The Forest for the Trees | Dan Nepstad

Images of Australia, Brazil and California literally burning triggered global sorrow. And suddenly, we remembered the trees. The fires are now raging again and so we ask, what is happening to the forest?

Daniel Nepstad, founder and director of the Earth Innovation Institute, believes that the challenge is dire, but there are solutions.

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With support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, through BGR, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

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Transcript

Åsa Borssén: 
Images of Australia, Brazil and California literally burning triggered global sorrow. And suddenly, we remembered the trees. The fires are now raging again and so we ask, what is happening to the forest? I'm your host Åsa Borssén, and this is Highgrade,


Åsa Borssén: 
Welcome to The Natural Resources Podcast. Trees are sanctuaries, wrote Hermann Hesse. Whoever knows how to listen to them can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts. They preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. Today I talk with Daniel Nepstad, founder and director of the Earth Innovation Institute. He has worked in the Brazilian Amazon for more than 30 years. Dan, thank you for joining us.

Dan Nepstad: 
Oh, it's my pleasure.

Åsa Borssén: 
You have dedicated your career to the forest, what drew you to the trees?

Dan Nepstad:
I really have to go back to high school when my house, much to my parents’ dismay, was a menagerie of wild animals that were wounded or needed help in some way. And then I started studying forest, and I realised that the real action was taking place in the tropics, and a chance came to do my PhD in the Amazon. And I grabbed it and I just fell in love with being in these really dynamic settings where, you know, people were trying to figure out how to make a living and the forest was what they turned to usually knocking it down to make a living instead of keeping it standing. And that's how I got my start. Where I did my masters were mostly coniferous trees, needles, needle leaves trees, where there's a very long winter and a very short growing season. But these are huge forests that extend across Canada and Russia, and the Nordic countries, and they're very much under threat, because it's the northern end of the boreal forests that are seeing the greatest warming today. And with that warming comes a change in their vulnerability to fire. And so fire is coming, and high temperatures has a very big impact on the boreal forest in northern forests. There's also very little attention paid to dry forests. Dry forests include everything from the open woodlands, if we think of the plains of Africa, the Serengeti, places like that. But also, it's the Cerrado in Brazil, which is this enormous woodland Savanna that is just full of plant and animal species. It's one of the most biodiverse forests in the world. And, and then the forest that I spent my life studying: the tropical forests, the moist tropical forests. Those are where a lot of the action is taking place today as well. So I would really highlight those three types of forests, the boreal forests, the dry forest, dry tropical and subtropical forests, the savannahs and woodlands. And then the moist forest that we think of as rainforest.

Åsa Borssén:  
Speaking of the Amazon, some voices claim that 20% of the oxygen that we breathe, comes from the Amazon. Should we think of it as the lungs of the earth?

Dan Nepstad: 
You know, I love that concept. But unfortunately, the science doesn't support it. The Amazon is essentially oxygen neutral. And if it were, you know, cut down and we're a young regrowing forest, then it would be a very large contributor of oxygen to the planet. But basically, the size of the oxygen cycle means that we do not depend on tropical forests for oxygen, and the fact too that they're net neutral.

Åsa Borssén:
It's a very popular myth, though. Maybe it's because it's very poetic.

Dan Nepstad: 
I think so you know, and I talked to one of the scientists who promoted it, and his concept was basically, the Amazon for example, is a huge interface of gas exchange between the atmosphere and the land. And that's true, right? The amount of oxygen produced by the Amazon every year is enormous. It’s enormous. But it also consumes about the same amount. And so if you think of a lung as not as a source of oxygen, but as the gas exchange system between the land and the atmosphere, then it works, yeah. But let's not say our oxygen supply depends upon the Amazon because it doesn't.

Åsa Borssén: 
And it shouldn't be all too obvious. But I'm gonna ask it anyway. Why are forests important?

