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Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending
from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern
Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska’s Bering
seacoast to Canada’s Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost
the entirety of South America’s bulge; the Congo, occupying parts
of six nations in Africa’s wet equatorial middle; and the island
forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California. These mega
forests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of
cultures and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and
celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever
Green. Mega forests serve an essential role in decarbonising the
atmosphere—the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of
carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of
global emissions at 2019 levels—and saving them is the most
immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s
most formidable ongoing crisis. Reid and Lovejoy offer practical
solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face,
from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous
forest stewards, to planning smarter road networks. In gorgeous
prose that evokes the majesty of these ancient forests along with
the people and animals who inhabit them, Reid and Lovejoy take us
on an exhilarating global journey.
Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending
from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern
Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska's Bering
seacoast to Canada's Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost
the entirety of South America's bulge; the Congo, occupying parts
of six nations in Africa's wet equatorial middle; and the island
forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California. These
megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands
of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and
celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever
Green. Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the
atmosphere-the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of
carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years' worth of
global emissions at 2019 levels-and saving them is the most
immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet's most
formidable ongoing crisis. Reid and Lovejoy offer practical
solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face,
from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous
forest stewards, to planning smarter road networks. In gorgeous
prose that evokes the majesty of these ancient forests along with
the people and animals who inhabit them, Reid and Lovejoy take us
on an exhilarating global journey.
In 1972, The Limits to Growth introduced the idea that world
resources are limited. Soon after, people became aware of the
threats to the world's rainforests, the biggest terrestrial
repositories of biodiversity and essential regulators of global air
and water cycles. Since that time, new research and technological
advances have greatly increased our knowledge of how rainforests
are being affected by changing patterns of resource use. Increasing
concern about climate change has made it more important than ever
to understand the state of the world's tropical forests. This book
provides an up-to-date picture of the health of the world's
tropical forests. Claude Martin, an eminent scientist and
conservationist, integrates information from remote imaging,
ecology, and economics to explain deforestation and forest health
throughout the world. He explains how urbanization, an increasingly
global economy, and a worldwide demand for biofuels put new
pressure on rainforest land. He examines the policies and market
forces that have successfully preserved forests in some areas and
discusses the economic benefits of protected areas. Using evidence
from ice core records and past forest cover patterns, he predicts
the most likely effects of climate change.
Deforestation is occurring at an alarming rate in many parts of the
world, causing destruction of natural habitat and fragmentation of
what remains. Nowhere is this problem more pressing than in the
Amazon rainforest, which is rapidly vanishing in the face of
enormous pressure from humans to exploit it. This book presents the
results of the longest-running and most comprehensive study of
forest fragmentation ever undertaken, the Biological Dynamics of
Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) in central Amazonia, the only
experimental study of tropical forest fragmentation in which
baseline data are available before isolation from continuous forest
took place.
A joint project of Brazil's National Institute for Research in
Amazonia and the U.S. Smithsonian Institution, the BDFFP has
investigated the many effects that habitat fragmentation has on
plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. The book provides an
overview of the BDFFP, reports on its case studies, looks at forest
ecology and tree genetics, and considers what issues are involved
in establishing conservation and management guidelines.
An essential, up-to-date look at the critical interactions between
biological diversity and climate change that will serve as an
immediate call to action The physical and biological impacts of
climate change are dramatic and broad-ranging. People who care
about the planet and manage natural resources urgently need a
synthesis of our rapidly growing understanding of these issues. In
this all-new sequel to the 2005 volume Climate Change and
Biodiversity, leading experts in the field summarize observed
changes, assess what the future holds, and offer suggested
responses. From extinction risk to ocean acidification, from the
future of the Amazon to changes in ecosystem services, and from
geoengineering to the power of ecosystem restoration, this book
captures the sweep of climate change transformation of the
biosphere.
A compelling expose of the highly problematic scholarship of Bjorn
Lomborg, the world's leading global warming skeptic In this major
assessment of leading climate-change skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, Howard
Friel meticulously deconstructs the Danish statistician's claim
that global warming is "no catastrophe" by exposing the systematic
misrepresentations and partial accounting that are at the core of
climate skepticism. His detailed analysis serves not only as a
guide to reading the global warming skeptics, but also as a model
for assessing the state of climate science. With attention to the
complexities of climate-related phenomena across a range of
areas-from Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic ice sheet-The Lomborg
Deception also offers readers an enlightening review of some of
today's most urgent climate concerns. Friel's book is the first to
respond directly to Lomborg's controversial research as published
in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical
Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007). His close
reading of Lomborg's textual claims and supporting footnotes
reveals a lengthy list of findings that will rock climate skeptics
and their allies in the government and news media, demonstrating
that the published peer-reviewed climate science, as assessed
mainly by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has
had it mostly right-even if somewhat conservatively right-all
along. Friel's able defense of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
against Lomborg's repeated attacks is by itself worth an attentive
reading.
For over 350 million years, thousands of species of amphibians have
lived on earth, but since the 1990s they have been disappearing at
an alarming rate, in many cases quite suddenly and mysteriously.
What is causing these extinctions? What role do human actions play
in them? What do they tell us about the overall state of
biodiversity on the planet? In Extinction in Our Times, James
Collins and Martha Crump explore these pressing questions and many
others as they document the first modern extinction event across an
entire vertebrate class, using global examples that range from the
Sierra Nevada of California to the rainforests of Costa Rica and
the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Joining scientific rigor
and vivid storytelling, this book is the first to use amphibian
decline as a lens through which to see more clearly the larger
story of climate change, conservation of biodiversity, and a host
of profoundly important ecological, evolutionary, ethical,
philosophical, and sociological issues.
The biological effects of global warming should be of concern to
all thinking individuals, for warming could cause profound
disruption of natural ecosystems and could threaten many species
with extinction. This important book-the first to discuss in detail
the consequences of global warming for ecosystems-includes
commentary by distinguished scientists on many aspects of this
critical problem. Experts describe responses of animals and plants
to previous climate changes, interactions between various
environmental components (precipitation and soil chemistry, for
example), and synergisms between climate change and human
activities such as deforestation. They consider many specific
ecosystems, including tropical forests, the deciduous forests of
eastern North America, the forests of the Pacific Northwest,
Mediterranean-type ecosystems in California, arctic tundra, and
arctic marine systems. Offering discussions that are both factual
and speculative, the volume points the way to future investigations
of the implications of global warming.
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