Would
you give us some background on your education and early research?
I did my undergraduate work in biology at Colorado College (1965)
and Master’s (1974) and PhD (1978) in the Department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
(under D.H. Janzen and J.H. Vandermeer). Between Colorado and
Michigan I spent two years in a small village in India as a Peace
Corps volunteer working on fisheries management in a reservoir at
the edge of the Thar Desert, which straddles the border between
India and Pakistan. That experience was critical to my later pursuit
of both climate change and human ecology, as well as for my work on
hydroelectric dams. I prepared to return to India to do my doctoral
research, but the US "tilted" to Pakistan in the war over
Bangladesh and India closed the doors to American researchers just
at the critical time.
I wound up in Brazil instead and spent two years in another small
village, this time at the deforestation frontier on the
just-completed Transamazon Highway. The dissertation was an estimate
of human carrying capacity that later resulted in a series of
publications including the book Human Carrying Capacity of the
Brazilian Rainforest (Columbia University Press, 1986). This
remains an interest, but over the 30 years that I have now been in
Brazil most of my time has gone into problems of deforestation and
climate change.
What
do you consider the main thrust of your research?
My research is organized around making the value of the
environmental services of tropical forests into a practical
alternative to the current destructive economy. This requires better
quantification of the contribution of deforestation to global
warming, as well as understanding the causes and dynamics of
deforestation. The impacts and prospects for sustainability of
different modes of development are also a part of this.
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“Global warming is such a huge problem that all available measures will have to be used to fight it.”
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Decision-making and licensing processes for major infrastructure
projects such as highways and dams are critical, as these structural
decisions are now made without any reference to the losses of
environmental services that they imply. Making environmental
services into a viable form of development is a logical evolution of
my work on human carrying capacity because it offers a path to
improving the prospects for long-term support of the human
population in the region. Sustaining Amazonia’s human population
and maintaining the environmental functions of forest are
interdependent, and both require recognition of limits.
Your
most-cited paper on this topic is the 1996 Forest Ecology and
Management paper, "Amazonian deforestation and global
warming: carbon stocks in vegetation replacing Brazil's Amazon
forest." In this paper, you state that the biomass values in your
study "are more than double those forming the basis of
deforestation emission estimates currently used by the
Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)." If you were to
repeat this study now, 10 years later, what do you estimate your
findings would be?
The IPCC still uses estimates of greenhouse-gas emissions based
on improbably optimistic assumptions of the rate at which Amazonian
secondary forests grow and reabsorb carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. The vast majority of deforested land in Amazonia becomes
cattle pasture which, by the time it has degraded to the point where
it is abandoned to secondary vegetation, has left the soil
compacted, biologically impoverished, and depleted of basic
nutrients. The result is that secondary forests in these vast areas
grow much more slowly than do secondary forests in fallows left
after slash-and-burn agriculture, as was shown in my
second-most-cited study, "Carbon uptake by secondary forests in
Brazilian Amazonia," coauthored by Walba Guimarães (also
published in Forest Ecology and Management in 1996).
Most existing studies of secondary-forest growth have been done
in areas of slash-and-burn agriculture rather than degraded cattle
pastures. The net emission from converting primary tropical forest
to the replacement landscape is underestimated when secondary-forest
growth rates from slash-and-burn fallows are used or, worse yet,
when secondary forests are simply assumed to grow at a given rate
without any basis in data at all.
In the past 10 years there have been some noticeable changes in
Amazonian land-use patterns that will affect the carbon stocks in
the landscape. Beef exports from Brazil were almost nonexistent in
1996 because foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) prevented export of frozen
beef to large markets in Europe, North America, and Japan. Beginning
in 1998, Brazilian states began gaining certification that FMD had
been eradicated, starting in the extreme south of the country and
now including three of the nine Amazonian states. The famous
"hamburger connection" of Central America has therefore
arrived in Amazonia, either directly in the three states certified
as FMD-free or indirectly in the rest, which can export beef to
Brazil’s Center-South region, while beef produced there can be
exported to Europe. Profitability has increased for beef production
in Amazonian pastures, as opposed to pastures for land speculation
and other "ulterior" motives. Pastures are therefore
maintained longer before being abandoned to secondary forest, and
the existing secondary forests are cut sooner for conversion to
pasture, soybeans, or other uses.
Falling exchange rates between the Brazilian real and other
currencies from 2003 to 2006 have cut into export profits but appear
not to have changed the trend to less secondary forest. The bottom
line is even lower carbon stocks in the vegetation replacing
Brazil's Amazon forest and, therefore, greater global warming impact
from deforestation.
Your
1997 Ecological Economics paper talks about the feasibility of
employing environmental services for sustainable development in rural
Amazonia. Has this idea been implemented, and if so, how successful
has it been?
