QU: What are the implications of Deforestation on human wellbeing?AIM: To apply the Kuznets curve to the link between development and

environmental degradation.

Link the alternative or unconventional resource with the region of environmental degradation.

Tar sands ­

Deep Sea Oil ­

Biofuel production ­

Timber extraction ­

Nuclear power ­

Guanabara Bay, Brazil

Boreal forest, Canada

Grasslands,USA

Betsiboka river, Madagasgar

Chernobyl, Ukraine

Human well­being is a subjective concept. It encompasses material well­being, relationships with family and friends, emotional and physical health. It includes work and recreation, how one feels about one's community, environment and personal safety.

Indigenous tribes, Amazonia

Watch the attached clip. Discussion point ‐Consider how dependent on the rainforest this population is. How is the forest 'service' their well being?

Human Well Being

Immediate

Immediate

Peripheral

Peripheral

Forest food stock naturally replenishes

Provides water Main fuel source

Provideslivestock fodder

Maintains tourism related jobs

Maintains stewardship jobs

Food security

Cultural heritage maintained aslifestyles are uninterrupted.

Primary source of incomeSupports regional soil health

Helps regulate climate

Prevents flooding and other stressfull hazard events.

Maintains soil for farming

Reduces drought hazard

Spiritual value Connection to the land Stabalises

communties(Less migration)

Avoids local/regional confrontation as resources are abundant

Task: Damage to ecosystems has huge implications for human wellbeing. Place the statements below on to your copy of the diagram. Those elements you consider most key place close to the middle. Factors that are less important place towards the periphery.

This is subjective!!

Undamaged forest ecosystem and services. Links with human wellbeing.

EXT: Simply oppose the statements above to work out the impacts of deforestation on Amazonia/Madagasgar. eg. Explain how cultural heritage would be negatively impacted and what the implications of soil loss on well being would be.

Compare this to the indigenous people of the boreal forests of Alberta Canada. Outline key detrimental impacts to their well being they are undergoing as a result of tar sand oil extraction.

Colon and bowel duct cancers linked to pollution ­stress and worry. Lowering Q of L.

Traditional hunting traps removed. Loss of tradition and connection with the land.

Water supply polluted. Associated health issues.

Introduction of western cultural influences. Alcoholism on the rise.

Migration of workers to region. Loss of community 'feel'.

Can you remember them?

Task: Figure out where the annotations below go on your copy of the Kuznets curve. (Black essential ­ red = extension ...but watch your step.

Industrial economy

Pre­Industrial economy

Post ­ Industrial(service) economy

GDP per capita (economic growth)

Level of environmental degradation

Turning point

Environmental laws enforced

Technology toincrease efficiency becomes affordable

Population also expanding and adding to environmental pressure

Changing attitude of population toenvironmental damage as education rates improve.

Energy demand increases with no monitoring or legislation

Energy demand is at it's highest.

Does the economic development level of a country influence environmental damage?

Ext:

Ext: What influences societies attitude to environmental damage?

Environmental laws enforced

Technology toincrease efficiency becomes affordable

Population also expanding and adding to environmental pressure

Changing attitude of population toenvironmental damage as education rates improve.

Energy demand increases with no monitoring or legislation

Energy demand is at it's highest.WHY?

Any criticisms of this model?

Establishment and management of forests to enhance the removal and storage of CO2 from the atmosphere are recognized as major opportunities to offset the increase in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce the rate of global warming. Clear evidence of the role of forests in regulating global atmospheric CO2 partial pressure is provided from long­term measurements

Adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in late 1997 encouraged individual countries to increase the rates of carbon uptake and storage in forest biomass. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of the global mitigation potential from forests are substantial, up to 3.8 Pg C year by 2030.

Non Government Organisations (NGO's) have been keen drivers of change and supporters of afforestation schemes.They have also been helped by the increasing power of social media and digital information to ask ethical questions of commercial firms and TNC's. This has led to .....

'The rise of the conscious consumer'.....in the developed world.

IN PAIRS DISCUSS WHAT THIS TERM MEANS. Define it in your notes and explain how it is influencing our exploitation of resources. Use the Rainforest Alliance Certification to example this.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A difference of 13,700

A figure with or without BREXIT

Villainous cowboys

That would be my wider community

No you can't for 14 years

The law get involved with an online retailer

An NGO applying pressure

Ganging up to create a fall

2005 - a changing balance

A movement of the retina to wider regions

A list of land limits

A pot of global contributions

A juxtaposition created by a global heavy weight

Tiny people with big chainsaws

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

A vanishing region of N. Europe.

