In recent times, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest has been in the spotlight due to a record-breaking number of fires. These fires, often set intentionally to clear land for agriculture, have spiraled out of control. The National Institute for Space Research reported over 74,000 fires between January and August, a stark increase from fewer than 40,000 in the same period in 2018. This destruction of what many consider a pristine natural wonder leaves us feeling powerless. Despite international efforts, including pledges of $22 million from the G7 summit and significant donations from Norway and Germany, the problem persists.
The fires in the Amazon are just one symptom of a larger issue: rampant deforestation across the globe. Rainforests in South America, Africa, and Asia are disappearing at an alarming rate. If this continues, these vital ecosystems could vanish within a century. Rainforests are home to an incredible diversity of plants and animals, offering experiences like hearing gibbons at dawn or spotting colorful birds and unique insects. Beyond their beauty, these ecosystems are invaluable for their biodiversity and their role in combating climate change.
Despite the grim news, there is hope. Efforts are underway to protect these ecosystems. A key focus is the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly Borneo, which is home to species like orangutans and pygmy elephants. Borneo has seen rapid deforestation, losing an average of 850,000 hectares of forest annually between 1985 and 2005. This has had devastating effects on wildlife, with significant declines in orangutan and pygmy elephant populations.
The reasons for deforestation vary by region. In Brazil, cattle ranching is a major cause, while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, illegal logging is prevalent. In Borneo, forests are cleared for palm oil production, a highly demanded commodity. The demand for palm oil surged in the 1980s as a healthier alternative to trans fats and has continued to grow, driven by its use in biodiesel and numerous consumer products.
Efforts to save the rainforests are complex. Boycotting palm oil, for instance, is not enough, as Asia accounts for half of the global demand. Palm oil is crucial to the economies of Malaysia and Indonesia, making a ban unlikely. Instead, understanding the rainforest’s response to deforestation is key. Questions about the impact on surrounding forests, animal relocation, and the viability of degraded forests need answers.
The SAFE (Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems) project in Malaysian Borneo is tackling these questions. This research initiative studies biodiversity and ecosystem changes in altered forests. The project spans 72 square kilometers, including palm oil plantations and untouched rainforest. Scientists are examining how forest fragments can support biodiversity and the effects of forest corridors.
The SAFE project aims to determine the minimum size for forest fragments to function as ecosystems. Early findings suggest that riparian reserves with over 40 meters of vegetation support similar bird diversity as continuous forests. These insights could inform sustainable palm oil farming and land-use policies. The project’s results will guide governments on effective conservation strategies.
Saving the rainforests requires collaboration between industry, ecology, and politics. While challenging, with corruption and complex negotiations, there is hope. Scientists are gathering crucial data to inform conservation efforts, and we can support their work by engaging with educational resources like Curiosity Stream.
Curiosity Stream offers documentaries on environmental topics, including the impact of Amazon fires. Subscribing to Curiosity Stream also provides access to Nebula, a platform for educational content creators. By learning more about these issues, we can contribute to global conservation efforts.
Join a seminar where you will explore the various causes of deforestation in different regions. Engage in group discussions to analyze the impact of cattle ranching in Brazil, illegal logging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and palm oil production in Borneo. Prepare a short presentation on your findings and propose potential solutions.
Participate in a virtual field trip to the rainforests of Borneo. Use online resources and virtual reality tools to observe the biodiversity and the effects of deforestation. Document your observations and share them in a class blog, highlighting the importance of conservation efforts like the SAFE project.
Conduct a detailed case study analysis of the SAFE project in Malaysian Borneo. Examine the project’s research methods, findings, and implications for sustainable palm oil farming. Discuss how these insights can inform global conservation policies and present your analysis in a written report.
Engage in a structured debate on the topic of palm oil production versus rainforest conservation. Take on roles representing different stakeholders, such as environmentalists, palm oil producers, and local governments. Develop arguments for your position and participate in a class debate to explore the complexities of this issue.
Attend a screening of a documentary on the Amazon fires and global deforestation. After the screening, participate in a guided discussion to reflect on the documentary’s content and its implications for rainforest conservation. Share your thoughts on how educational platforms like Curiosity Stream can enhance public awareness and involvement in conservation efforts.