Dan Nepstad:  
It's actually a big question, a very difficult question to answer in some ways. I think we tend to think of all of the plant and animal species that find our homes and rainforests, but also the indigenous communities, the local communities, who've been there for millennia, who know how to use it sustainably and are under increasing pressure from outsiders. But I think the thing that doesn't get enough attention of tropical forests, or rainforests, is their role is really these giant, planetary cooling systems. If we think of our own bodies, when we get hot, we sweat, the water evaporates. And that cools us down. Rainforests do the same thing. So they're, they're under this intense equatorial heat, taking in all of that sun that's directly overhead. And their leaves, which are drawing water from deep beneath the soil, all the way up the tree trunk, to the leaf surface. And every time a tiny molecule of water evaporates, it's absorbing energy, it's cooling. And if you add that up across millions of square kilometers of forest, it's enough to change the way global circulation happens. It determines our climate systems. So that's one way that we don't talk about very much. We need rain forests as cooling systems. But we also need them because they're an enormous stock of carbon, the trees, the tree trunks, and branches and roots and leaves of tropical forests, just in the Amazon, for example, nearly a half a trillion tonnes of co2 if all of that were to go into the atmosphere. And so that right there represents a decade's worth of worldwide emissions of carbon from all human activities in one of these tropical forests. So that's another thing that's attracted a lot of attention today. That's why there's some money flowing to tropical forest conservation. Can we keep this carbon storage function of the of the forest alive?

Åsa Borssén:  
Everything is polarised nowadays, and on the state of forests, public opinion is split between forests are about to disappear, and we are doomed or no, no, we're being hysterical and overreacting. But what do you say, what is the real situation?

Dan Nepstad: 
I think the trend right now is not going in the right direction. If you look at since 2000, the four years with the highest rates of tropical forest loss in that 20 year period were the last four years, so we're not going in the right direction. And on the other hand, I am a pragmatist and an optimist, I think that all of the pieces are in place to turn that trajectory around to start slowing the loss of deforestation, as we accelerate forest recovery, on marginal lands that never should have been cleared in the first place. They're Rocky, they're poorly drained. They're on steep slopes. And much of the Amazon, for example, that's been cleared, is under that circumstance. In other words, no one really wants to use that land for cattle or agriculture. So why not let it go back to forest? And there's some very near-term ways that we could make that happen.

Åsa Borssén: 
So you're saying that there is a cause for alarm, but there's also hope?

Dan Nepstad:  
To put it very succinctly, we should be very concerned that the rate of loss is growing. But there's reasons to believe we can get it under control.

Åsa Borssén: 
Before we get to the solutions, you just said that forest loss is accelerating. How is that happening?

Dan Nepstad: 
About a quarter of the deforestation is eventually going to commodity production. In other words, you clear a hectare of forest and you put in cattle or you put you plant palm oil, or you plant a rubber plantation or soybeans in the case of South America. And some reports say that that's closer to 70%. And that's just not true. It's a smaller number. That's a quarter of the issue: commodity production aimed at international markets. The biggest piece of this, first and foremost, people trying to earn money, improve their lives, survive in many cases by cutting forests down. And that category right there includes poor people who do slash and burn farming for subsistence agriculture, if they're growing rice and beans and cassava and things like that, if there's excess, they'll sell in a local market, usually, you know, for tiny incomes. There's sort of middle-sized producers who are more market oriented, and they will buy their food instead of growing their food. And then there's giant producers. But there's still people who trying to make a profit from land use. And those include, you know, a lot of my research has been on an 80,000 Hector soy farm in Mato Grosso. 80,000 Hector's that's almost as big as some, some small European countries. So you have people growing food. And for me, the thing we often forget is, we are needing more and more food every year. When China has an 8% annual growth in it's income that means people are eating better, and more dairy, more cheese, more chicken. And that's coming from somewhere. So today, most of Brazil's soy exports are going to animal ration for China's burgeoning appetite for pork and poultry, etc. and their per capita meat consumption is still far below the European Union countries, below the United States. So all of these emerging economies are trying to catch up if you would, with the dietary standards of developed countries.

