Welcome back to the Climate Catalogue Reader. If you’re a new subscriber, you can catch up with us by clicking here. If you haven’t already subscribed to this newsletter and have received it as a forward, do consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with others using the links below:
The understory of the Hoh temperate rainforest in Northern America, exhibiting a diversity of mosses, ferns, bracken and several understory plants sharing a square meter of the forest floor
Liz Chicaje Churay and Yaguas National Park
In Issue #2, we were introduced to Nemonte Nenquimo and her instrumental role in a court ruling that led to 500,000 acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon being safeguarded from oil drilling and extraction. Despite the global rhetoric around safeguarding biodiversity and maintaining “carbon sinks”, there is often a conflict between national economies and the drive to keep ecoregions intact. On one hand, the inculcation of underdeveloped countries - development measured broadly by capital and production - into a global economy has made governing entities choose between capital advancement (often through extraction of fossil fuels and other natural resources) or safeguarding biodiversity. Often, the population affected most by the biodiversity loss or starved of capital if the extraction of resources is not permitted is the indigenous community.
Indigenous Peoples’ rights and jungle conservation have several overlapping facets because of the association of various indigenous tribes with their ecosystems through deep time. They often have a better understanding of, and derive the majority of their livelihoods or sustenance from the jungles or forests that they inhabit. Moreover, the ecosystems are sacred to the Indigenous Peoples, and in most cases, over-extraction is a form of disrespect to their belief systems, and violence against their practices. With a belief deeper than simply carbon sequestration potentials of their native jungles, recognizing leaders from these communities is imperative to the process of maintaining biodiversity and protecting the sanctity of the Peoples' relationship with their jungle. Liz Chicaje Churay is such an individual.
Churay is a leader of the Bora community based in Loreto, Peru. Through her actions as a leader of her community, and a former President of the Indigenous Communities of the Ampiyacu River, she was able to convince the government of Peru to notify Zona Reservada Yaguas (Yaguas National Park), comprising over 800,000 hectares of highly biodiverse rainforest in the Amazon. Churay realized that in order to achieve some form of protection for the region of forest around the Ampiyacu River, she would need to be able to campaign within Indigenous Community organizations and the state and national governments. She was able to bring in the necessary support from scientists and conservationists, along with institutions that helped map and analyze satellite images of the region. The data gleaned from various studies and reports was necessary to convince the government of Peru of the biodiversity importance of this region - in fact, the studies showed that the region was far more biodiverse than previously assumed. In addition to this, she rallied indigenous communities, with a majority of them endorsing her drive for the national park, with support from several Indigenous Community organizations in the region. As an activist, she also led outreach and education programs for the indigenous communities along the river, ensuring that they were aware of the issues that stemmed from biodiversity loss due to illegal logging and mining in the forests. In recognition of her efforts towards organizing the communities and campaigning for the national park, among other things, Churay won the Goldman Prize in 2021. (Goldman Prize Website)
The area of biodiversity notified as Zona Reservada Yaguas is a stretch of Amazonian jungle in the north of Peru; an area which has been relatively safe from deforestation and mining because of limited access to the region by roads - and tight ranks of indigenous communities that have protected this region for a long time. The creation of the National Park bolsters this protection even further. The national park is part of a biodiversity corridor spanning several countries in regions to the north of the Amazon River, including The State of Amazonas, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Although this encompasses many regions of biodiversity, Yaguas NP itself boasts up to 3,500 species of plants, 550 species of fish (about 2/3rd of Peru’s freshwater fish), 500 species of birds, 160 species of mammals, 110 species of amphibians and 100 species of reptiles. (Mongabay’s Article on Yaguas National Park)
The Conservation Strategy Fund also played a role in helping the Indigenous People to make the case for the National Park by assigning monetary value to the conservation of certain species within the region - with a gross estimate that a value equivalent to some $28 million could be gleaned from keeping the forest intact with a financial input of a little over $6 million over a period of 20 years. While this value is magnitudes lower than the money to be made by rampant overextraction of resources (exhibiting the fallacy of assigning capital value to safeguarding biodiversity), the cost/benefit analysis helps assign fiscal significance to conservation. According to the CSF’s analysis, 60% of the “benefits” will help the communities of Indigenous Peoples that depend on the forest for their livelihoods. (Conservation Strategy Fund)