This episode of Real Science is brought to you by Curiosity Stream. Watch thousands of documentaries for free for 31 days at curiositystream.com/realscience.
It’s been all over the news lately. There have been a record-breaking number of fires ravaging the Brazilian Amazon rainforest this year—manmade fires intentionally set to clear land for agriculture, which then spread uncontrollably. The National Institute for Space Research says it has detected more than 74,000 fires between January and August. In comparison, there were fewer than 40,000 for the same period in 2018. It is shocking to see it happening to a place many of us consider to be a pristine lush expanse. Most of us looking on from thousands of miles away feel helpless. Members of the G7 summit pledged $22 million to help fight the fires. Over the past decade, Norway has donated $1.2 billion to help conserve the Amazon, and Germany has contributed $68 million. However, both have stopped their contributions due to doubts over Brazil’s efforts to reduce deforestation.
Despite money pouring in over many years to try to battle the problem, international campaigns, summits, and boycotts, it just isn’t working. The recent fires are just a symptom of an ongoing problem of unregulated and out-of-control clearing for agriculture. Across the world, in South America, Africa, and Asia, the world’s rainforests are being lost at a rapid pace. If current deforestation levels continue, the world’s rainforests may completely vanish in as little as a hundred years. There is so much to lose. The diversity of plants and animals in the world’s rainforests is staggering, especially in person.
Seeing mist rise above the canopy at sunrise while hearing Gibbon calls from miles away, trekking through the forest at night, and seeing unique insects, dodging snakes wrapped around branches, and colorful birds is an experience like no other. The value that these ecosystems have to the world is impossible to quantify. With all the terrible news stories we hear, it’s easy to feel like there is no hope. To see animals losing their habitat is heartbreaking. However, despite the headlines, all hope is not lost. There are things that can be done and people who are doing everything in their power to ensure the rainforests survive the recent onslaught of destruction.
To understand what is being done and how, let’s focus on one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world: the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly Borneo—home to recognizable species such as orangutans and pygmy elephants. Borneo’s natural forests continue to be destroyed at a rapid pace. Between 1985 and 2005, Borneo lost an average of 850,000 hectares of forest every year. If this trend continues, forest cover will drop to less than a third in coming years. This deforestation has been devastating for wildlife. Nearly 150,000 critically endangered Bornean orangutans died between 1999 and 2015, and there are fewer than 1,500 surviving Borneo pygmy elephants.
10 to 15 percent of the world’s unique plant and animal species live in this area, and they are all at risk of being wiped out entirely. This is not to mention the importance of the forest and its carbon-storing abilities and how devastating clearing it will be in the battle against climate change. It’s easy to point out why deforestation is bad for biodiversity, and no one wants the orangutans to die, so why is it happening? The answer varies from region to region and from year to year. In Brazil, cattle ranching is the leading cause. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s largely due to unregulated or illegal logging for timber. In Borneo and the rest of Indonesia and Malaysia, the forests are currently being cleared to make room for the most in-demand plant oil in the world—palm oil.
This huge demand for palm oil can be traced back to the 1980s when the world learned the dangers of trans fats. Food producers scrambled to find a suitable alternative—something cheap with similar properties to trans fats but less damaging to human health. The substance that ticked these boxes was palm oil. Then, in the last few decades, environmentalists ironically pushed for an increase in biodiesel production to try to stop the release of carbon from fossil fuels, not foreseeing the contradiction in their thinking. In the U.S., a law mandating that biofuels be incorporated into diesel promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades. Biodiesel production in the U.S. jumped from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016.
Like many well-intentioned plans, this one did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to and helped lead to the ongoing decimation of one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. By the 21st century, the palm oil boom was in full swing, and thousands of square miles of lowland forests across Borneo were planted with oil palms. Today, Indonesia and Malaysia supply 85% of the world’s palm oil, and whether we realize it or not, palm oil is in everything—pizza dough, lipstick, ice cream, laundry detergent, soap, chocolate, instant noodles, and fuel. It’s an extremely cheap and versatile product, making it nearly impossible to avoid in modern life.
