Brazil to Conduct a Tree Census

A deforested area of rainforest along the border of the Xingu river in northern Brazil. Photo courtesy: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images via guardian.co.uk

The Brazilian government is to launch a four-year tree census of the Amazon to improve understanding of the impacts of deforestation, climate change and conservation efforts.

The study will also help to assess the potential value of the biodiversity under the canopy and the growth of human settlements in the Amazon region, which is home to a number of fast-expanding cities, as well as uncontacted indigenous tribes.

The cataloguing operation will be the most detailed study for 40 years – a period in which the world's greatest forest has come under unprecedented pressure from farmers, loggers and drought.

The environment ministry said the inventory "will allow us to have a broad panorama of the quality and the conditions in the forest cover".

Improvements in satellite monitoring technology have already provided a wealth of data about the degradation of the Amazon.

Last week, Nasa released figures showing that an area twice the size of California continues to suffer from a mega-drought, which began eight years ago. Nasa said this may be the first sign that the Amazon is suffering major consequences from climate change.

The Brazilian government also uses a sophisticated satellite system to co-ordinate its actions against illegal forest clearance. The environment ministry says this has slowed deforestation and pushed Brazil halfway towards its Copenhagen commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 36% by 2020.

However, there are limits to what can be analysed from above, particularly when it comes to the quality of the forest and the biodiversity below the canopy.

"We are going to come to know the rainforest from within," said forestry minister, Antonio Carlos Hummel.

With the results expected to be released year by year, the environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, said the government would have more information on which to base its future strategies of conservation and extraction of economic value.

Drug Cartels Threaten Guatemala's Maya Nature Reserve

Scarlet macaws.

The 200-foot summit of Temple IV in the ancient Maya city of Tikal provides a spectacular view of Central America's largest expanse of intact rainforest. In the late afternoon, spider monkeys dangle from nearby branches, stretching to pick small fruits. The guttural barks of howler monkeys echo through the canopy — a lush green broken only by the occasional flash of lemon yellow from a swooping toucan.

This lowland forest is the heart of the Maya Biosphere Reserve of northern Guatemala, a 2.1 million-hectare (5.2 million-acre) sanctuary that covers 19 percent of the country and contains roughly 60 percent of its protected area. The UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve sustains a wide array of biodiversity, most notably the last remaining population of a key subspecies of scarlet macaw.

But this magnificent creature and others that inhabit the reserve — jaguars, pumas, Guatemalan black howler monkeys, Baird's tapirs — are being pressured not just by the standard threats common to tropical regions, such as illegal logging, fires, and commercial hunting. Even more virulent forces are gnawing away at the Maya Biosphere Reserve, including Mexican drug cartels that cut into the forest to build airstrips to transport drugs, Salvadoran gangs that carve out huge cattle ranches to launder drug money, and Chinese organized crime groups moving their illegal logging network toward the reserve to supply Asian markets with prime tropical hardwoods.

As a result, this natural and cultural treasure — the heart of the Selva Maya, a forest spanning the borders of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize — has in recent years effectively been cut in two. The western side, which includes two of the reserve's five national parks and is bordered on the west and the north by Mexico, is under siege, according to Guatemalan park officials. The eastern part of the reserve, where Tikal rises above the jungle canopy and which borders Belize, is lush and intact.

"The story of the Maya Biosphere Reserve has increasingly become a tale of two reserves — one of conservation successes and one of failures," says Roan McNab, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Guatemala program. McNab is a pivotal figure in a coalition of Guatemalan and foreign conservation groups battling to preserve the eastern half of the reserve and claw back some of the denuded lands of the western sector.

Much is at stake, as the reserve and the surrounding Selva Maya are the largest block of intact forest north of the Amazon Basin. The reserve supports 513 of Guatemala's bird species (71 percent of the national total), 122 mammal species (64 percent), 95 reptile species (39 percent), and more than 80 species of neotropical migrant birds from North America. It enshrouds Tikal, a national park and World Heritage Site, and hundreds of other vestiges of Mayan civilization.

The international coalition struggling to preserve the heart of the reserve has enjoyed some important successes. Scarlet macaws are making a comeback thanks to intensive restoration efforts. The presence of the civilian government and military has grown. Prosecution of environmental crimes is up, albeit slightly. And community-based forest concessions have brought some rural Guatemalans sustainable income and empowered them in managing parts of the reserve.

