A story filed by Innocent on the main blog on 2 Feb 2009 showed material documenting the enormous decline of hippopotamus populations in Virunga National Park between the mid 1970ies and today. It is a breathtaking decline, and just one that happens to have been documented when many are not. Most people know that human use of the natural resources of this planet is taking a serious toll on biodiversity, but I think few people fully realize just how serious and real the losses are in many important landscapes. It is as with climate change: most people know it is coming, but I suspect many will be surprised when it does (having said that: a lot can still be prevented by decisive action).

Here in Europe, landscapes have been transformed a long time ago and nobody remembers what it might have been like to live in a much more wild Europe. James Lovelock once wrote that it must have been achingly beautiful. Of course this is a romaticized notion, life then was surely not easy – for humans. But for the rest of life, it surely was better than today’s high-powered European agro-landscapes that reach nearly wall-to-wall. Africa has undergone a tremendous land use expansion more recently, just in the past 50 years or so. One scientist I spoke to remembers that when growing up in Eastern Africa he could not really understand why nature reserves were needed because wildlife was abundant everywhere; today these reserves are most of what is left, most of everything else having been converted to use. This is the story not just in Africa, but all around the globe. It will take a very serious and prolonged effort to bring the wealth and beauty of the natrual world through this bottleneck of unsustainable developments – hoping that indeed it will turn out to be “just” a bottleneck in the evolution of human societies and their relationship with the environment, not a dead-end or a road leading to some very bleak landscapes. Virunga is one of the lifeboats on which this wealth hinges, but such boats can easily be sunk, with or without realising it, and climate change may put them into quite a storm, too.

Spreading the word to shore up support is an important element of ensuring action. There is a much better chance that governments react if people expect it, and that agencies and organisations on the ground have the means to operate if people know why it counts. So when I was approached last week by a journalist intending to write a piece for one of the most respected German Sunday newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, with more than a million readers, concerning the topics of deforestation, the future of carbon backflows from vegetation and soils into the atmosphere, and forest protection, I seized the opportunity to not just talk about our own scientific research. I also pointed her to the Virguna website and a story that appeared on the main blog the day after the hippo story, on 3 Feb 2009.  Some persons were encountered carrying wood bundles out of the park. The story made the point well that it is paramount, if the park is to be saved from such encroachment, that the local population has access to alternative, local sources of energy. So I also pointed the journalist to the briquette programme.

I did not hear back, but was delighted to then find last Sunday that the story was actually led off with the Virguna example. Written bei Julia Groß, it can be found here, in German. In my translation, the article is entitled “Climate Protection: Otherwise we’ll not be Heading for Green”, and leads off: “The families laden with large bundles of wood, which a Congolese ranger met in early February when on patrol in Virunga National Park, didn’t even search for excuses. Yes, they did know that it is forbiddedn to collect wood in the protected rainforest. But since the rangers had to be evacuated due to the civil war last November they did it anyhow – because they needed the wood for cooking. The ranger, who documented the encounter on the website of the National Park, let them go. Too great is the need in the region of eastern Congo for him to enforce the law strictly. And this even though the damage created by wood collecting in Virunga is alarming. Not only refugees are taking fuel wood from the last jungles of Central Africa. In the homeland of the mountain gorillas, threatened with extinction, a lively trade with charcoal has devloped – often under the control of local militias. In the year 2007 alone about 20 percent of the southern section of Virunga National Park was deforested, the park administration estimates. But the problem is not limited to the Congo. Around the globe about 13 million hectares of forest are being lost each year, which corresponds about to the area of Greece.”

The article then continues to discuss at some length global deforestation and the land carbon balance, carbon dioxide fertilisation effects (plants tend to grow better with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), and financial instruments and incentives to boost forest protection. Modelling of these processes is discussed and some of the work gets mentioned that is being done by my research group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The article builds a bridge from stopping deforestation to the capacity of forests to take up anthropogenic carbon emissions, thereby slowing climate change, and goes on to discussing methods of making forest protection economically attractive through international schemes that credit protection. Such a scheme of international financing of forest protection would use some of the income generated from the sale of mandatory emission permits for those that emit CO₂, mostly in the rich North. The article then closes: “The administration of Virunga National Park knows that it would do with such money: for example acquire more briquette machines and teach more Congolese how to use them. With these machines fuel can be produced from all sorts of waste materials. Without wood.”

It is just a very small example, one that I happened to be involved in. But from Innocent posting a few short lines on the web blog with some great pictures, taken just then and there, and myself then reading it with many others, and me pointing the journalist to it; and she picking it up and writing about it for one million readers in Germany: that is how a brief encounter in eastern Congo can today be transmitted to many, and perhaps contribute a slight small bit to making a difference. It really means using the means that today connect the world to safeguard something all of the world should have an interest in.

Of course the other necessary action is to donate, if possible: so please do, now, on the main page or through this blog, if you can, and wish to, afford it. It is important.

The newspaper piece did not give a link to the Virunga web site, so I entered a comment in the online copy giving the link - another example of how authors and sources can communicate in a very different manner these days (hopefully here leading to an additional donation or two).