You can explore Yaguas National Park and it’s formation through the links below:
See Yaguas National Park and it’s context on Google Maps
A New York Times Article With Photographs of the Species Found in the Region
A Video from Goldman Environmental Prize about Liz Chicaje Churay on YouTube
Rainforests and jungles are vastly complex ecosystems characterized by an extremely diverse selection of species within a small area (compared to other ecosystems), making them one of the best-recognized typologies for biodiversity the world over. Depending on the latitude where a particular jungle may be located, they are classified as tropical or temperate rainforests, in each case receiving a higher and more consistent amount of rainfall than other ecosystems at similar latitudes. The constant addition of water allows networks of biodiversity to thrive the year round, giving various species multiple niches to inhabit. A single acre of the Amazonian tropical rainforest may contain more distinct species than entire countries in the subtropical latitudes. Many of these jungles are unexplored by modern science, known only to the indigenous communities that have lived in these ecosystems for generations. Numbers for unknown species in tropical forests the world over range from some 3 to 50 million distinct species that are yet to be classified in taxonomical terms. This extreme biological density leads to abstract associations like “Tropical rainforests covering 2% (between 6-7% of the terrestrial surface biome) of the earth’s surface hosts 50% of all life on the landmass” (from Mongabay’s Article on Rainforests), something that is rather counter-intuitive for us to fathom.
Carbon sequestration is the tip of the rainforest iceberg; they are key drivers of local and regional hydrological systems, affect rainfall patterns the world over, and thermoregulate large swaths of the atmosphere through the physical processes dense jungles undergo. Rainforests have long been studied (initially, as a potential source of lumber or sustenance resources), although the studies are often limited to the proliferation of a particular species for their use as natural resources, the overarching networks of interdependence within the rainforests being studied only as an appendix. Between the 20th and 21st Century, however, rainforests’ role in regulating the climate has increasingly become an area of interest through the lens of bioremediation and ecological regulation of global climate systems.
Since the metric for “green spaces” focused on tree cover over actual biodiversity or inherent feedback loops that benefit global systems, highly biodiverse rainforests the world over were replaced by plantations for much of the 20th Century - satellite analysis of such regions misrepresent the changes to the ecosystem. However, unlike old-growth tropical forests, monoculture plantations host a minute fraction of the biodiversity found in the forests they have been cut from. They drain hydrological resources and are more susceptible to collapse by pathogens or pests. Pathogens like the Panama Disease, caused by a fungus that wiped out entire plantations, and eventually a the popular banana cultivar, spread easily in monocultures. In forests with higher biodiversity, there are myriad checks and balances against the spread of such diseases - often limiting them to a small percentage of the over-all green cover of the jungle. Efforts to curtail pests and diseases in monocultures with the use of of broad-spectrum insecticides often have a toxic effect on the adjacent rainforest’s fauna.
Although the land area covered by rainforests has more than halved since the 1950s, in recent decades, rainforests the world over are garnering more protections and the entire global population is aware of their importance. However, there is so much more to learn from rainforests and tropical jungles the world over, and this Issue of the newsletter goes over texts and articles that explain more about rainforest ecosystems.
[A Short Film]
“A Dream of Trees”
a documentary by Nature Conservation Foundation on YouTube, 2020
This is a 30 MINUTE long video.
You can read more about this project on NCF India’s website here.
This documentary by the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in India follows two of their scientists through their Ph.D. project which explores the potential restoration of the fragmented rainforests of Anamalai Hills, based in the Western Ghats of India.
The documentary focuses on NCF’s efforts to restore the small patches of rainforest through various levels of study, experimentation and execution of the project by the two individuals, their initial journey and their current progress in restoration. The documentary also explains the various layers of rainforest ecosystems in this region of the Western Ghats. Through their study of the fragments of rainforest as well as research and documentation based in intact forests, the duo are able to mark the differences between the degraded patches of forest and a healthy, fully functional rainforest. Additionally, the stark differences between the complex rainforest ecosystems and the local teak or tea monoculture plantation ecosystems are highlighted.