Åsa Borssén: 
How much of an impact does the mining industry have on deforestation?

Dan Nepstad: 
If you think of two big categories of mining, one is industrial mining, that often has international stockholders who are sort of wanting to make sure they're not becoming headlines so that their share values don't go down. Those types of mines tend to be fairly small in their footprint, their land footprint. They tend to have a lot of, you know, negative aspects like contaminated waters or lakes, informal settlements outside of the mining towns. But their footprint is pretty small. In the Amazon, it's like a few large cattle ranches worth of land that we're talking about. But then there's at the other end of the spectrum, something like Wildcat gold mining, where everyone is out there for themselves there. They're basically hosing down stream banks, riverbanks making these pock marks in the jungle if you would. And they're full of malaria, and they are nasty, and releasing mercury into the environment. In Peru, it's coming down now, but as a big chunk of the Peruvian Amazon's deforestation still far from half, you know, it's much lower than that. So mining is crosses that spectrum in the middle are more informal, sort of flying-below-the- radar mining companies that are not playing by the rules. They're not putting money into compensation funds that are supposed to compensate the local and regional community for the damages they do. And those are worried very worrisome as well.

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You are listening to Highgrade, and this is our Natural Resources Podcast. Today, we're speaking with Dan Nepstad about trees. Lots of them in fact. If you just tuned in, you need to know two things: The forests around the world are under huge pressure. But Dan is a pragmatist that believes there's hope.

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Åsa Borssén: 
And then there is the issue of illegal logging. How much of an issue is that in terms of deforestation?

Dan Nepstad: 
Yeah, first, let's start with teasing apart the word illegal. The whole difference between legal and illegal for me is fraught with this, this background question of is it possible to be legal, if you would?

Åsa Borssén:  
That's an interesting one that we come across when we talk about legal and illegal mining as well. It has a lot to do with the administrative burden. And really, it's impossible for a lot of miners to become legal.

Dan Nepstad: 
And that actually favours the illegal players. When I talk to soy farmers in Brazil, they describe 20 or more licences that they need to get to operate and they're not done in online they're not you know, everyone has a different deadline. Maybe not every licence, but they figured about 10% of their overall costs of doing business is just dealing with the licencing. And I feel like it could be so much more efficient and achieve the goal, which is better environmental management. And I've, you know, had my own teams for more than 20 years in the Amazon. And I'll admit, I could never bring them up to the law, because I'd have to have literally bathrooms in the middle of the forest to comply with the laws. So it's, I think, well-meaning laws that are never really designed to be implemented, are a chronic problem in tropical forest regions. And so when the international community comes in and says, this is legal, this is illegal. I think we need a little more nuance to that question.

Åsa Borssén: 
And you mentioned also palm oil. Planting trees as a business and is sustainable forestry an oxymoron.

Dan Nepstad: 
I do think that we can reduce the impact of logging so that the forest is still there, it's still doing the things we talked about: cooling the planet, maintaining most plant and animal species. I think something like palm oil coming in with a monoculture, I think we just have to look at those operations for what they are. It's the world's most productive source of vegetable oil, and it's got a huge demand. And if you get it right, you know, there can be a very small footprint in terms of land occupied for a very large amount of a commodity that the world needs. And I do get worried of campaigns to eliminate palm oil, because first, that means we're going to have to use more land growing that vegetable oil from some other source. And second, there's a huge number of small holders, who have been able to put in a hectare or two of oil palm trees. And that has allowed them to send their daughter to college. It's really given them a step up in the economy. And, you know, when we're in Indonesia, our work focused on smallholders growing palm oil in Central Kalimantan. And those communities had just amazing stories to tell about what it meant when they got their certificates from the responsible roundtable for sustainable palm oil standard. They were selling their certificates to Unilever, and Unilever bought everything they produced. And it was really building that local economy and giving those people an economic opportunity that they otherwise wouldn't have had. So I think, yes, it's a monoculture. Is it biodiverse? Not so much. Orangutans will cross palm oil plantations, but they don't really live there. They need high forests. And so my pragmatic side says, we better make sure that we just do it, right. Yeah, instead of trying to get rid of it. Because if we get rid of it, there could be worse problems associated with that.