The concept of environmental services has really taken off and is
now virtually a household word. I first presented it in January 1985
as a needed addition to the economic calculations for forest
management (published in Forest Ecology and Management in
1989), but it was during the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de
Janeiro, where I gave a series of nine speeches in rapid succession,
that the concept evolved into the proposal for an alternative basis
for the economy in Amazonia that was published in the 1997 Ecological
Economics paper. The paper appeared shortly before the Kyoto
conference that produced the Kyoto Protocol, offering the
still-untapped potential to turn the role of tropical forests in
avoiding global warming into a significant monetary flow that could
decrease the rate of deforestation.
Even though this remains a long-term goal rather than something
that today can feed people from one day to the next, advances are
being made. Although environmental services have entered the
discourse at every level, the Amazonian economy continues to be
almost entirely based on destruction of the forest (for timber,
pasture, soybeans, etc.). These destructive activities are worth
much less than the environmental services of standing rainforest in
maintaining biodiversity and water cycling and in avoiding global
warming.
Much of the Brazilian government’s effort goes into the
constant struggle to enforce environmental legislation on a
day-to-day basis; more priority must be put on the policy and
diplomatic fields to provide the foundation for an economy based on
environmental services. The role of the forest in global warming is
the environmental service that is closest to generating a
significant monetary flow. I consider this to be my most important
paper.
A
few of your papers discuss the emissions from hydroelectric
reservoirs, such as Brazil's Tucuruí Dam, compared with those of
conventional fossil fuels. What were your findings, and have they
influenced energy policy?
The possibility that hydroelectric dams could be a significant
source of greenhouse gases was first raised in 1993 by four
Canadians with respect to dams in that country, but it was my 1995
paper in Environmental Conservation, with calculations of
substantial releases from Amazonian dams, that so infuriated the
hydroelectric industry. "It’s baloney" was the reaction
of the U.S. National Hydropower Association (see1
both sides of this and other controversies). Since then much
progress has been made, and the general trend has been to find
greater and greater emissions from dams. The 2002 paper on the
Tucuruí Dam calculated methane emissions from water passing through
the turbines and spillways, which represent the largest sources of
emissions.
Estimates that indicate much lower emissions, including Brazil’s
National Inventory under the climate convention, ignore this source
and count only the emissions from bubbles and diffusion through the
surface of the reservoir. This has sparked a lively debate
(published in Climatic
Change) between me and the group that produced the estimate
in Brazil’s National Inventory; I was even accused of being
subject to the "lures of the thermo-power and nuclear-power
lobbies." The visibility that the issue has gained has
undoubtedly helped bring attention to these emissions; some
environmental-impact assessments now discuss hydroelectric
emissions, and the IPCC recently modified the guidelines for
emissions reporting under the climate convention to cover some of
the sources from dams, at least on an optional basis. I think it
safe to predict that this issue will be the subject of much research
activity and will result in important policy changes in the coming
years.
Global
warming is a political issue as well as a scientific one, as you
outlined in your 2001 Ecological Economics paper, "Saving
tropical forests as a global warming countermeasure: an issue that
divides the environmental movement." Would you outline the
varying issues and agendas for us, and tell us how much of an obstacle
is this division?
The question of whether avoiding tropical deforestation should be
eligible for carbon credit under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean
Development Mechanism caused a serious split between
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during the three and a half
years between the December 1997 Kyoto convention and the June 2001
Bonn agreement that ruled out credit for avoided deforestation until
after 2013. At Kyoto each of the industrialized countries agreed to
reduce its carbon emissions to a specified quota over the 2008-2012
commitment period. These quotas were fixed in Kyoto, but the rules
of the game, especially whether tropical forests could receive
credit, had not yet been agreed.
This presented an opportunity for European governments to use the
avoided–deforestation issue as a tool for advancing a parallel
agenda to level the playing field for commercial competition with
the United States, where the price of gasoline has long been only
half the price in Europe. By ruling out carbon credit for avoided
deforestation, the US would be forced to meet almost all of its
Kyoto commitment through domestic measures, and the price of fuel
would have to increase enough to significantly reduce consumption.
Cheap gasoline gives North America a large (and unfair) advantage
over Europe in international trade.
While European-based NGOs such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife
Fund, and Friends of the Earth were not worried about international
trade, a closely parallel logic applied. The US has long been the
principal villain in climate negotiations, having at every step
tried (often successfully) to weaken the measures for mitigating
global warming. This long predates George W. Bush’s March 2001
withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. The US is also the largest
single emitter of greenhouse gases, as well as having one of the
highest per-capita emission rates. Any opportunity to punish the US
for these (and other) sins was well received by European NGOs.
Meanwhile, US NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy, Conservation
International, and the Environmental Defense Fund, as well as
Brazilian NGOs such as the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), the
Institute for Environmental Research in Amazonia (
ccording
to our most recent Special Topics analysis of global warming,
the work of Dr. Philip Fearnside ranks at #2, with 19 papers
cited a total of 530 times. Dr. Fearnside’s record in the 
database includes 47 papers cited a total of 808 times to
date, the majority of which are in the field of Environment
& Ecology. Dr. Fearnside is a Research Professor at the
National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus,
Brazil. In the interview below, he talks about his highly
cited global warming research.
