Rainforest in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 16 2013 (IPS)

Jungles, forests, mangroves, swamps and lagoons are natural carbon storehouses or “sinks” in the Caribbean regions of Mexico. But now studies are being conducted to measure their capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

These ecosystems are typically found along the strip of coastline that includes the southeastern states of Veracruz, Tabasco, Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo.

“The recommendation to avoid deforestation and forest degradation is a measure aimed at the mitigation (reduction) of the roughly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from these causes,” said researcher José Andrade of the Yucatan Centre for Scientific Research (CICY), a government institute.

However, “at the same time, emissions from industry and transportation need to be reduced with alternative energy sources. (Forest conservation) alone is not a solution for reducing global emissions,” he told Tierramérica*.

As part of the research study “Las hojas: parte fundamental del almacenamiento de carbono en una selva de Yucatán” (Leaves: A fundamental part of carbon storage in a Yucatán rainforest), Andrade and four of his colleagues assessed factors such as air currents, biomass and carbon fluxes in the ecosystem of the Kiuic Reserve, which covers 1,800 hectares in the state of Yucatán.

Of the plant species studied, gumbo-limbo or copperwood (Bursera simaruba) trees were found to absorb 730 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per square metre, Florida fishpoison or Jamaican dogwood (Piscidia piscipula), 680 grams, and kitinché (Caesalpinia gaumeri), 1.32 kilograms. The last two are native to Mexico.

“The data suggest that the species of the area use water efficiently to promote the regeneration of new leaves, which allows them to continue absorbing CO2 and thus to store carbon in the form of biomass,” explained Andrade.

The Mexican Caribbean is exposed to increasingly destructive hurricanes and storms and the threat of rising sea levels, which would flood wide strips of the coastline, specialists warn. The area’s biological wealth is also endangered by the expansion of the tourist industry, deforestation, cattle grazing and oil industry activities.

Mexico’s emissions of CO2, one of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, total some 748 million tons annually. Agriculture is responsible for 12.3 percent of these emissions, industry for 8.2 percent, and changes in land use and forestry for 5.3 percent, according to the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

“Climate change heightens our uncertainty about the future of forests. We aren’t sure about what is going to happen,” Richard Birdsey of the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Tierramérica*.

“In some places forests are growing more, in others they are growing less. This is influenced by many factors that we need to study,” added Birdsey, a member of CarboNA, a joint government-level initiative between Canada, the United States and Mexico for carbon cycle research throughout North America.

CarbonNA projects, including one being undertaken in Yucatán, are aimed at CO2 monitoring and modelling in the region through remote sensing and mapping.

“It’s difficult to calculate the CO2 in the soil, but we are trying to measure it. We process ecosystems on a small scale to generate emission factor curves,” said Birdsey.

In 2011, a group of scientists created the MexFlux network in Mexico, to study water and carbon fluxes based on the same methodology as the AmeriFlux network in the United States. At least seven sites have been established in Mexico to study these mass and energy exchanges between the land and atmosphere.

The ecosystems of the Mexican Caribbean provide valuable services for the environmental equilibrium of the region and serve as protection against climate and weather phenomena such as droughts, storms, storm surges and flooding.

But the Yucatán peninsula “is highly degraded. There is a great deal of pressure on the ecosystems. The areas that act as carbon sinks need to be analysed. Tropical rainforests fix more carbon dioxide than they release,” Rodrigo Valle, a postgraduate student and researcher at CICY, told Tierramérica.

Valle and two colleagues are working on the study “Estimación de la distribución espacial de la biomasa forestal en la Península de Yucatán, usando percepción remota y datos de campo” (Estimation of the spatial distribution of forest biomass in the Yucatán Peninsula using remote sensing and field data).

Their research found 229,000 tons of biomass per hectare in the area studied, by measuring the electromagnetic radiation reflected by green matter.

Using data from the 2009-2013 National Forests and Soils Inventory, two government agencies, the National Forests Commission and the Mexican Carbon Program, estimated that there are 9.146 million tons of carbon stored in Mexico’s soils.

The Yucatán peninsula is the region with the highest levels of buried CO2, due to its chalky soil.

This year, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, which is considered a critical level for the effect it will have global temperatures. It also demonstrates that the measures adopted up until now are not working, and that the only solution is to drastically cut emissions of these gases.

Given the amount of carbon dioxide stored in plants, “one alternative is to reduce deforestation and promote the management and conservation of jungles and forests as carbon reservoirs,” Luisa Cámara of the public Juárez Autonomous University of Tabasco told Tierramérica.

Cámara is heading up a study in Huimanguillo, Tabasco to measure the carbon stored in a tropical lowland forest of Quercus oleoides, a type of oak, and plantations of Eucaliptus urophylla, a species of eucalyptus, and Gmelina arborea, a fast-growing deciduous tree, neither of which is native to Mexico.

