this precious

resource are under increasing threat because the timber industry is subject

to no coherent international regulation to match its global power and

influence," an EIA study declared.

The study, "Corporate Power, Corruption, and the Destruction of the World's

Forests," said the lack of international controls had "encouraged the use

of illegal and unethical activities by many large companies, both in their

dealings with foreign governments and in their logging operations."

The IPF was set up by the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development in

March last year and is working on draft recommendations for consideration

by world leaders at a special "Earth Summit" in New York in June 1997.

But environmental activists say the power of the forest product industry --

believed to be the third largest global industrial sector after

telecommunications and automobiles -- could prevent any effective action.

To back its own campaign, the WWF Monday released data gathered by the

British-based World Conservation Monitoring Center (WCMC) showing a 34 per

cent increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since 1992.

Sullivan told the news conference this meant an area the size of Belgium

had been lost in a country which was home to some of the world's largest

remaining forest areas.

The data also showed that countries like Russia, Cambodia and Cameroun,

where large regions of forest still survived although widely exploited by

commercial loggers, had yet to establish networks of protected areas.

A global map produced by the WCMC showed "that levels of forest protection

are far below the internationally-accepted minimum of 10 per cent of the

world's forests," Sullivan declared.

"With this new map, we can blow away the smokescreen which has hidden the

truth about the state of the world's forests for so long....This issue must

be the central theme of IPF if we are to stop the continuing degradation of

the world's remaining forests."

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