Åsa Borssén:  
It's never black or white, is it?

The Amazon fires have become a burning issue globally. And there are people that are saying that the fires are natural events, and even necessary. Are these fires that we're seeing, and wild or are they land grabs?

Dan Nepstad: 
Yeah, so historically, the best evidence we have is that Amazon forests burned every 400 to 700 years. And these fires took place during times of extreme drought, when there were Amerindian populations, indigenous populations, probably their own slash and burn agriculture systems, those fires would escape into the forest and they would burn for weeks. And what we saw last year, actually, it was not a dry, very dry year. Most of the fires were associated with patches of rainforests that had been cleared, were being allowed to dry out. And then they were set on fire by landholders to make way for usually, you know, planting cattle pastures or putting in some sort of farming system. So these are intentional fires. They're not necessarily illegal, although most were illegal. It's hard to get a fire permit, for example. And we know there's a lot of land grabbing taking place in the Amazon right now. And if you're a land grabber and want to demonstrate to the government that you are using that land, your land claim productively, the cheapest way to do that is to cut trees down and throw in some grass seed and put some cattle on it. And then you can say, nope, this is a productive ranch. You can't take it away and put it into agrarian reform. So the land grabbing I don't want to diminish. It's huge. It's an incredibly nasty problem to deal with in the Amazon because you want to recognise those legitimate landholders who have been there for years or decades and are producing food and making a living with serious production systems. And then there's others who are basically after land speculation, you know, they want to claim a land and then sell it and then move on.

Åsa Borssén: 
The whole situation has gotten very politicised. How do you read the politics behind the Amazon?

Dan Nepstad: 
First of all, I do think it's important to recognise a dynamic in Brazil that I think needs to be addressed if there's going to be a solution in the Amazon. And this bodes for places like Indonesia and the Congo as well. And that is there is a tendency, I think, to not recognise adequately bold steps and progress that are made. But to point fingers when there are problems. And so I'm not talking here about the Bolsonaro administration, but more, you know, the deeper history of Brazil. Beginning in 2004, Brazil set in motion an ambitious strategy to reduce deforestation. This is under President Lula with Marina Silva as his environment minister. Deforestation declined almost 80% between 2004-5 and 2012. And that's against the historical average. And so 80%. And Norway stepped up, committed a billion dollars, if those results continued. Germany helped out in a smaller way to their contributions to the Amazon fund. But basically, there was sort of a global, not silence, but just not enough recognition and applause and saying, let's collaborate together to continue this amazing progress. And beginning in 2013, deforestation started to come up. And we talk a lot to farmers, their leaders. And I remember in August of 2018, a farm leader saying all of this talk about zero deforestation, and it's the only metric of success that will be accepted in the markets is making farmers mad. He told me, he said, it's pushing them towards balsa narrow. And it's this frustration that even though Brazil has a law, that means you cannot clear more than 20% of your land in the Amazon - most farmers I know in the United States would never put up with that - it's not even recognised by the markets. So I do feel like there's this tendency to always blame Brazil, even when it has set aside more than half of the Amazon in protected areas. It has recognised indigenous territories historically, you know, and some of that's being eroded now but, in a phenomenal way, you know, much more successfully than some many other countries. It's politicised, but I feel like we need to understand that politicisation in an historical context.

Åsa Borssén: 
And you said it is pushing farmers away. Is there a way of working with them instead.

Dan Nepstad:  
To understand the perspective of an Amazon farmer, let me just give you three numbers. So if I'm a farmer, and I have my legal Forest Reserve on my farm, when I go to sell my farm someday, or even leave it to my children, so that they have an asset that can work, every hectare of forest is going to be worth a couple hundred dollars on average. And once it's cleared, that value jumps up about fivefold. And if it is cleared under an area good for soybeans, that value can jump up tenfold. And that means that if I have a few thousand hectors, you know, the amount that's in forest will determine what you know, the value of that property, you know, and that's the main asset for my family.

