Can ‘Rewilding’ Come to Southeast Asia?
While it looks promising in the Global North, smokescreens and corruption prevail in Southeast Asia
By: Gregory McCann
Can so-called “re-wilding,” the process of allowing nature to take care of itself to repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes, play a role in saving the planet? Surprisingly, across much of the Northern hemisphere, as countries get richer, citizens prioritize environmental conservation more, and higher productivity allows economies to grow without needing to clear more forests for land and resources.
On the extreme northern and midwestern areas of the US, for instance, significant agricultural areas cleared centuries ago are simply being abandoned to nature as their inhabitants move to the cities, with striking results. Stephen Clare, a London-based researcher who writes about emerging technologies, in a recent paper, “Notes on Progress: Growing Forests,” asserts in an intriguing paper that “As with other environmental problems, we’re beginning to see a Kuznets Curve emerge in forestry.” Industrialization and agricultural expansion do initially come at the expense of forests, he writes, But as countries get richer, this trend reverses: citizens prioritize environmental conservation more, and higher productivity allows economies to grow without needing to clear more forests for land and resources.
China and India are the world’s leading countries in reforestation although that masks problems as too much of the reforestation is in single species that don’t allow for biodiversity. But, as Clare writes, “deforestation in tropical, developing nations is also slowing. From 1990 through 2020, real progress on combating forest loss took place in most developing nations. In Brazil, where each year more forest is lost than in any other country, there has been a decline of over 60 percent. Progress in Indonesia was similarly promising: from over 17,000 square kilometers lost per year in the ‘90s to about 7,500 per year in the 2010s. In fact, the rate of forest loss slowed or reversed in a majority of countries that lost forest in that period.”…