Save the Rain Forests

I was watching CNN in my hotel room in Tehran when a promo showing, among others, Robin Williams, Harrison Ford and Princes Charles, William and Harry appeared. It was about the Prince of Wales’ initiative to save the rain forest.... It's called The Prince's Rainforests Project.

Suddenly, the environmentalist in me came out.

I realized that we have been destroying and polluting our world, our home, with our activities (in the name of "Development") and we seemed to content that it will heal itself. Well, obviously, we were wrong.

How can we expect a fallen tree to grow back if we didn't plant a new one? I think most of the people associated with the environmental movement may have heard about the principles of Sustainable Development.

Sustainable Development has a lot of definition, depending upon from which perpective we are looking from. One of them is:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." - Brundtland Commission, 1987

In layman's term, "we shouldn't take more than we can give back, for the sake of our future generations".

Let's look at the issue at hands.... the rain forests. If we keep destroying our rain forests, which is one of our natural heritages, our future generations will have to pay for it dearly.... to the very least. If nothing is done now, the Green Lungs of our World will be just a piece of history then. The whole world will be ecologically un-balanced. And the effect will definitely be devastating. It would be like a self-inflicted Armageddon, if I may say so.

So, let’s stop tropical deforestation, in fact all deforestations, and lend our hands in keeping our heritage intact. If not for us, let’s do it for our children, our grandchildren....and the future generations.

Please click HERE and send your message. Insya-Allah, your effort will not go in vain.

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Here are some important things to know about our rain forest.....

Rainforests wrap around the equator of the earth like a green belt. After millions of years of evolution, they are the most biologically rich ecosystems on our planet. Tropical rainforests contain a hugely rich diversity of species of plants and animals. They are also home to many different indigenous people, who have unique and treasured cultures.

Valuable resources for everyone
Rainforests are precious resources for all of us – not just for the nations in which they are found. They provide vital ecosystem benefits for the whole world. They store water, regulate rainfall and provide a home to over half the planet’s biodiversity. But more importantly, they also play a crucial role in climate change. And that’s why we’re worried.

When it comes to climate change, the destruction of rainforests has a double whammy effect for everyone. Rainforests absorb almost a fifth of the world’s man-made CO2 emissions every year. But tropical deforestation releases an extra 17% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. So if the rainforests are destroyed, it’s bad news on both counts.

Rapid deforestation
Rainforests around the world are being destroyed at an alarming rate. This is increasingly due to destructive logging operations and conversion of the land for farming use. Cutting down and burning tropical forests to clear the land in this way enables rainforest nations to provide globally traded commodities, such as timber, palm oil, beef and soy. The world’s population is likely to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion over the next 40 years. This population growth, combined with rising incomes, will lead to a continual increasing demand for food, animal feed and fuel. And this, in turn, will lead to more destruction of rainforests – with devastating effects for everyone.

The need for urgent action
The Prince’s Rainforests Project believes that emergency funding is needed to help protect rainforests and to encourage rainforest nations to continue to develop without the need for deforestation.

If we don’t take action, we could lose another 100 million hectares of tropical forests over the next 10 years – that’s an area the size of Egypt.

Saving the rainforests will give the world a better chance to achieve its goals of stabilising climate change, while also preserving important ecosystem benefits, not to mention the fact that over one billion of the poorest people on Earth depend on the rainforests for their livelihoods.

The need for action is urgent. Recent research shows that it will be impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change without it [1].

Sources
1 McKinsey & Company, ‘Global GHG Abatement Cost Curve v2' (2009); ClimateWorks Foundation / McKinsey & Company ‘Project Catalyst'

From HERE