Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear, the effects of climate change will be felt most significantly in the developing world. Fortunately, forest carbon storage is most efficient in the tropics and subtropics. Tropical forests also harbor more than half of life on earth, generate rainfall and provide shelter, food, medicine and energy to 1.6 billion of the people most vulnerable to climate change...
...Indonesian island of Sumatra, a young man named Suranto wakes early on a Sunday, wraps a red T shirt around his head and ambles off to the fields to work. Suranto isn't a local; he has come from northern Sumatra because there are jobs in Riau. The forests and peatlands of the area are being transformed into plantations, and workers are being paid to plant tens of thousands of young oil-palm trees in fields stripped bare of their native vegetation by burning. As Suranto stoops and digs one hole after another amid the blackened stumps...
...biodiesel boom has a high environmental cost, however. Critics say it's contributing to global warming. Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting not only eliminates one of the planet's crucial air-filtration systems, the process also releases even more carbon dioxide into the air, in smoke or as gases released during the decomposition of forest waste. Annual clearing of Indonesia's carbon-rich peatlands alone releases some 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases, according to a Greenpeace report. Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter...
Matt Reck is the kind of eco-conscious guy who feeds his trees with bathwater and recycles condensation drops from his air conditioners to water plants. His family also uses a clothesline. But on July 9, Otto Hagen, president of Reck's HOA in Wake Forest, N.C., notified him that a neighbor had complained about his line. The Recks ignored the warning and still dry their clothes on a rope that extends from their swing set to a pole across the yard. "Many people claim to be environmentally friendly but don't take matters into their own hands," says Reck...
...Visitors descend into the former clay hole, now landscaped and studded with native vegetation, to arrive at the main attraction: two honeycombed domes, shaped like grapefruit halves, bubbling up from the base. These are the biomes, giant greenhouses that shelter the flora and mimic the climate of tropical rain forests and Mediterranean farms. Enter the humid and heated rain-forest biome on a drizzly Cornish day, and you'll soon break a sweat worthy of Singapore...