The world's forests: A (modest) environmental success story

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IN 1998 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then Brazil’s president, said he would triple the area of the Amazonian forest set aside for posterity. At the time the ambition seemed vain: Brazil was losing 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) of forest a year. Over the next 15 years loggers, ranchers, environmentalists and indigenous tribes battled it out—often bloodily—in the world’s largest tropical forest. Yet all the while presidents were patiently patching together a jigsaw of national parks and other protected patches of forest to create the Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA), a protected area 20 times the size of Belgium. Now, less than 6,000 sq km of Brazil’s Amazonian forest is cleared each year. In May the government and a group of donors agreed to finance ARPA for 25 years. It is the largest tropical-forest conservation project in history.

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Fifteen years ago, the conversion of forest into farmland accounted for a quarter of total greenhouse-gas emissions and the rainforest was the symbol of worldwide environmental degradation. Average surface temperatures, ocean acidity, glacier melt and carbon emissions are all higher now than then. Yet deforestation now accounts for only 12% of greenhouse gases

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