TASK: 1 ­ Read the article in the middle of your A3 sheet. Highlight the answers in the text to the clues on the left. Then write the clue as shown above. (clues are in order)

2 ­ Answer the Qu:s below.

­What role have consumers/NGO's in developed nations had on this issue. ­ Why are commercial farmers and ranchers more likely to 'respond to market pressures' (consumers)? ?

Forest stores are being protected. Micro­study, Brazil).

Ext: Where would you place Brazil on the Kuznets curve?

Such as?

For example?Which shows?

Are what?

Plenary, can you develop the points highlighted.

Homework:

Referring to examples, evaluate the implications for human well­being caused by degradation of the water and carbon cycles. (20)

Referring to examples, evaluate the implications for human well­being caused by degradation of the water and carbon cycles. (20)

BrazilMadagascar Alberta, Marcellus ­ although careful with these as they are more about impacts of resource

extraction.

Which implications are most significant?Does it depend on scale? Economic status?

On health, lifestyles, livelihoods

Stores, fluxes, transfers, rate of changeDisruption to,breakdown of

Extra reading and resource slides

The rate at which the world is losing its forests has been halved, but an area of woodland the size of South Africa has still been lost since 1990, a UN report said on Monday.

Improvement has been seen around the globe, even in the key tropical rainforests of South America and Africa, according to a surprisingly upbeat Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), which is released every five years.

Despite the good news, it points out that since 1990, the world had lost forests covering some 129m hectares – an area the size of South Africa.

“Even though, globally, the extent of the world’s forest continues to decline ... the rate of net forest loss has been cut by over 50%,” said the report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The assessment was released at the World Forestry Congress in the South African port city of Durban, host to the 14th edition of the conference.

“FRA 2015 shows a very encouraging tendency towards a reduction in the rates of deforestation and carbon emissions from forests and increases in capacity for sustainable forest management,” said FAO director general Jose Graziano da Silva.

“The direction of change is positive, with many impressive examples of progress in all regions of the world.

“However this positive trend needs to be strengthened, especially in the countries that are lagging behind,” he said.

Apart from offering oxygen, fuel and building material, trees store important quantities of carbon, which, if released, contribute to global warming.

Halting deforestation is a key focus of UN negotiations for a global pact to limit disastrous climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

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The UN talks are designed to secure a deal to be signed by world leaders in Paris in December.

In 1990 the world had 4,128m hectares of forest covering 31.6% of the global land area, the forest report said.

By 2015 this had decreased to 3,999m hectares, covering 30.6% – a net loss of some 129m hectares.

The net annual rate of loss – which takes into account the planting of new forests – has slowed from ­0.18% in the 1990s to ­0.08% over the past five years.

Planted forest area has increased by more than 110m hectares since 1990 and now accounts for 7% of the world’s forest area.

The biggest loss of forests occurred in the tropics, particularly in South America and Africa, although even there the rate of loss “has decreased substantially in the past five years”, the report says.

Natural forest will probably continue to decline mainly through land clearance for agriculture, but “due to growing demand for forest products and environmental services, the area of planted forests is likely to continue to increase in coming years”.

The conclusions raised questions of whether alarm bells sounded over forest loss have been overplayed, but the report’s team leader, Kenneth MacDicken, said the FRA had led a change in attitude over deforestation.

“The FRA has since 1948 reported forest area change – including the loss of forest area in the tropics.

“Actions in response to this information have helped slow the rate of forest loss – and in some countries have resulted in increased forest area,” MacDicken told AFP from his base in Rome.

Better information from new forest inventories had also “greatly improved our understanding of forest change”, he said.

Rate of global forest loss halved, says UNGuardian 2015

The Amazon rainforestCutting down on cutting down

How Brazil became the world leader in reducing environmental degradationIN THE 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every year, Brazil was the world’s environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade, from a ten­year average of 19,500 km2 (7,500 square miles) per year in 2005 to 5,800 km2 in 2013. If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a year’s emissions from the European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in tackling climate change.But how did it break the vicious cycle in which—it was widely expected—farmers and cattle ranchers (the main culprits in the Amazon) would make so much money from clearing the forest that they would go on cutting down trees until there were none left? After all, most other rainforest countries, such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have failed to stop the chainsaws. The answer, according to a paper just published in Science by Dan Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute in San Francisco, is that there was no silver bullet but instead a three­stage process in which bans, better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked, if fitfully and only after several false starts.