"There's a greater social awareness now of the importance of preserving environmental stability," says Rolman Hernandez, director of the Petén region of Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas (CONAP), the Guatemalan park service. The reserve covers more than half of the Petén, the largest and northernmost of Guatemala's 22 departments, or provinces.

The region that became the Maya Biosphere Reserve was once a vast mix of lowland rainforest, wetlands, lagoons, lakes, rivers, and mangrove forests. As many as 2 million people lived here at the peak of Mayan civilization, around 800 A.D., archeologists estimate. Then came the Mayan decline and Spanish conquest.

Until the 1960s, the region consisted of a few isolated forest villages. Then roads, built mainly to access oil and timber, opened the the area to illegal colonization and slash-and-burn agriculture. The reserve was created in 1990 to help control deforestation, but CONAP, financially strapped and often overruled by government officials friendly to the ranchers, has been hampered in its attempts to control the wave of destruction, McNab and others say. Today the human population is 118,000, with most living in poverty.

The eastern half of the Maya Biosphere Reserve not only harbours much of Guatemala's biodiversity, but it also includes historic Mayan sites like these temples, part of Tikal National Park and World Heritage Site. Photo courtesy: Al Argueta/Alamy

Criminal activity in the area began to intensify a decade ago, further accelerating the destruction of the western half of the reserve. An important factor is that northern Guatemala is ideally situated to refuel drug aircraft flying from South America and transfer narcotics to trucks for the easy drive to Mexico. The cartels operated in a "climate of impunity" since the army and police lacked the power to take them on, McNab says. The ranchers built dozens of airstrips, including one dubbed the "international airport," which had three runways and more than a dozen abandoned aircraft. The result was a loss of 40,000 hectares of forest.

Guatemalans have developed a new term for what's happening in the region: narcoganaderia, a combination of the Spanish words for drugs and cattle ranching. The cartels launder drug money by investing in cattle production and reaping profits from cattle sales in Mexican markets.

CONAP officials say evidence of the work of Chinese-backed criminal groups lies in the yard behind the agency's Petén headquarters, in San Benito. The yard is crowded with timber and confiscated vehicles. Victor Penados, CONAP's coordinator of control and vigilance for the reserve, points to a pile of rosewood confiscated from suppliers to Chinese criminal groups. The wood comes from one of several recent timber-smuggling busts by the government reported in national news media. This pile, confiscated from a truck delivering the wood to the Caribbean seaport of Puerto San Tomas de Castillo for shipment to China, has a market value of $125,000, Penados estimates.

Operatives with Chinese criminal cartels have been conducting illegal logging just south of the reserve, according to CONAP. McNab fears it won't be long before the Chinese-backed groups start cutting inside the reserve itself and then turn to intensive jaguar poaching for body parts to serve a Chinese market that is already driving Asian big cats toward extinction.

This conservation drama is playing out under extreme conditions. CONAP and WCS staffers have been threatened many times. Some have been taken hostage, while others have had to "disappear" for several weeks after raids to reclaim illegally acquired ranchland. McNab himself was held at gunpoint by two looters of a Mayan ruin deep in the jungle. The writer was accompanied into the forest with as many as five armed security guards as they traveled near cartel ranches. Always in the back of his mind were the nation's poverty, corruption, history of dictatorship, lawlessness, and 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.

The influence of illegal logging and ranching in the reserve is evident in a series of three CONAP land-use maps showing a wave of fires and land clearing that gobbled up large green swaths of forest from 2000 to 2011, especially in the western section. McNab warns that if law enforcement does not improve, the reserve faces a "chain of falling dominoes threatening to sweep eastward all the way to Guatemala's border with Belize."

Nowhere is the tale of two reserves more visible than at the Guacamayas Biological Station in Laguna del Tigre National Park. To the south, across the Rio San Pedro and beyond, stretches a vast plain of ranchland, the raw result of deforestation. To the north, the rainforest canopy rolls untattered all the way to the border with Mexico. In 2008, scientists discovered a 1,100-hectare clear-cut smack in the middle of that expanse. It turned out to be a large cattle ranch linked to a Salvadoran gang involved in drug trafficking.

Such forest destruction has in recent decades reduced by 75 percent the habitat of the region's scarlet macaws, a subspecies of the scarlet macaws found farther south in Latin America and the last remaining macaws in the wild in Guatemala. By 2000, scarlet macaws had nearly been extirpated in the reserve. A 2003 WCS study estimated that the population, mostly centered in the forest to the east of Laguna del Tigre park, had dropped to 200 birds. That year, the researchers monitored 15 nests, but only one chick successfully fledged.

