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It's been all over the news lately. There have been a record-breaking

number of fires ravaging the Brazilian Amazon rainforest this year - manmade

fires, intentionally set to clear land for

agriculture, which then spread uncontrollably. The National Institute

for Space Research says it has detected more than 74 thousand fires between

January and August. In comparison there were fewer than 40,000 for the same

period in 2018. It is shocking to see it happening to a place many of us consider

to be a pristine lush expanse. And most of us looking on from thousands of miles

away from behind our computer screens feel helpless. Members of the G7 summit

pledged 22 million dollars to help fight the fires. And over the past decade

Norway has donated 1.2 billion dollars to help conserve the Amazon and Germany

has contributed 68 million dollars. However they've both stopped their

contributions because of doubts over Brazil's efforts to reduce deforestation.

Despite money pouring in over many years to try to battle the problem,

international campaigns, summits, and boycotts, it just isn't working. The

recent fires are just a symptom of an ongoing problem of unregulated and

out-of-control clearing for agriculture. Across the world, in South America, Africa,

and Asia, the world's rainforests are being lost at a rapid pace. If current

deforestation levels precede, the world's rainforests may completely vanish in as

little as a hundred years. And there is so much to lose. The diversity of plants

and animals in the world's rainforests is staggering,

especially in person. Seeing mist rise above the canopy at sunrise while

hearing Gibbon calls from miles away, trekking through the forest at night and

seeing alien like insects, dodging snakes wrapped around branches,

colorful ridiculous birds. The amount of amazing creatures there is seemingly

endless. And the value that they have to the

world is impossible to quantify. And so, with all the terrible news stories we

hear it's easy to feel like there is no hope. To see any animals losing their

habitat is heartbreaking. However, despite the headlines, all hope is not lost. There

are things that can be done and people who are doing everything in their power

to ensure the rainforests survive the recent onslaught of destruction. To

understand what is being done and how, let's focus on one of the most

endangered ecosystems in the world, the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, and in

particular Borneo - home to recognizable species such as orangutangs and pygmy

elephant. Borneo's natural forests continue to be destroyed at a rapid pace.

Between 1985 and 2005 Borneo lost an average of 850 thousand hectares of

forest every year. If this trend continues, forest cover will drop to less

than a third in coming years. And all that deforestation has been devastating

for wildlife. Nearly a hundred and fifty thousand critically endangered Bornean

orangutans died between 1999 and 2015 and there are less than 1500 surviving

Borneo pygmy elephants. 10 to 15 percent of the world's unique plant and animal

species live in this area and they are all at risk of being wiped out entirely.

And this is not to mention the importance of the forest and its carbon

storing abilities and how devastating clearing it will be in the battle

against climate change. It's easy to point out why deforestation is bad for

biodiversity, and no one wants the orangutans to die, so why is it happening?

The answer to this question varies from region to region and from year to year.

In Brazil, cattle ranching is the leading cause. In the DRC it's largely due to

unregulated or illegal logging for timber. And in Borneo and the rest of

Indonesia and Malaysia, the forests are currently being cleared to make room for

the most in-demand plant oil in the world -

palm oil. this huge demand for palm oil can be traced back to the 1980s when the

world learned the dangers of trans fats. Food producers scrambled to find a

suitable alternative - something cheap with similar properties to trans fats

but less damaging to human health. The substance that ticked these three boxes

was you guessed it, palm oil. Then in the last few decades

environmentalists ironically pushed for an increase in biodiesel production to

try to stop the release of carbon from fossil fuels, not foreseeing the

contradiction in their thinking. In the US a law mandating that biofuels be

incorporated into diesel promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of

carbon over three decades. Biodiesel production in the U.S. jumped from 250

million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Like many

well-intentioned plans this one did the exact opposite of what it was supposed

to and helped lead to the ongoing decimation of one of the world's biggest

carbon sinks. By the 21st century the palm oil boom was in full swing and

thousands of square miles of lowland forests across Borneo were planted with

oil palms. Today Indonesia and Malaysia supply 85% of the world's palm oil, and

whether we realize it or not palm oil is in everything -

pizza dough, lipstick, ice cream, laundry detergent, soap, chocolate, instant noodles,

fuel. It's an extremely cheap and versatile product and it's nearly

impossible to avoid in modern life. Globally we each consume an average of 8

kilograms of palm oil a year. When you're in Borneo you can drive for hours and

hours and hours and see nothing but palm trees. And much of the forest you can see

is under severe pressure with animals being forced into smaller and smaller

habitats. Trucks carrying the palm kernels and trucks lugging out massive

ancient trees zigzag across the landscape. This leads to the hardest

question of it all. What can be done about it? There's been a recent push to

boycott palm oil products, like the grocery chain Iceland is doing as

explained in their controversial viral ad. This kind of stuff feels nice and is

easy for people to support. However, Europe and the U.S. account for less than

14 percent of global palm oil demand. So boycotts coming from these parts of the

world are unfortunately not enough. Half of global demand comes from Asia where

within many of the developing economies product price is what matters. And with

palm oil accounting for 13.7 percent of Malaysia's gross national income and

existing as Indonesia's top export, outright banning its cultivation is just

not going to happen. The way to actually save the rainforests is unfortunately

way more complicated. To save the rainforest we

have to understand the rainforest. We have to understand how it actually

reacts to deforestation and degradation. Obviously when an entire forest slashed

and burned and logged, that ecosystem is lost. But what about the surrounding

forests, are they impacted by the adjacent damage? Are any animals able to

relocate? And if so, what kinds, how many? What about partially degraded forests, or