The first stage ran from the mid­1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its ability to police the Amazon. Brazil’s president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, made stopping deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co­operation between different bits of the government, especially the police and public prosecutors. The area in which farming was banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.

Also, for the first time, restrictions were backed up by other things: a fall in export earnings from soyabeans because of a rise in Brazil’s currency, the real; a sharp improvement in cattle breeding which meant farmers could raise more animals on fewer hectares; and a consumer boycott. After a campaign by Greenpeace and others, buyers of Brazilian soyabeans promised not to purchase crops planted on land cleared after July 2006. All of these combined to cause deforestation to plummet (see chart).

The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a regime of restrictions could survive as soyabean expansion resumed. The government shifted its focus from farms to counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell. The government also set up a proper land registry, requiring landowners to report their properties’ boundaries to environmental regulators. There was a cattle boycott modelled on the soya one. And for the first time, there were rewards as well as punishments: an amnesty for illegal clearances before 2008 and money from a special $1 billion Amazon Fund financed by foreign aid.

By any standards, Brazil’s Amazon policy has been a triumph, made the more remarkable because it relied on restrictions rather than incentives, which might have been expected to have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output without destroying the forest (though there was some deforestation at first).

Still, as Dr Nepstad concedes, a policy of “thou­shalt­not” depends on political support at the top, which cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among commercial farmers and ranchers who care about the law and respond to market pressures; hence the effectiveness of boycotts. Most remaining deforestation is by smallholders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yet stopped.

The concept of consumers boycotting brands and publishers isn’t a new one.

Perhaps the best­known example is Nestlé. In protest of its aggressive marketing of baby food products in less economically developed countries, a boycott movement that began in the 1970s in Europe quickly spread across the globe.

And in a homegrown movement, certain brands of milk were avoided by consumers in May 2016 after it was revealed dairy processors and exporter, Murray Goulburn and Fonterra, had slashed the price it was willing to pay Australian dairy farmers for their product.

In the last quarter of 2016, however, the issue of brand ethics was put firmly in the spotlight. From the recent decision by Lego to drop its commercial deal with the Daily Mail following pressure from the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ campaign, to the ‘Grab Your Wallet’ campaign in the US urging consumers to boycott Trump­related products and services, consumers are increasingly voting with their wallets. Our customers are choosing to make what they perceive to be positive decisions about what they buy and where they spend their money – and offset what they feel to be the negative effects of consumerism.

This type of conscious consumerism has been on the rise for a while but social media has – and continues to – act as an accelerant. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are making it much easier for consumer activists to share information and lobby for specific campaigns.

For example, while it was Waleed Aly’s ‘We need to talk about’ TV segment on The Project that pushed the dairy farmers’ issue into the public eye, it was the sharing of the segment on social media that really galvanised the campaign.

Brand ethics beyond CSR

Our digital age has ushered in a new level of transparency and openness where authenticity has become more important than it has even been; largely as it is easier for people to smell and call out – to be frank – bullsh*t. This means that merely ticking the corporate social responsibility (CSR) box won’t cut it anymore.

Companies increasingly must walk the talk and address the growing demand for ethical behaviour across areas like supply chain sourcing, employee pay and gender equality.

In November 2016, for example, Airbnb introduced a mandatory ‘pledge’ for users of its service to sign in to agree to: ‘Treat everyone – regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age – with respect, and without judgment or bias.’

While Airbnb’s actions have no doubt been galvanised by the spectre of lawsuits, it will be an interesting test case to monitor consumer reaction and impact on their behaviours, good or bad.

Going forward, brands will increasingly be called upon to publicly define and prove what they stand for. The notion of ‘brands with purpose’ has been around for a while. They are typically defined as companies that add meaning to a service or product to connect on an emotional level. Purpose is often tied to giving back to local communities or the environment.

A winning formula

Perhaps the best­known examples of brands with purpose are Dove and Chobani. The former is known for its promotion of women’s self­esteem, while the latter is respected for its operating mission, ‘the how matters’.