But a program of predator control, environmental education in local schools, and hand-rearing by veterinarians brought the number of successful macaw fledglings to 29 in 2011 and 49 for this year's nesting season. Says McNab, "We feel pretty good about adding that number of birds to the population. That's big in terms of saving the species."

To halt continuing deforestation, CONAP and its allies have established what they call "the Shield" — a lattice of trails running along the eastern border of Laguna del Tigre park, anchored by three major bases for patrols by CONAP, the army, national police, and others. Patrols and arrests have risen steadily over the past four years.

If the success or failure of the Shield will determine whether the western front of the reserve holds, what happens in villages like Uaxactún will decide whether the eastern part will avoid destruction from within.

Uaxactún, population 280, is one of 14 villages awarded government concessions more than a decade ago as part of an experiment in community-based forest management. The concessions, covering nearly one-fourth of the reserve, require residents to protect the forest ecosystem and manage its wood and other resources sustainably.

The villagers must refrain from poaching, intensive logging, slash-and-burn farming, and other unsustainable practices, as well as patrol for and report any such illegal activity. In return, CONAP, WCS, and other groups provide technical and financial support for forest-product ventures. Dozens of residents now work in sustainable harvesting of timber, date palm fronds, chicle for chewing gum, and other non-timber products from the forest. Others work in the village sawmill and woodworking shop.

Village leaders say the concession is working well. But not all the concessions have been so successful, according to a study published in March in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. Among reasons for the problems were limited funding, the low CONAP budget, pressure from illegal ranching, and land speculation.

The effort in the village of Cruce a la Colorada was one of the failures. In 2010, disputes between ranchers and concession managers became so heated that concession members received death threats. A community leader was assassinated. In the ensuing climate of fear, the project collapsed.

But the conservation groups remain hopeful.

"You can grapple with these governance issues and you can have success," McNab says. "It takes an integrated strategy working with a huge suite of partners, but it can be done."

Extinctions on The Rise in Brazil

Among other forest mammals, giant anteaters were found to be virtually extinct. Photo courtesy: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Large vertebrates are rapidly going extinct in the small forest fragments remaining after mass deforestation in Brazil.

Led by England’s University of East Anglia (UEA), an international team of scientists assessed the long-term effects of hunting and forest fragmentation on tropical biodiversity in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.

About 90 percent of the area has been deforested for agriculture, grazing, and development with most remnants smaller than a football pitch. On average, these patches contained only four of the 18 mammal species being surveyed.

“We uncovered a staggering process of local extinctions of mid-sized and large mammals,” said study co-author Gustavo Canale from the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT) in a press release.

The study revealed that white-lipped peccaries were completely extinct, and other mammals like jaguars, woolly spider monkeys, and giant anteaters were nearly extinct.

“You might expect forest fragments with a relatively intact canopy structure to still support high levels of biodiversity,” said study senior author Carlos Peres from UEA in the release. “Our study demonstrates that this is rarely the case, unless these fragments are strictly protected from hunting pressure.”

The researchers found that fragments in protected areas had the most number of species in the region.

“We therefore recommend the implementation of new strictly protected areas, such as national parks and biological reserves, including forest fragments containing populations of endangered, rare, and endemic species, particularly those facing imminent extinctions,” Canale said.

However, many existing protected areas are under threat from degradation and being downsized or degazetted.

“Human populations are exploding and very few areas remain untouched by the expanding cornucopia of human impacts,” Peres said. “It is therefore essential to enforce protection in areas that are nominally protected ‘on paper.’ The future of tropical forest wildlife depends on it.”

Nearly 100 Species of Birds Threatened in Amazon

The Hoary-throated Spinetail is predicted to lose more than 80% of its habitat in the Amazon, according to the latest survey of the world's birds. Photo courtesy: IUCN

Birds in the Amazon are under increasing threat from deforestation, while large populations of duck have disappeared from northern Europe, and vultures are under intensifying attack in Africa, according to the latest survey of the world's birds.

The Rio Branco antbird has been singled out for particular concern – it lives in the Amazon, but its relatively long lifespan makes it more vulnerable than some other species to even moderate deforestation. The hoary-throated spinetail is predicted to lose more than 80% of its habitat in the same region, putting it on the "critically endangered" list, meaning the species faces serious risk of extinction.

According to BirdLife International's update for 2012 of the IUCN red list of threatened species, close to 100 species of birds across the Amazon region are now at a greatly increased threat of extinction.