Towards the end of the documentary, they feature figures and narrate information on the progress and milestones achieved by the project over several decades, and its importance in framing a mechanism to restore degraded forests.
A metric they use includes the fact that the 70 hectares of rainforest they have restored have sequestered 5000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of 7.8 Million Litres of petrol - this is less than 1% of the petrol consumed by India every day. To simply break even on the basis of these numbers, we would need 8,00,000 square kilometers of forests in India as functional as a growing tropical rainforest - to neutralize the emissions from petrol burning every day for 30 years. India’s current total forest cover is about 7,13,000 square kilometers.
While this (very approximate, highly hypothetical) number may seem daunting, the efforts by Dr. Divya Mudappa and Dr. T.R. Shankar Raman to study and propose regeneration solutions for degraded and fragmented rainforests delineate a clear pathway towards restoration of these landscapes - a new hope.
Below are links to a few publications by them:
Native Shade Trees Aid Bird Conservation in Tea Plantations in Southern India - ResearchGate
[A Long-Form Essay]
Why are Rainforests so diverse?
a photo-essay by Rhett Butler, on Mongabay’s rainforest website, 2019
This article is a 20 MINUTE read.
Tap on the link to access the website.
This essay (also, potentially study material) gives readers a quick lesson on the biodiversity of rainforests, presented in eight parts. The author touches upon the effects of climate, natural events over deep time, physical limitations of a rainforest, and evolutionary processes on the diversity found in a rainforest.
The high biodiversity in rainforests is owed in part to the various niches available for creatures to colonize; each “layer” of the forest has specialists evolved to live in the conditions provided in that particular elevation of the rainforest. While the majority of the species in the rainforest may be in the canopy, living partial or even completely arboreal lives, every square inch of the forest is occupied by variations of a particular species - from arthropods to mammals, amphibians, birds and reptiles. This variation might be limited to species occupying a few square meters of the entire forest, or species that have evolved and spread out to occupy similar ecological conditions throughout the forest. Because of this patchy diversity, deforestation of even a small percentage of the total forest could drive a species to extinction - often, a species that we may not even know existed.
Changes in microclimates from one part of the rainforest to another also drive evolution of species to fit a particular condition. When adverse events precipitated by ecological degradation occur, these conditions may change drastically, affecting the specialized species - temporarily driving their numbers down or resulting in permanent extinction. More adaptable species, “generalists” and invasive species thrive in changing conditions, erasing microdiversities by outcompeting local species in degraded niches of the forest.
The essay also talks about how internal nutrient cycling in rainforests is extremely fast - this is because of the microfauna and fungal biomass in the soil and “leaf litter” layers of the jungle. The rapid decomposition of detritus left by plants and animals in the humid forests feeds the biodiversity of the forest - detritivores breaking down the “waste” into nutrients that can be taken up by fungi and plants, perpetuating the cycle.
Rainforests may be some of the oldest continuous ecosystems existing today, with origins in the dinosaur-ridden Cretaceous period about 150 million years ago. Over time, a series of geological and (more recently) anthropological upheavals has led to diversification and adaptation in rainforest species, which may be one of the reasons there is so much biodiversity in these ecosystems.
In addition to the information in the essay (presented for the average reader with no background in biology or ecology), there are also a series of images showing the adaptation of different kinds of arthropods and other animals displaying mimicry and camouflage, as well as links to other essays and galleries within Mongabay’s rainforest website.
See more about rainforests and conservation through these links
Watch a video by ATREE & CEPF on their efforts to empower indigenous people of Western Ghats’ ecosystems on YouTube here.
Learn about the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) on Global Earth Observatory Network’s website: Overview
Loss and Gain in tree cover in India, an interactive map on Global Forest Watch - view the map here. (Zoom in for more details, or look at other analyses and geographies)
Thank you for reading through this issue of the Climate Catalogue Reader; if you enjoyed it, do tap on the little heart and be sure to send it through to others who might find it interesting. Happy New Year to everyone (hopefully, with fewer and less expansive hiatuses).