Facebook to act on illegal sale of Amazon rainforest

By Joao Fellet and Charlotte Pamment

BBC Brasil

    The Amazon rainforest is home to one in 10 known species on Earth

Facebook says it will begin clamping down on the illegal sale of protected areas of the Amazon rainforest on its site.

The social media giant changed its policy following a BBC investigation into the practice.

The new measures will apply only to conservation areas and not to publicly owned forest.

And the move will be limited to the Amazon, not other rainforests and wildlife habitats across the world.

According to a recent study from the think tank Ipam (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambental da Amazonia), a third of all deforestation happens in publicly-owned forests in the Amazon.

Facebook said it would not reveal how it planned to find the illegal ads but said it would "seek to identify and block new listings" in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest.

Illegal deforestation exposed

In February, the BBC Our World documentary Selling the Amazon revealed that plots of rainforest as large as 1,000 football pitches were being listed on Facebook's classified ads service.

Alvim Souza Alves was trying to sell land for about £16,400

Many of the plots were inside protected areas, including national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples.

Read More

Jumbo-gardeners: How elephants affect weather

The tropical forests of Congo help create downpours many miles away. What’s a key element in this forest flourishing? 
The elephant!

The tropical rainforests of Africa and Asia play a crucial role in keeping our planet healthy. They moderate our climate, absorb the carbon we produce, and act as a major source of atmospheric moisture – which can fall as rain many miles away.

One of the biggest tropical forests in the world is in Congo. Its huge size and incredible biodiversity is partly thanks to an unlikely ally – the elephant.

In this film, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist Dr M Sanjayan, Dr Valerie Kapos of the UN Environment Programme, and tropical field biologist and conservationist Dr Ian Redmond reveal the crucial role that elephants play in keeping these forests strong and resilient, and how elephants are the most important player when it comes to the diversity of tree species in the rainforest. 

From BBC-Future

Brazil builds giant Amazon observation tower

Construction has begun on a giant observation tower in the heart of the Amazon basin to monitor climate change.

The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory is expected to rise 325m from the ground.

Its instruments will gather data on greenhouse gases, aerosol particles and the weather in one of the largest continuous rain forests on the planet.

Brazilian and German scientists hope to use the data to better understand sources of greenhouse gases and answer questions on climate change.

The tower is being constructed out of steel that was brought thousands of kilometres from the south of Brazil to the site, about 160km (100 miles) from the Amazonian city of Manaus.

Manaus-the state capital of Amazonas

Because of its height, the tower will make it possible to investigate the alteration and movement of air masses through the forest over a distance of several hundred kilometres.

"The measurement point is widely without direct human influence, and therefore ideal to investigate the meaning of the forest region for the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere," said Jurgen Kesselmeier, the project coordinator for the German side, quoted on the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz website.

The Amazon jungle is one of the world's most sensitive ecosystems, with a powerful influence on the intake and release of carbon into the atmosphere.

"The tower will help us answer innumerable questions related to global climate change," said Paulo Artaxo, from the University of Sao Paulo.

The tower will be integrated into an existing structure of smaller measuring towers in the region.

When finished, it will complement a similar observatory built in 2006 that already stands in Central Siberia.

The Amazon rainforest is responsible for absorbing tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere

From BBC Sci/ Environment