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Amazon rainforest under threat
21/01/2001 13:46 - (SA)
Rio de Janeiro - A billion-dollar development programme in Brazil threatens to have a catastrophic impact on the Amazon rain forest, experts warned on Friday.
The plans envisage new roads and rail links being carved through
the forest over the next seven years, opening up regions that were once inaccessible.
The move is part of a huge economic programme known as Avanca
Brasil -Advance Brazil. Ecologists fear it will result in large
swathes of forest being lost to make way for farming, mining, oil
exploration, logging, and new communities.
The US and Brazilian experts said conservation projects now under way in the Amazon would not be able to withstand the destruction.
According to one forecast, less than 5 per cent of the land will
survive as pristine forest, and 42 per cent of the region would
either be totally deforested or heavily degraded by 2020.
Scott Bergen, a forest scientist at Oregon State University in
Portland, US,, who helped carry out an investigation into the
likely fate of the Amazon, said: "If these development plans go
through, we'll lose the largest remaining wilderness on Earth and a huge amount of the world's remaining biodiversity".
The rate of forest destruction in the Amazon was now almost five
million acres a year and the highest in the world, said the experts writing in the journal Science.
According to their forecasts, that rate could increase by more than 25 per cent a year over the next 20 years.
The scientists evaluated satellite data to measure the impact of
past development on the Amazon, and drew on the information to
assess what might happen in future. - Sapa-DPA
- SAPA
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