Rainforest Conservation

Lasers Weigh in on Rainforest Conservation

Have you ever read the perennial taunt that environmentalists have about saving the planet that goes -'The planet's been around for billions of years; it's always going to be here; saving humans is what we need to worry about'? Perhaps environmentalists could get further with their cause talking about saving the human race instead of talking about saving the planet. In an important environmental conference in Cancun last year, the countries of the world established a new way by which to protect the environment (and humanity, by extension). REDD is what they call the mechanism. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (which is what that acronym expands to), is a plan that tries to help with rainforest conservation. They plan to reduce our forests down into a number - a number that quantifies the amount of carbon pollution they remove from the atmosphere.

The thing is, forests can be surprisingly good medicine for the environment. In places like Nepal where forests have been raised from the dead, they found that they've improved the quality of the water drinking water in the area and even brought old extinct freshwater springs back to life. Rainforest conservation can be terribly important for the environment in all kinds of ways. The whole REDD system is meant to turn into a powerful enforcing authority. Countries that work to reduce their carbon pollution through protecting their forests will get paid by other countries that haven't been successful.

So who really knows how much carbon every country manages to put out or get trapped in its forests? There is a high-tech solution to the problem - the technology is called Light Detection and Ranging. It's a high-tech method of shooting lasers from airplanes at forests to measure stuff.

The plan is to send airplanes up there that aim lasers all over forest covered areas to try to count every tree. It's a kind of tree census. Satellites will use this data to count trees to perfection and to measure how much carbon they keep from escaping into the atmosphere. They've just finished mapping out and counting every tree and the carbon it holds in the Peruvian Amazon. That's an area the size of Switzerland that they finished mapping in just three weeks and practically no money at all.

In the REDD method of rainforest conservation, mapping every rainforest tree on earth is only the beginning. Once they do that and measure the amount of carbon every country contributes around the world, they still have to get countries to sign up to paying those penalties and accepting those rewards. You could bend light and use satellites to count every tree on earth. Getting people to commit to a sensible strategy to save the human race might be somewhat more difficult.