Word: foresters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are two important things to know about tracking wild elephants, and it's better to learn both of them before you're actually in the jungle, tracking wild elephants. First, elephants are fast. In thick forest - in this case, the vast Ulu Masen ecosystem in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where leeches writhe beneath your feet and white-handed gibbons hoot from the treetops - they can outpace even deer. Second, elephants can't climb trees. This is good, because that's precisely what you're meant to do if one of them charges...
...Green plants use light to transform carbon dioxide, absorbed from the atmosphere, and water into organic compounds, with oxygen as a by-product. The process is called photosynthesis, and it enables forests like Ulu Masen to play a critical role in regulating our climate. Forests store an estimated 300 billion tons of carbon, or the equivalent of 40 times the world's total annual greenhouse-gas emissions - emissions that cause global warming. Destroy the trees and you release that carbon into the atmosphere, putting the great challenge of our age - averting catastrophic climate change - beyond reach. Forest destruction accounts...
...good news is that protecting forests "is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to take a big bite out of the apple when it comes to emissions," says Greenpeace spokesman Daniel Kessler. Ulu Masen will be one of the first forests to be protected under a pioneering U.N. program called REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries - that offers a powerful financial incentive to keep forests intact. Here's how it works. Preserve Ulu Masen, and over the next 30 years an estimated 100 million tons of carbon are prevented from entering the earth...
...these credits." Merrill Lynch calls Ulu Masen "the world's first commercially financed avoided deforestation project." Money has been followed by political muscle: a year later, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, along with the governors of Wisconsin and Illinois, signed a deal committing the state to finding ways to incorporate forest credits within U.S. carbon-trading systems. Ulu Masen is expected to generate $26 million in carbon credits in its first five years...
...chocolate bars to biofuels, the natural habitat of endangered animals such as the orangutan and Borneo rhino shrinks further each year. REDD could save them, said a recent study of Kalimantan by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia. They believe that the revenues generated by preserving a forest could not only compete with the profits of cutting it down for palm oil but also fund biodiversity projects to put the brakes on species extinction. REDD could "fundamentally change conservation [in tropical countries] and provide benefits for mammals at a scale we've never seen before," writes its lead...