In fact, Chobani is a particularly good example of a brand that has created immense value from focusing on a higher purpose. The yoghurt producer went from a 2005 startup to over $1 billion in revenue business in a decade. Yet it entered a crowded market with nothing particularly inventive or unique to differentiate it aside from its ‘how’ and its focus on creating ‘nothing but good’ for both consumers and its supply chain.

Naturally, Chobani offers a good product, but a large part of its success has been to do with an unwavering focus on the ‘how’. From the humane treatment of its cows, to the fair and respected relationship with its farmers, to giving each of its employees a stake in the private company, it is a case study in authenticity.

This authenticity also served Chobani well when dealing with a recall crisis on a small batch of product in 2013. This led with an apology from its founder that began: ‘Dear fans and customers, I’m’ sorry I let you down and has become a lauded example of crisis communication (see breakout box).

As we move through 2017, I expect to see even more consumer pressure on brands as they are called into question issues like gender equality, employee condition, political affiliations and environmental concerns.

But what does it truly take to foster such a holistic approach?

Making change holistic

Management boards will be required to ensure they are clear on how ‘the how matters’ to their operations in order to avoid being caught in either a knee­jerk response or in an inauthentic one. A recent example of what not to do has been 7­Eleven’s misleading press releases and failure to follow up on its promise to improve pay and working conditions for its employees.

Working out your ‘how’ starts with a clear company philosophy that distils a company’s overall culture into core values that inform all areas of its business.

US online shoe retailer, Zappos, for example, is highly respected for its culture, which is clearly laid out for all to see on its website. It helps create an identity for a company that differentiates it from the crowd and develops an employee base with common values.

Companies should create hypothetical scenarios in which there is tension between profit, customer experience and ethics. Once you begin to document how you should react, you begin to gain clarity on values and ultimately, what you stand for.

Ultimately, however, the big questions must be asked of management. They are responsible for defining, developing, refining and evolving a company’s culture, values and ethics alongside their employees, partners and customers.

As the consumer becomes more conscious, now is the time to hold up the mirror and make sure you are comfortable with what is reflected.

The rise of the conscious consumer

Like our organizational logo, the Rainforest Alliance Certified™ seal features a frog for a very good reason.

The Rainforest Alliance Certified sealThe Rainforest Alliance Certified sealFrogs are indicator species, meaning that they are a symbol of environmental health, and they are found on every continent except Antarctica. Our green frog certification seal indicates that a farm, forest, or tourism enterprise has been audited to meet standards that require environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Thousands of products bearing the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal are found on shelves, in advertisements, and websites around the world.

For information on how to become certified or how to source products from certified farms or forestry operations, visit our business website.

AgricultureIn order to become certified, farms must meet criteria of the Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture Standard. The Standard encompasses all three pillars of sustainability—social, economic, and environmental. Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms are audited regularly to verify that farmers are complying with the Standard’s comprehensive requirements, which require continual improvement on the journey to sustainable agriculture. The Standard is built on these important principles of sustainable farming:

Biodiversity conservationImproved livelihoods and human well­beingNatural resource conservationEffective planning and farm management systemsFor more information on the Sustainable Agriculture Standard and how Rainforest Alliance certification benefits communities, forests, and wildlife, read the SAN/Rainforest Alliance Impacts Report. Visit our business website for more information about what it means to be a Rainforest Alliance Certified farm.

ForestryThe Rainforest Alliance is one of the founding members of the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®), the largest sustainable forestry standard setter in the world. Products that bear the FSC mark and the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal are sourced from forests that:

Protect endangered species and forest areas of high conservation valueSet aside a portion of land as forest reserveProvide workers with decent wages and protect their ability to organizeFollow FSC guidelines that determine how, when, and where timber and non­timber forest products are harvestedRespect the rights of local communities and indigenous peopleYou can find more information about our work to conserve forests here. For more information on what it means when you see the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal on forestry products, visit our business website or our FAQ.

TourismProprietors of tourism businesses, including lodging services and inbound tour operators, who demonstrate they are minimizing their environmental footprint and supporting workers, local cultures, and surrounding communities may also be eligible for using the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal. Rainforest Alliance audits confirm these businesses meet our tourism criteria, which are recognized by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. The criteria require:

Protection of nearby ecosystemsWise use of natural resourcesClimate change mitigationBenefits to the social and cultural development of surrounding communities

Rain Forest Alliance quality mark

Attachments

Indigenous tribes, Amazonia