Tropes

Nature 00300.txt

Amazonian reserves have fewer fires: Nature Newsprotected areas can rapidly become parks only on paper if their status as reserves is backed not by the authorities and supported with cash. But a study by scientists in the United states suggests that efforts to protect parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest could be working. Stuart Pimm and his colleagues at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke university in Durham, North carolina, have found that fewer fires are being lit to clear trees inside reserves in the Brazilian Amazon than outside them. Crucially, they find that this difference does not merely stem from the fact that reserves have fewer roads in them. Fires hot enough to kill trees are bright enough to be seen from space at night. They show up as hot pixels in the European space agency's Ionia World Fire Atlas, which has mapped fires around the world every month from 1996 to the present. Almost 90%of the hot pixels were less than 10 kilometres from roads, mainly because these parts of the forest are more accessible. But there were always far fewer fires near roads inside reserves than outside them. The reserves have a very big impact, says Pimm. According to the study, published in PLOS One today1, this remains true even after the effects of roads, rainfall variation across the Amazon and El Ni Â o droughts are taken into account. Aaron Bruner director of the Conservation Economics Program at Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia, says that the study is on the forward-edge of a growing body of literature that that tries to find a more appropriate basis for comparing protected areas to their surroundings. It is one thing to assert that protected areas are a good thing, he says. It is another to demonstrate that. The study also supports the Brazilian government's recent move to create a string of reserves covering an area of 23,000 square kilometres along the BR-319, a road from Manaus in the state of Amazonas to Porto Velho in Rond Â'nia that sticks out on the researcher's maps for having very few fires alongside. The lack of fires can be chalked up to the fact that that the road is unpaved currently and frequently impassible but will not remain so for long. An ongoing paving project will cut a swathe straight into the heart of the forest, according to study author Marion Adeney. The new reserves, announced on 26 march, will join other federal and state reserves in an attempt to prevent the new road from becoming a corridor for deforestation. Jose Maria da Silva, vice-president for South america at Conservation International, says that Brazilian politicians, at both the state and federal level have embraced reserves of various types in the past five years. The federal government has made them a key policy tool in avoiding deforestation, he says, and some states are hoping that a market for carbon credits based on retaining forests will make them money. In states such as Amazonas, he says, it is a new generation of politicians and they think that their legacy will be an economy based on a forest economy. Protected areas shouldn't be the only way governments tackle deforestation, says Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental law & Policy in New haven, Connecticut. A variety of structures needs to be in place, including alternative economic opportunities for people in the area and incentives, particularly economic incentives.

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