"We have previously underestimated the risk of extinction that many of Amazonia's bird species are facing," said Leon Bennun, director of science, policy and information at BirdLife. "However, given the recent weakening of Brazilian forest law, the situation may be even worse than recent studies have predicted."

In Africa, the white-backed and Rueppell's vultures have been classified as "endangered", after their numbers have declined rapidly. Vultures have been suffering across the globe, particularly in areas such as India and south-east Asia, because of poisoning from pesticides, loss of habitat and harassment from farmers. The decline in their numbers has raised fears for the future of other species, as vultures play a key role in the food chain by feeding on dead animals.

But this year's list – based on a review that takes place every four years – shows that it is not just tropical species that are facing serious threats. In northern Europe, more than one million long-tailed ducks have mysteriously disappeared from the Baltic region over the past two decades. No one is sure why this has happened, and the species is now classified as "vulnerable", while another northern European sea duck, the Velvet Scoter, has been listed as "endangered".

BirdLife called for conservation efforts to be increased, as birds across the globe face mounting threats from habitat loss, hunting and predation, pollution, and other environmental problems.

Stuart Butchart, global research coordinator for BirdLife, pointed to the success of some conservation programmes as a guide to future efforts to ensure the survival of some of the world's rarest species. For instance, in the Pacific, the Raratonga Monarch of the Cook Islands has returned from the brink of extinction, owing to a concerted attempt to control predators such as black rats, which are not native to the islands and the proliferation of which created havoc for nesting birds. In Brazil, the restinga antwren, which lives in the coastal south-east of the country, has been found to be more widespread than previously thought, while a new protected area covering some of its key habitat should help to ensure its long term survival.

Butchart said: "Such successes show the remarkable achievements that are possible where effort and dedication by conservationists and local communities are backed up with political support and adequate resources." But he said more efforts were needed, and on a wider scale, to ensure more species stay off the critically endangered list.

Deforestation Threatens Vietnam's Mangrove Forests

Under threat ... an Acehnese worker prepares mangrove saplings on the outskirts of Banda Aceh. Photo courtesy: Tarmizy Harva/Reuters

Standing at the entrance to Lang Co town hall, 69-year-old Mai Truc Lam gestured to the two-story building, the sun-drenched parking lot and two-lane road in front, and described the small coastal community as it once was.

"We are standing in an area that used to be mangroves," the weathered fisherman said, and then described the negative impact deforestation has wrought on the area's sea life. "Now, we do not see some species of fish here anymore."

A few minutes' drive away, on a sliver of sand that forms the Lap An Lagoon on the central coast of Vietnam, lies a modest grove of trees – some evergreens that shed a path of soft needles, and where the land meets the sea, Lang Co's few remaining hectares of mangroves, perched above the water upon their stilted, flying buttress-like roots.

Some of the mangrove trees have torpedo-shaped seeds, which have poked into the ground and given birth to a new generation of delicate seedlings, all too easily trampled upon by oblivious passersby. Yet these remaining mangroves face the threat of being razed entirely to make way for a golf course as part of local economic development plans – part of a global development trend that has seen the clearance of as much as 50% of the world's mangroves over the past half a century.

Mangroves grow along the ocean coasts of 118 countries – with a quarter of the world's 40m hectares being in south-east Asia – but with widespread deforestation due to population pressure, expansion of shrimp farms and development, scientists fear mangroves may disappear altogether in as little as 100 years. At their best, mangroves form a vast coastal barrier of trunks and roots against the sea, controlling erosion, protecting communities from storms, and providing an environment for greater fish diversity.

Furthermore, scientists last year unveiled research pointing to mangrove forests as ideal repositories for carbon storage – containing an average of 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, compared with 300 tonnes per hectare of tropical forest – which could help to fight climate change by keeping carbon locked away on land and out of the atmosphere. The scientists found that most of the carbon in mangrove forests – 49% to 98% – is stored below ground in thick, tidally submerged soil in which decomposition is anaerobic in the absence of oxygen. Yet with mangrove conservation up against economic development, the more obvious path to money wins.

"My sense in Lang Co, and in provinces across Vietnam, is that economic development has become a driving force so dominant that environmental precautions have fallen by the wayside," said Evan Fox, a coastal planning consultant. "In villages where local governments are searching for ways to bolster their economic output, it is difficult to justify preservation of an area if managers and local people cannot discern its tangible benefit."

