• Trees absorb carbon and emit oxygen, cleaning the air locally and the atmosphere globally. Forests also stabilize and nourish soil, provide food and shade, clean water, and house 80% of all terrestrial life.
• Deforestation releases 2 billion tonnes of CO2 each year.
• CAUSE Canada has planted nearly 3 million trees in Central America, sequestering over 12 million tonnes of CO2 in their lifetimes.
  
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Forests are often called the Earth’s lungs, absorbing carbon and emitting oxygen, cleaning the air we all need to survive. But forests do much more than that. Preventing erosion and landslides through stabilizing soil, providing shade, habitat and food for 80% of all terrestrial life, cleaning water, and sustaining the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people are all just a few of the reasons to celebrate forests and to pursue their sustainable use. That’s why the United Nations declared 2011 to be the International Year of Forests.

Current deforestation rates, however, threaten to turn forests from climate assets to climate deficits. Because trees absorb and use carbon for life, when they die that carbon is returned to the atmosphere. That means, as we cut trees, we lose carbon-sequestering capacity in addition to releasing stored carbon to the air. Deforestation releases 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. That’s as much as the entire population of Canada flying from Vancouver to St. John’s every 2 weeks, and it accounts for 25% of all human-caused carbon emissions.

Perhaps most dangerously, tropical deforestation decreases local precipitation and exposes soil to compaction and/or erosion, making it extremely difficult to reestablish forests where they once were.

In Central America, 40% of all the rainforests have been cleared or burned in the last 4 decades, mostly to graze beef cattle for export to North America.

Deforestation is one of the greatest threats to lives and livelihoods in Central America. In the Guatemalan Highlands, steep and denuded hillsides mean massive topsoil erosion, lost wildlife habitat, and decreasing agricultural productivity. Between 1990 and 2005, Guatemala lost 17% of its forest cover and, when Hurricane Stan struck in the final year of that period, mudslides on deforested slopes killed 650 people. Yet, fuel and construction requirements for a growing population continue to intensify tree harvesting and increase strain on the forest.

In response, CAUSE Canada has worked with IMDI (Mam Institute for Integrated Development), the first independent development organization in Todos Santos, to establish two large commercial and 20 community-run tree nurseries as part of an integrated forestry program. Environmental education in schools and adult education courses, tree-planting days, and management training initiatives have promoted a new, community-oriented forest management ethic. The 10 operational community nurseries together produce 50,000 trees annually. The big nursery in Todos Santos produces 30,000 to 40,000 alder, cyprus, eucalyptus, and white pine trees, and the one in Comitancillo produces and sells 5,000 fruit trees every year!

On Honduras’ Garifuna Coast, trees have been lost to a very different problem. Lethal Yellowing Disease (LYD), a deadly blight for coconut trees, destroyed over 90% of the region’s coconut palms in the early 2000s. The Garifuna people use coconut for all types of food, construction, medicine, weaving, animal feed, as a buffer against hurricanes and tropical storms, and as a tourism draw. Dead coconut stands devastate the Garifuna economy and culture.

CAUSE Canada established 3 coconut palm nurseries, a hybrid seed producer, 3 community nursery management cooperatives, and a national coconut network to organize monitoring, reforestation, and prevention activities throughout Honduras. In the initial CAUSE Canada project, 20,000 LYD-resistant coconut palms were planted.

In all, CAUSE Canada has planted over 3 million trees in Guatemala and Honduras, plus the constant and ongoing production of tree nurseries.

The trees that CAUSE Canada has already been involved in planting will sequester, in their lifetimes, over 12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere! That’s enough to offset the carbon production of nearly 10,000 Canadians for their entire lives!

CAUSE Canada responded to deforestation in our Central American partner communities because we saw the damage that environmental degradation does to human communities and the rest of the commonwealth of life. We have been rewarded with further insight into the maxim that human justice requires environmental justice, and vice versa. The environment suffers when gross inequality forces the poor into unsustainable activities and permits the wealthy to avoid accountability for their exploitation of common resources. Human society and life suffer when environmental degradation robs us of the ecological services of clean air and water, productive land, a relatively predictable climate, and space in which to observe, unmediated, our own smallness. Human justice and environmental justice are codependent.

Forest renewal in Guatemala and Honduras is great for local communities, but it’s awfully good for the rest of us, too.