Threatened tropical moist forest habitats

Nature

The loss of tropical moist forest will bring about changes in the composition of the earth's atmosphere with consequences for climate and the earth's food producing capacity. For the people who live and depend on the tropical moist forest, its disappearance has devastating consequences. This may include those that live thousands of kilometres away, who may be affected by floods, land slides etc. intensified by deforestation.

Tropical moist forest is being lost through indiscriminate logging practices and is being converted into farmland. This conversion is often not sustainable due to the nature of the underlying soils and the rapid nutrient recycling that occurs in the tropical moist forest. Nutrients are lost once the vegetation is removed. Traditional systems of using unpromising forest soils are breaking down as people are compressed into smaller areas and are denied access to land. Forest fallows are declining and people are forced to grow cash crops that are destructive to the soil.

Dispossesed people moving into the forests are not shifting cultivators but rather "shifted cultivators" that have experience and traditions of different methods that are not adapted to the forest and are destructive. Government supported transmigration programmes to settle forest areas exacerbate the problem while avoiding the issue of land redistribution in more favourable areas.

Background

According to Holdridge's system of ecological zones, tropical moist forest has a mean annual temperature of 24 or more øC and an average annual rainfall of 2,000-4,000 mm.

Tropical moist forest is not a very satisfactory term but it has a widespread acceptance. The term includes the closed high forests lying in the tropical belt. Closed refers to the fact that the canopy covers at least 20 percent of the land surface. Tropical moist forest includes both wet forest formations, monsoon forests, mountain rain and cloud forests and mangroves. Nearly all these forests consist of broadleaved species with coniferous species accounting for less than 3 percent.

Claim

The forest dwelling people are not merely losing their rights but are the subject of genocide from contemporary deforestation, the deliberate destruction of forest dwelling people with the killing of those who dare to resist.

The tropical moist forest consists of many different types of ecosystem and the lamentable fact is that little or nothing is known about how to renew or replace most of them. The reason less is known about many tropical forests than about the surface of the moon is that so few resources have so far been devoted to learning about them and finding out how to manage them.

Many scientists claim that tropical moist forest is not a renewable resource.

The greatest impediment to efforts to save the tropical forest is an unwillingness on the part of governments, both inside and outside the tropics, to recognize the socio-economic and political factors which are bringing about tropical forest destruction. The pity of it is that this unwillingness is shared by so many conservationists who are vigorously campaigning to save the forests.