Globally, we each consume an average of 8 kilograms of palm oil a year. When you’re in Borneo, you can drive for hours and see nothing but palm trees. Much of the forest is under severe pressure, with animals being forced into smaller and smaller habitats. Trucks carrying palm kernels and massive ancient trees zigzag across the landscape. This leads to the hardest question of all: What can be done about it?
There has been a recent push to boycott palm oil products, like the grocery chain Iceland is doing as explained in their controversial viral ad. This kind of initiative feels nice and is easy for people to support. However, Europe and the U.S. account for less than 14 percent of global palm oil demand. So, boycotts from these parts of the world are unfortunately not enough. Half of global demand comes from Asia, where product price is what matters. With palm oil accounting for 13.7 percent of Malaysia’s gross national income and being Indonesia’s top export, outright banning its cultivation is just not going to happen.
The way to actually save the rainforests is unfortunately much more complicated. To save the rainforest, we have to understand it. We need to understand how it reacts to deforestation and degradation. Obviously, when an entire forest is slashed, burned, and logged, that ecosystem is lost. But what about the surrounding forests? Are they impacted by the adjacent damage? Are any animals able to relocate? If so, what kinds and how many? What about partially degraded forests or young forests that are being restored? Can they support wildlife? Can some animals actually live within the palm oil plantations? Are wildlife corridors along rivers enough to promote the movement of animals across a plantation landscape? How much forest can we actually lose before the damage is irreversible?
These are the questions that need to be answered to ensure the future of the Southeast Asian rainforest and any threatened forest in the world. One group working on finding the answers is a team of scientists nestled deep in the heart of Malaysian Borneo at the SAFE project site. SAFE stands for the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems, and their goal is to research biodiversity and ecosystem function changes as forests are modified by human activities. They aim to learn whether preserving sections of forests within degraded landscapes can protect biodiversity and how much protection is needed to be effective.
The entire SAFE project experimental site covers an area of 72 square kilometers, which is spread over existing palm oil plantations and untouched rainforest, much of which is slated to soon be converted into palm oil plantations. The site also contains a large virgin jungle reserve of 22 square kilometers, which will remain protected throughout the process. Within the total SAFE project area, the owners of the palm oil plantation have agreed to allow an additional 8 square kilometers of land to be set aside as forest fragments. These will be the experimental forest fragments that the scientists can study.
In addition to this, Malaysian law prohibits the clearance of forests on steep slopes and along rivers, accounting for another approximately 5 square kilometers. With this arrangement, the scientists will be able to study the effect of logging before, during, and after such forest conversion, and they can also study the effects of forest corridors and reserves within damaged forests. This type of experimental design is extremely valuable and rare. It is not often that scientists get to work with the cooperation of the very people who are doing the damage being studied and get to choose where their experimental sites are.
In most cases, ecological research is carried out observationally after the fact, which does not produce as powerful results as an experiment like this will. The overall goal of the SAFE project is to determine the minimum critical size forest fragments can be before they fail to operate as functional tropical ecosystems. They are gathering data on animal populations, soil composition, plant populations, hydrology, insect behavior, seed dispersal—everything that a healthy tropical ecosystem needs—and seeing how that changes with different levels of forest destruction.
With this information, the ultimate goal is to find the best way to sustainably farm palm oil—to find a compromise between agriculture and conservation. While this experiment is set to go on for many years to come and the full results won’t be known until then, there are already hundreds of papers emerging from this research site, and some of the results already have significant implications.
One study, for example, found that riparian reserves—the strips of forests that are protected along the lengths of rivers—that have over 40 meters of natural vegetation on each bank supported similar bird diversity to control habitats found in continuous protected forests. However, to support equivalent numbers of birds of conservation concern, reserves would need to be at least 100 meters wide on each bank. Another study concluded that overall mammal species richness was conserved even in degraded forests, forests that otherwise might be thought to be too damaged to be worth protecting.
Yet another study found unexpectedly that there is no impact from land use changes on the biomass or number of fish in small streams, suggesting that these fish could be a sustainable food source for villages established in human-modified forests or in developed oil palm plantations. These are the types of results that SAFE wants to use to inform how palm oil is farmed and how any fragmented landscape can be designed to best preserve the environment in the face of land-use change.