In the areas studied, Cámara and her research team measured 14.75 tons of CO2 per hectare in the eucalyptus trees, 15.54 tons in the Gmelina arborea and 63.51 tons in the oaks. These figures indicate that the creation of industrial tree plantations does not represent a solution for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

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An estimated half of fresh produce in Papua New Guinea is lost between harvesting and marketing. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

With less than three years before a 2015 deadline, the developing world is largely expected to miss one of the U.N.’s key Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): halving the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger.

Despite limited progress, there are still more than 1.4 billion people – out of a total global population of over seven billion – who live below the poverty line of 1.25 dollars and on the razor edge of starvation.

"On the quicksand of development, predictions are dangerous.” -- Ambassador Ernest Corea
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has, however, identified at least 16 countries that have already reached the 1996 World Food Summit’s goal of halving the total number of undernourished people.

“This was made possible by the priority the government has set on ensuring the right to food and polices it has implemented,” says FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva.

The 16 countries – namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chile, Cuba, Fiji, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Nicaragua, Peru, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela and Viet Nam – will be honoured at an FAO ceremony in Rome on Jun. 16.

Meanwhile, in a report released last month, a high-level panel of eminent persons has projected a 2030 deadline to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger from the face of the earth.

But how realistic is this new deadline?

Ambassador Ernest Corea, who served for nearly 19 years on the staff of the World Bank’s secretariat for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), told IPS: “On the quicksand of development, predictions are dangerous.”

Two missed monsoons could upend whatever progress has been made towards reaching this goal, he noted.

“Still, it is better to reach out towards a worthwhile objective than to do nothing at all.”

Hunger is a cruel and debilitating scourge. Malnutrition, often the by-product of hunger, causes the deaths of three million children per year, he added.

“Reversing this tragic situation is a goal worth striving for,” said Corea, a former Sri Lankan ambassador to the United States.

Dr. Joan Russow of the Canada-based Global Compliance Research Project told IPS one of the reasons for the failure of the MDG1 might have been because the urgency was not effectively communicated by using the word “halving”.

The goal should have been “eradicating extreme hunger and poverty and then delineating the drastic means to do so,” she said.

“It will only be possible to do so in 2030 if the global community drastically alters current global practices,” said Russow, a longtime peace and environmental activist.

These include, at a minimum, prohibiting land grabs for biofuel production around the world; establishing a global ban on genetically engineered food and crops, promoting organic agriculture and instituting a fair and just transition for farmers and communities affected by the ban.

Additionally, she said, there should be a ban on the production and use of pesticides such as neonicotinoids, which have been destroying the world’s honeybee population.

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank, told IPS the 2007-2008 food price crisis has mostly resulted in wishful thinking at international conferences that food security can be accomplished.

“However, silver bullet policy solutions, for instance suggesting foreign investment in agriculture will result in food security, ignore the unprecedented land rush over the last five years to grab the natural resources – land, water, forests – that the poorest depend on for their livelihoods.”

He said: “We know there are enough resources to feed everyone; it is therefore possible to eradicate hunger by 2030.”

However, this would require a major overhaul of current food security and development policies, which would have to focus on supporting the livelihoods of the rural poor in developing countries, protecting their rights to land and access and control over natural resources and promoting sustainable production methods.

Corea pointed out it would be a worthwhile exercise for a small working group convened by the FAO to review the record of the 16 countries and determine what common policies and practices among them contributed to their success.

Was it good governance? A crackdown on corruption? The development through research of enhanced sustainable productivity? Something else?

The findings of such a review would be invaluable to other countries.

Russow told IPS there are also other urgent issues that have to be resolved in order to eradicate hunger by 2030, including climate change.

She said there should be a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions – primarily by conserving carbon sinks, ending subsidies to fossil fuel industries and by seriously phasing out the production and use of fossil fuels and abandoning an animal-based diet in favour of a vegetarian diet.

She also called for a substantial reduction in global military budgets, and investments in socially equitable and environmentally sound transportation, and energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal power.

Russow said there should be a revoking of the charters of transnational corporations, which, in pursuing unsustainable exploitative development, have destroyed food security around the world.

And the world should abide by the legally binding International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights, reaffirming that everyone has the right to be free from hunger and enshrining the right to food and drinking water.

She said it is necessary to move away from the over-consumptive model of consumption and towards an effective programme of conservation, coupled with a serious reduction of the ecological footprint.

Additionally, Russow said, there should be a cancellation of the “devastating debt of developing states”, and the abandoning of structural adjustment programmes by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the elimination of the World Bank’s ill-conceived projects.