young forests that are being restored? Can they support wildlife? Can some

animals actually even live within the palm oil plantations? Are wildlife

corridors along rivers enough to promote the movement of animals across a

plantation landscape? How much forest can we actually lose before the damage is

irreversible? These are the questions that need to be answered to ensure the

future of the Southeast Asian rainforest, and in fact any threatened forest in the

world. One group working on finding the answers to these questions is a group of

scientists nestled deep in the heart of Malaysian Borneo at the SAFE project

site. SAFE stands for the stability of altered forest ecosystems and their goal

is to research biodiversity and ecosystem function change as forests are

modified by human activities and to learn whether preserving sections of

forests within degraded landscapes can protect biodiversity, and how much

protection is needed to be effective. The entire SAFE project experimental site

has an area of 72 square kilometers which is spread over existing palm oil

plantations and untouched rainforest, much of which is slated to soon be

converted into palm oil plantations. The site also contains a large virgin jungle

reserve of 22 square kilometers which will remain protected throughout the

process. Within the total safe project area the owners of the palm oil

plantation have agreed to allow an additional 8 square kilometres of land

to be set aside as forest fragments. These will be the experimental forest

fragments that the scientists can study. In addition to this Malaysian law

prohibits the clearance of forests on steep slopes and along rivers accounting

for another approximately five square kilometres. With this arrangement the

scientists will be able to study the effect of logging before during and

after such forest conversion and can also study the effects of forest

corridors and reserves within damaged forests. This type of experimental design

is extremely valuable and extremely rare. It is not often that

scientists get to work with the cooperation of the very people who are

doing the damage that is being studied and get to choose where their

experimental sites are. In most cases ecological research is carried out

observationally, after the fact, which does not produce as powerful of results

as an experiment like this will. The overall goal of the safe project is to

determine the minimum critical size forest fragments can be before they fail

to operate as functional tropical ecosystems. They are gathering data on

animal populations, soil composition, plant populations, hydrology, insect

behavior, seed dispersal, everything that a healthy tropical ecosystem needs and

seeing how that changes in different levels of forest destruction. And with

this information the ultimate goal is to find out the best way to sustainably

farm palm oil - to find a compromise between agriculture and conservation. And

while this experiment is set to go on for many years to come and the full

results won't be known until then, there are already hundreds of papers pouring

out of this research site and some of the results already have big

implications. One study for example found that riparian reserves, the strips of

forests that are protected along the lengths of rivers, that have over 40

metres of natural vegetation on each bank supported similar bird diversity to

the control habitats found in continuous protected forests. However to support

equivalent numbers of birds of conservation concern, reserves would need

to be at least a hundred metres wide on each bank. Another study concluded that

over all mammal species richness was conserved even in degraded forests,

forests that otherwise might be thought to be too damaged already to be worth

protecting. And yet another study found unexpectedly that there is no impact

from land use changes on the biomass or number of fish and small streams,

suggesting that these fish could be a sustainable food source for villages

established in human modified forests or in developed oil palm plantations. These

are the types of results that SAFE wants to use to inform how palm oil is farmed

and in fact how any fragmented landscape can be designed to best preserve the

environment in the face of land-use change. And once even more years of data

have been collected the SAFE project will inform relevant governments about

the best land-use policy. For example, at the moment

governmental guidelines on the amount of riparian reserves around rivers varies

greatly. In Sabah, the law says that 20 meters of natural vegetation on either

side of a riverbank has to be preserved. In Indonesia it's 50 meters, in other

parts of Malaysia it's 5 meters, and other regions have different guidelines

altogether. But as I mentioned before some studies are already finding that

maybe a hundred meters or more are necessary to be sufficient wildlife

corridors to preserve biodiversity. Results like these will be funneled to

policymakers and members of the round table for sustainable palm oil to try to

set up a system in which despite some deforestation happening now, the

rainforest can survive and rebound once the local economies move on to other

forms ofiIndustry one day in the future. To really save the rainforest requires

an unromantic often tedious compromise between industry, ecology, and politics.

None of it is easy, and with fairly rampant corruption in many of the

countries in question, undermining any progress made, it can feel like an

impossible battle. It will take years of discussion from the decision-makers, long

hours spent in the field, and integrity from relevant politicians. But with all

of these things working together, in theory, there is hope for a future world

still covered in rainforests. The subject of deforestation is a massive one and

there are many many things we need to understand in order to save the world's

forests. Scientists everywhere are tirelessly gathering data and

discovering the answers needed to inform conservation efforts. And while they are

working to understand the rainforest, we can work to understand their efforts and

the ecology that surrounds the problem by signing up to Curiosity Stream.

Curiosity Stream has thousands of high quality documentaries including many

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fascinating work being done to study the impact of forest fires in the Amazon for

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