Once even more years of data have been collected, the SAFE project will inform relevant governments about the best land-use policy. For example, at the moment, governmental guidelines on the amount of riparian reserves around rivers vary greatly. In Sabah, the law says that 20 meters of natural vegetation on either side of a riverbank must be preserved. In Indonesia, it’s 50 meters; in other parts of Malaysia, it’s 5 meters; and other regions have different guidelines altogether.
However, some studies are already finding that maybe 100 meters or more are necessary to be sufficient wildlife corridors to preserve biodiversity. Results like these will be funneled to policymakers and members of the Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil to try to set up a system in which, despite some deforestation happening now, the rainforest can survive and rebound once local economies move on to other forms of industry in the future.
To really save the rainforest requires an unromantic, often tedious compromise between industry, ecology, and politics. None of it is easy, and with fairly rampant corruption in many of the countries in question undermining any progress made, it can feel like an impossible battle. It will take years of discussion from decision-makers, long hours spent in the field, and integrity from relevant politicians. But with all of these things working together, in theory, there is hope for a future world still covered in rainforests.
The subject of deforestation is massive, and there are many things we need to understand to save the world’s forests. Scientists everywhere are tirelessly gathering data and discovering the answers needed to inform conservation efforts. While they are working to understand the rainforest, we can support their efforts and the ecology surrounding the problem by signing up for Curiosity Stream.
Curiosity Stream has thousands of high-quality documentaries, including many about environmental and ecological subjects. You can learn more about the fascinating work being done to study the impact of forest fires in the Amazon, for example, in the documentary called “Amazon Burning.” It highlights the complex fieldwork being done there and explains some of the high-tech methods used for measuring carbon storage in tropical ecosystems.
Because Curiosity Stream also supports independent creators, an annual subscription now includes a subscription to Nebula—a streaming site created by some of the best educational YouTube content creators. Nebula is a place for videos to be watched ad-free and for creators to try new ideas without fear of demonetization on YouTube. The next Real Science video is already available on Nebula, which won’t be on YouTube for another month. It’s also building its library with loads of exclusive content.
So, to get all that along with access to Curiosity Stream’s library, sign up at curiositystream.com/realscience, and you’ll receive an email with a link to get your free Nebula subscription. Learning about a wide range of subjects like the ones on Curiosity Stream and Nebula is one of the best things you can do to help the world in its environmental battles.
Rainforest – A dense, tropical forest with a high amount of annual rainfall, known for its rich biodiversity and complex ecosystems. – The Amazon rainforest is often referred to as the “lungs of the Earth” due to its vast capacity to produce oxygen and store carbon dioxide.
Deforestation – The process of clearing or thinning forests, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. – Deforestation in the Amazon basin is a significant contributor to global climate change due to the release of stored carbon dioxide.
Biodiversity – The variety of life in a particular habitat or ecosystem, often used as a measure of the health of biological systems. – The biodiversity of coral reefs is crucial for maintaining the balance of marine ecosystems.
Ecosystems – Communities of living organisms interacting with their physical environment, functioning as a unit. – Wetland ecosystems play a vital role in water purification and flood control.
Conservation – The protection and preservation of natural resources and environments to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect. – Conservation efforts are essential to protect endangered species and their habitats from further decline.
Palm Oil – An edible vegetable oil derived from the fruit of oil palm trees, often associated with deforestation and habitat destruction. – The demand for palm oil has led to significant deforestation in Southeast Asia, threatening the habitat of species like the orangutan.
Agriculture – The practice of cultivating soil, growing crops, and raising animals for food, fiber, and other products. – Sustainable agriculture practices are necessary to reduce the environmental impact of food production.
Wildlife – Animals and other living organisms that are not domesticated and live in natural environments. – Protecting wildlife is crucial for maintaining ecological balance and biodiversity.
Climate Change – Long-term alterations in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, and other elements of the Earth’s climate system. – Climate change poses a significant threat to global biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems.
Research – The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources to establish facts and reach new conclusions. – Ongoing research in environmental science is vital for developing strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change.
