Climate change needs a new direction

How we deal with climate change may have more impact on the environment then the change itself.

Conservation actions meant to preserve tropical rainforests from climate change may be heading in the wrong direction, as portrayed in the journal Nature in December. The world’s largest diverse ecosystems have been experiencing change for quite some time now, and an article from Science Daily talks about how humans may be making a bad situation even worse.

A rainforest can adapt to temperature and can survive when things get a little dry…Unless people take advantage of it. Higher temperatures and dry seasons see more people burning forest away to use for agricultural land. This requires conservation acts to find a way around these new problems and means that people are still not informed enough.

When creating conservation plans, we need to include plans that involve the people. Land can be protected, but people will still find away against it. The world needs to be informed of how their actions affect the planet and how the planet can adapt to changes, but not when the changes are made worse by people.

The most common answer that people think of – protected parks. A park can protect a piece of land, but it can’t protect an ecosystem. If a quarter of a rainforest is protected, what happens to the other three-quarters? If habitat is destroyed at any scale, the wildlife will move into what hasn’t been disturbed. So a park can’t protect the entire landscape, why not introduce larger protected areas. These plans need to be introduced at a nation-wide, or regional level, since the small ideas aren’t cutting it.

Farmers can find other land. There is plenty of land around the world that does not require the destruction of a rainforest at such drastic levels.

Unless more people become involved with conservation of these areas, rainforests will continue to be burned, logged, and destroyed. Climate change is one thing, destruction is another.