There are laws that protect the forests and mangroves in Vietnam, but enforcement can be lax, rendering such regulations impotent. "My interpretation is that it's illegal but everything is negotiable in Vietnam and since there is no consequence for breaking the law (at least in the environmental domain), mangroves get cut. Anyway, since there are so many conflicting laws, you can probably legalise what you've done by reference to a previous law," said Jake Brunner, programme co-ordinator for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Vietnam.

Shrimp farms have been one of the big drivers behind mangrove loss. A 2011 analysis of images of Vietnam's southern Mekong delta – an area that is typically mangroves – found that from 1973 to 2008, more than half of the mangroves were converted into shrimp farms, causing serious erosion. Nonetheless, communities and governments have taken little notice of the protective services that mangroves provide until a disaster of epic proportions strikes – such as the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed some 180,000 people in western Indonesia's Aceh province.

"In Aceh, after the tsunami, the result wouldn't have been like this, if we still had mangroves," said Daniel Murdiyarso, a scientist with the Indonesia-based Centre for International Forestry Research and one of the researchers behind the mangrove carbon-storage findings.

Disaster management and risk reduction are now squarely on the Indonesian government's radar, but in most countries – and most of the time – the impact of climate change is incremental and therefore unlikely to spur governments and communities to action. When typhoons have hit Vietnam, mangroves have helped to save lives.

"That's when people noticed that where there were mangroves, people survived," Brunner said. "Thailand and Indonesia suffered a very high magnitude event, the tsunami, and that sent a very clear message. In Vietnam, there have been higher frequency, but lower magnitude events, so it hasn't quite had the same impact, and you still see mangroves being lost."

Initiatives like the Mangroves for the Future (MFF), established after the 2004 tsunami and co-chaired by IUCN and the UN Development Programme, offer grants to communities like Lang Co to protect their mangroves. Since 2008, MFF has implemented about 90 projects in its eight member countries across south and south-east Asia. The $29,000 project in Lang Co – $23,000 from MFF and $6,000 from the grantee organisation, the Centre for Community Research and Development (CCRD), and the local community – is to focus on supporting natural regeneration of existing mangroves, which is less expensive and more effective than planting. According to CCRD, Lang Co had about 100 hectares of mangroves two decades ago, but today only five hectares of poor-quality mangroves remain.

Under the MFF grant, the Lang Co fishing association has been tasked with looking after these mangroves. Local fishermen will be trained in mangrove and aquatic resource management and protection.

Newly-Discovered Species Already Endangered

Cloudforest at an imperiled mountain site, Cerro Pata de Pajaro, in western Ecuador. Photograph: Paul S Hamilton/RAEI

In the misty beauty of a threatened rainforest in Ecuador, a team of scientists have discovered a new species of snail-sucking snake, 30 varieties of frog and a gecko so tiny it can perch on the top of a pencil. Amazing discoveries; but, already endangered. How can this be? We’ve only just found them; and, we might lose them in the very near future?

Unfortunately, these new discoveries were found in an area that is being rapidly deforested threatening them and the other animals there with extinction. Cerro Pata de Pájaro is the area of rain and cloud forest where the species were found; but, approximately 95% of the surrounding areas have been felled to make way for farming, said Paul Hamilton, leader of the expedition for Reptile and Amphibian Ecology International.

A glass frog from western Ecuador shows its beating heart through its transparent chest. Photograph: Paul S Hamilton/RAEI

As if this cornucopia of new species isn’t enough, in the remaining forest cover scientists have made several more important, equally amazing discoveries. Each mountaintop in the region is its own microhabitat, with its own variety of frog, lizard, and other small animal.

"In this part of Ecuador, if you go to one spot you can find 20 or 30 species of frog, and if you go to the next site over you will see a whole bunch of different ones," said Hamilton.

Important discoveries included a snake with striking red markings and a blunt snout that allows the snake to jam it’s snout into the hole of a snail shell and suction to suck the snail right out of its shell; frogs which lay their eggs in trees, rather than in water; salamanders that have no lungs but breathe entirely through their skin; geckos and at least four previously unseen types of stick insect.

An unidentified snail-sucking snake of the genus Sibon recently found in western Ecuador. A similar species is found nearly 600 miles away in Panama. Photograph: Paul S Hamilton/RAEI

Deforestation and climate change are forcing the animals to make drastic changes in their lifestyles if they are to survive. Higher temperatures and drought are forcing them to move to higher elevations in search of cooler, wetter climates. Frogs which depend heavily on the moist tree cover to protect their eggs are in the greatest danger.

