Here are some numbers that put into perspective the human dominance of the planet: people and domesticated livestock account for 96 percent of the biomass of all mammals on the planet. In other words, if you weighed up all the mammals of the planet on a giant scale, wild mammals (including those very heavy whales and elephants) are only 4 percent of the total. Yikes! The same holds true for birds. The biomass of all the chicken in the world is about three times higher than that of wild birds. What if conservation measures that put their goals in terms of land area (like Madagascar’s Durban Vision of 10% in protected areas, or E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth) switched to a biomass goal instead?
Read the rest of this entry »Statistics to open your eyes: our biomass on this planet
November 1, 2019
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Conservation, Statistic to open your eyes | 
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Socio-ecological landscapes of Thừa Thiên-Huế province
September 19, 2017
Unrecognizable 20 years ago: Acacia plantations and new road in Nam Đông district, Thừa Thiên-Huế province.
The past week marked the launch of our new, Swiss government funded research project on the “forest transition” in Vietnam, which I’m leading in collaboration with colleagues Trần Nam Thắng and Ngô Trí Dũng of Huế University and Roland Cochard at Unil (see previous blog). The project aims to promote sustainable forest management and resilient rural livelihoods in the rapidly changing forest landscapes of this region.
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Research, Smallholder farming, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: agroforestry, forest transition, landscapes, plantation forests | Permalink
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Announcing new project on forest landscapes in Vietnam (with PhD post)
April 25, 2017Forest in Vietnam can mean many things. There are the dense, dipterocarp rainforests that have divulged mammal species previously unknown to science, like the saola. There are also the vast plantations of exotic acacias growing wood for industry, as I detailed in a previous blog entry. And these forests have changed rapidly in the past few decades in step with the country’s economy and politics. The country is often seen to have undergone a “forest transition”, whereby a previous history of deforestation transitions to a new phase characterised by forest stability and indeed regrowth (albeit largely with exotic plantations). In a new research-for-development project (see PhD job ad here), we intend to investigate the exact nature of the forest transition and its feedback into sustainable development for the heavily peopled rural landscapes of Vietnam.
Acacia mangium, forest plantations, and natural rainforest in A Luoi district, Vietnam
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Arbres voyageurs et plantes invasives dans les pays du Sud
October 17, 2016
Last month I gave the ceremonial first lecture of the academic year for our Faculty. The video is now online (see below). The presentation dips into a number of research projects I’ve contributed to in recent years in order to make a number of observations about the relationship between plants and people, notably with iconic ‘natural’ plants and problematic ‘invasive’ weeds. These observations include: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged: australian acacias, baobabs, biological invasions, invasive species, weeds | Permalink
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Peatland deforestation for acacia in Indonesia
September 27, 2014Oil palm gets all the attention, but what about acacia? Oil palm has become synonymous with deforestation in Indonesia and resulting losses of orang-utan habitat, increased carbon emissions, and unhealthy smoke haze. But equally large areas of peatland are being converted to pulp and paper plantations of tropical salwood wattles like Acacia crassicarpa and A. magnum, trees that now cover many millions of hectares in South East Asia. In Riau province, Sumatra, the two big pulp mills (operated by Asia Pulp and Paper [APP] and Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd [APRIL]) have around 75 and 45 per cent (respectively) of their pulp plantations located on peatland. The ways in which such forestry concessions have been granted and implemented have inspired dramatic protests: 28 residents of the Meranti Islands in Riau Province stitched their lips shut while demonstrating in front of government buildings in Jakarta (Jakarta Post; Transparency Int.). Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Political ecology, Research, Sustainability | Tagged: deforestation, forestry, Indonesia, peatland, protest | Permalink
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Biodiversity conservation in a developing country: new book
May 9, 2014I’ve finally received my copy of the new edited book Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar, edited by Ivan Scales of Cambridge University. This will be a fantastic resource for scholars of Madagascar new and old, as well as more broadly. It includes chapters on a full array of topics: on biodiversity, palaeoecology, and archaeology, on the measurement and causes of deforestation, on environmental politics, policies, programs, and projects, and on different economic development-and-conservation solutions, often (but not always) from a political ecology perspective, broadly construed.
Highlights for me in the book – which also has two of my own chapters – include: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Book Review, Conservation, Development, Madagascar, Political ecology | Tagged: Madagascar | Permalink
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Why we can’t say Madagascar is 90% deforested
April 25, 2014If stated often enough, a fact becomes truth. That seems to be the case with the oft-repeated figure that “Madagascar has lost 90% of its original forest cover”. The problem, as Bill McConnell of Michigan State University and I point out in a letter just published in Science magazine, is that this fact cannot be proven.
Slash-and-burn tavy clearing near Andapa, Madagascar (photo by C. Kull)
5 Comments | Conservation, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: conservation, deforestation, Madagascar, remote sensing | Permalink
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