Amazon up in smoke, even when deforestation slows
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO
Thu Jun 3, 2010 2:03pm EDT OSLO (Reuters) – Brazilian farmers are setting more fires in parts of the Amazon where deforestation has slowed, according to a study on Thursday that shows weaknesses in a U.N. plan for slowing climate change. Big fires, set by farmers to clear land for agriculture, are the main cause of deforestation but they continue to set smaller fires to maintain their plots — and the damage is often hidden from satellite imaging because they burn under the tree canopy. “This was a big surprise,” Luiz Aragao, lead author of the study at the University of Exeter in England, told Reuters. “We thought that fires would decrease with less deforestation.” The extra blazes, used to clear regrowing trees and undergrowth and add nutrients to the soil, release large amounts of greenhouse gases stored in vegetation and so partly negate the climate benefits of a drive to brake deforestation. “Fire occurrence has increased in 59 percent of the area that has experienced reduced deforestation rates,” according to the scientists writing in the journal Science, based mainly on satellite images. Aragao said that a pattern of more fires might also be true in other tropical forests, such as the Congo basin or parts of Asia which are seeking to slow forest loss under U.N. schemes. In Brazil, extra fires often burned undergrowth in forests alongside farmland but the damage went unnoticed by satellites if the big trees were mostly intact. “Farmers plant pasture under the large trees and you can’t see it from a satellite. It still counts as a forest because of the canopy cover,” Aragao said. …