It appears that we might lose these species before we learn anything about them other than they exist.

Via guardian

Some Interesting Stuff

The Giri Raja Chicken

Worsening food prices world wide have caused a hardship on everyone particularly the poor, the uneducated, the unemployed and others. India has started a new project for impoverished rural farmers using the Giri Raja chicken – a practically extinct chicken native to India. Giri Raja means “forest king.” The chicken is a particularly hardy breed that requires little care and little in the way of extra food when allowed to forage outside around the farmer’s home and fields.

With this bird, the government is trying to turn the tide against factory-farmed chickens which offers advantages to the poor farmer.

John Callahan of “Compassion in World Farming” is backing this project for its ingenuity and ability to raise the standard of living amongst the poor rural farmers of India. The chickens have a very hardy immune system and do well foraging outside all year round. The farmers don’t need any special or expensive food for these chickens as foraging is natural to them. If they require extra feeding, the farmers can use local, cheaper feed thereby drastically reducing the cost of both eggs and meat.

By raising these chickens, poor farming families can raise their standard of living twofold. First, they have the eggs produced by these chickens to either eat themselves, sell, or a combination of the two. Secondly, by allowing a certain percent of the eggs to be fertilized and develop into chicks, they can subsidize their income by selling some chickens for meat, not to mention the added bonus of chicken for their own meals.

The Indian government is having such great success with this program; they are considering suggesting it to other countries.


Whales Losing Blubber

Scientist in Japan have made a discovery regarding the condition of the earth’s whales. This discovery is a startling one and has impressed upon scientists the need to act now regarding global warming.

The Japanese are using this discovery to defend their controversial whaling program. They claim that the information could only be captured by killing the animals.

The Japanese have been collecting data on the thousands of Minke whales they have slaughtered since the late 1980’s. This data establishes that the animals have lost a significant amount of blubber. Forty-five thousand Minke whales show that the blubber is decreasing at a worrying rate of speed say researchers.

The researchers from the Institute of Cetacean Research located in Tokyo offers the first evidence that global warming could be harming the whale population by restricting food supplies.
Lars Walloe, a Norwegian whale expert at the University of Oslo, who helped the Japanese team analyze the data, and an author of the study, said: "This is a big change in blubber and if it continues it could make it more difficult for the whales to survive. It indicates there have been some big changes in their ecosystem."

Blubber is used by whales for energy and insulation. There is a possibility that this loss of blubber could make reproduction difficult.


The Lungs of the Earth to be Exploited Again

Energy companies have upped their land use for oil and gas explorations in the Western Amazon to around 180 zones. Combined this land covers an area of 688,000 sq. km., almost equivalent to the size of Texas.

Conservationists warn that this will put some of the planet’s most pristine and biodiverse forests at risk. The majority of the planned oil and gas projects are in the most species-rich areas of the Amazon.

Researchers used government information on land that has been leased to state or multinational energy companies over the past four years to create oil and gas exploration maps for western Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia. The maps showed that in Peru and Ecuador, regions designated for oil and gas projects already cover more than two thirds of the Amazon. Of 64 oil and gas regions that cover 72% of the Peruvian Amazon, all but eight were approved since 2003. Major increases in activity are expected in Bolivia and western Brazil.

"We've been following oil and gas development in the Amazon since 2004 and the picture has changed before our eyes," said Matt Finer of Save America's Forests, a US-based environment group. "When you look at where the oil and gas blocks are, they overlap perfectly on top of the peak biodiversity spots, almost as if by design, and this is in one of the most, if not the most, biodiverse place on Earth."

"The real concern is when exploration is successful and a zone moves into the development phase, because that's when the roads, drilling and pipelines come in," said Finer.

However further research has proved that it is not just the plants and animals that are at risk in the Amazon. Many of the planned exploration and extraction projects are planned for land that is home to indigenous peoples. These people may be being consulted; but, they have no say in whether a project goes ahead or not.

At least 58 of the 64 regions in Peru are on land where isolated communities live, with a further 17 infringing areas that have existing or proposed reserves for indigenous groups.

"The way that oil development is being pursued in the western Amazon is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region," said Brian Keane of Land is Life. "International agreements and inter-American human rights law recognize indigenous peoples have rights to their lands, and explicitly prohibit the granting of concessions to exploit natural resources in their territories without their free, prior and informed consent," he added.