To the global economy, that one hectare of forests that that let's say it's worth $1,000 cleared, the damages to the global economy of releasing the carbon in its trunk and branches, releasing that to the Amazon, releasing that to the atmosphere is $50,000. So it's a 50-fold difference in economic value that we haven't figured out how to close that gap. And the farmer is not expecting us to pay him or her $50,000 they're expecting to close the gap between $1,000 cleared and $200 forested. And so, the good news is the farmers who are conserving forests are ready to do their part. If we give them that incentive, and today there is not that incentive. You basically lose out if you have, If you're a forest conserving farmer, and so one of the opportunities for delivering that incentive, which is actually something that the current government wants to see, is to see private investor funding going to farmers who are conserving their forests. And these are funds coming from companies here in San Francisco, Salesforce, for example, Microsoft, Amazon, but there are hundreds of companies that have pledged to become Climate Neutral. And part of that climate neutrality means compensating a small fraction of their emissions by paying into forest conserving programmes. So I think that's a big opportunity that could deliver that incentive to farmers and be part of an overall tropical forest conservation strategy. That gets us to that 20% of the solution, instead of 10% of the problems we have today,

Åsa Borssén: 
We’ve touched on some solutions, and it is ultimately about competing land use for people. More generally, how can we balance the different interests?

Dan Nepstad: 
I think the need for collaboration is greater today than ever. I do think, you know, the international market signals, basically saying we want a solution to deforestation. You know, 30 some, you know, major investment firms said, we want to see a solution to Amazon deforestation, or we're going to push our investments to other countries. I think that stick, that sort of punishment, needs to be complemented needs to be continued, but it needs to be complemented by an offer of help. Because what Brazil is trying to do, what Indonesia is trying to do, what Peru and Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for them, they're seeing the forest agenda in competition with poverty alleviation. In competition with the food security agenda. And if we do not make a more compelling case, to these governments and their farm sectors, to embrace forest friendly development, it's just not going to happen. And so, you know, we need a stick. But I feel like we're coming off a decade where the highest deforestation has been in recent years, where we haven't had adequate carrots. And it's time for these carrots, it's time to say, we want to invest in your region, and help you solve the deforestation issue. As opposed to we're divesting from your region until you fix the deforestation problem. Because these countries, they need help. And so I think that's the nub of my suggestion. I think part of that help could come in getting back to that $50,000 damage to the global economy that happens when you clear a hector of forest. And it just a tiny fraction of that damage getting that down to the ground so that communities, indigenous people, local and regional governments are all seeing that their efforts to slow deforestation and speed its recovery, are recognised and at some level compensated.

Åsa Borssén: 
How do you imagine our relationship with the forests evolving in the future?

Dan Nepstad: 
I think that the awareness of forests is really urgent in the last 10 years, so I think we have to take advantage of this moment of greater awareness of the potential of forests as 20% of the climate change solution that we so desperately need to really make sure that people understand, you know, everyday citizens around the world understand our collective dependence on forests. But also the need to look at forests as a partnership, that the global community has a role to play to keep those forests standing. And local people have a role to play. But alone, neither will succeed. So I think that it's time to really bring forests into our lives in more meaningful ways, knowing our connection to them.

Åsa Borssén: 
So, more forest bathing for the people.

Dan Nepstad: 
Exactly. Yeah, I like that.

Åsa Borssén: 
Thank you, Dan, for joining us. And thank you for listening. This was a really interesting conversation. My takeaways: deforestation has accelerated around the world. There are multiple reasons for this, but gradual forest encroachments for food production tops the list. If the forest agenda competes with poverty alleviation, it's doomed to fail. Forest nations needs support. Yes, keep the stick. But what is now really missing is the carrot. 

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Next time we will turn our attention to energy - is coal a unnecessary evil. 

Until then, so long!