Il y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

The latest climate prediction modelling shows that the Amazon basin may not suffer a catastrophic drought later this century due to global warming, despite recent fears

Although Brazil’s environmental policing has many imperfections, Gilberto Câmara, Inpe’s director-general, insists that the alerts have led to a substantial reduction in Amazonian deforestation in recent years. In 2011, 6,238 sq km of forest were lost – the smallest area since satellite monitoring started in 1988. As recently as 2005, the annual deforestation rate was more than 25,000 sq km.

Inpe does not send the satellite observations only to its own government and law enforcement agencies – all the data are made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

“We used to sell remote sensing data, like other space agencies,” says Câmara, “but in 2004 we opened it all up for free. We used to sell 1,000 images a year; now we distribute 500,000 images freely around the world. Full and open access to space-based information is indispensable for global sustainable development.” Câmara is critical of agencies elsewhere that restrict public access to environmental monitoring data.

Satellite monitoring shows not only how much forest is lost, but also what the cleared land is used for – most becomes pasture for low-intensity cattle ranching.

“Of the 720,000 sq km of Amazon forest lost so far, about 65 per cent is used for cattle,” Câmara says. “This means that Brazil has lost an enormous amount of biodiversity just to graze cattle at about one head per hectare.” Just 5 per cent of former forest land is devoted to growing commercial crops – mainly soya beans.

Such information can be commercially, as well as environmentally, valuable. For instance, Inpe provides the data to enforce a soya moratorium. In place since 2006, and endorsed by Greenpeace, this agreement commits all of Brazil’s big soya traders to buy only from farmers who can prove that their land did not come from illegal deforestation. So, soya grown on uncertified land is worth less on the market.

Câmara says that most space agencies around the world exist at least partly “for geopolitical and military reasons”, such as supporting a domestic aerospace industry. Inpe is different, he claims: “Our aim is to support the development of a peaceful, green economy in Brazil.”

October 7, 2011 10:09 pm The Better Angels of Our Nature

Review by Clive Cookson Financial Times

Despite appearances, the human race is losing its appetite for violence

Fratricide 'Cain murdering Abel' by Bartolomo Manfredi (c1610)

Readers, rejoice: we are living at a time that is not only the healthiest, wealthiest and best-educated in history but also by far the least violent.

That is the message from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychology professor and one of the world’s most celebrated science writers. He expects it to be controversial, given our constant exposure to stories in the media about contemporary violence and horrific images of mass carnage in the recent past.

To demonstrate that people have become progressively more peaceful since Neolithic times – and that the trend is continuing into the 21st century – Pinker devotes much of The Better Angels of Our Nature to a historical and statistical analysis of violence at all scales and of many types, from warfare between tribes and nations to individual murders, from torture and rape to slavery and cruelty to animals. This takes up about two-thirds of the book, before Pinker the historian hands over to the more familiar figure of Pinker the psychologist, who analyses why the “inner demons” behind violent behaviour are giving way to the “better angels” of co-operation and altruism.

Unlike the sceptical reader set up by Pinker in his introduction, who laments the growing violence of the modern world and refuses to believe that things are getting better, I felt that I knew enough about the past to accept his basic thesis before I started the book. Even so, I was astonished by the extent to which violence has declined in every shape, form and scale.

In his statistical argument Pinker rightly focuses on the rate of violence relative to the size of population, rather than the number of violent acts. What matters to an individual living at a particular time and place is their risk of becoming a victim of violence. In moral terms too, Pinker believes the experience of those who enjoy full lives should be included in any reckoning.

The second world war was the worst episode in human history in terms of absolute numbers killed on the battlefield and indirect deaths of non-combatants. But when adjusted for population size, the death toll of 55m makes it only the ninth most deadly event over the past 1,200 years.

The worst of all, according to Pinker’s interpretation of figures from the “atrocitologist” Matthew White, was the eighth-century An Lushan revolt and civil war that killed 36m in and around China (equivalent to 429m deaths in the mid-20th century). Second worst was the 13th-century Mongol conquests (40m deaths, equivalent to 278m in the mid-20th century). Although statistics for ancient atrocities are far from reliable, they are good enough – combined with contemporary accounts – to demonstrate the astonishing bloodlust of past warlords.

Pinker begins his pacification story thousands of years ago with the transition from the hunting, gathering and gardening societies of prehistory to more settled agricultural civilisations with cities and governments. Anyone who has read recent forensic archaeology reports about bodies and skeletons excavated from stone and bronze-age European burial sites will be struck by the frequent evidence of violence. Pinker estimates that the end of raiding and feuding between prehistoric tribes led to a fivefold decrease in violent death rates.

But, by today’s standards, life remained nasty, brutish and short. The next stage, according to Pinker, was the “civilisation process” after the Middle Ages, in which a patchwork of feudal territories was consolidated into large nations with an infrastructure of commerce and the authority to enforce law and order. While nations still went to war, the advent of centralised government greatly reduced the violence between individuals and small groups.

Analysis of court records and official documents shows an astonishing decline in murder across western Europe between the 13th and 20th centuries. Murder rates fell between tenfold and a hundredfold. For example, the murder rate per 100,000 people was 110 in 14th-century Oxford and less than one in 20th-century London.

“The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present,” Pinker says. When he surveyed public perceptions in an internet questionnaire, the average guess was that 20th-century England was about 14 per cent more violent than 14th-century England; in fact it was 95 per cent less violent.

Pinker proposes several historical forces that have promoted peaceful behaviour by suppressing the “inner demons” of human psychology and stimulating our “better angels”. Besides government and commerce, they include feminisation and cosmopolitanism.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, the increasing respect for the interests and values of women has led society away from the glorification of violence. A more cosmopolitan culture – resulting from growing literacy, mobility and the mass media – can prompt people to understand the perspective of those unlike themselves and expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

Finally, Pinker says, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs, “the escalator of reason”, can force people to recognise the futility of violence and reframe it as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. Less than a century ago, many Europeans were positively looking forward to what became the first world war – it is unthinkable that anyone besides a deranged eccentric would look forward to war today.

At 830 pages, the book might be too long. Although Pinker says he needed the length to make his argument and convince the sceptics, I found some passages repetitive. Readers of a squeamish disposition might feel that he has included too many detailed accounts of murder and excruciating torture through the ages, in his effort to illustrate how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence.

Overall, however, this is a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, demonstrating how fortunate the vast majority of us are today to experience serious violence only through the mass media.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Photography with the FT, featuring Stephen Pinker, see FT magazine

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 830 pages

China scientists lead world in research growth By Clive Cookson Published: January 25 2010 18:06 | Last updated: January 25 2010 18:06 FINANCIAL TIMES

China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing. Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020. Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from 10,500 journals worldwide, analysed the performance of four emerging markets countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China, over the past 30 years. China far outperformed every other nation, with a 64-fold increase in peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981, with particular strength in chemistry and materials science.

“China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,” said James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London. “If anything, China’s recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago, while India has not moved as fast as expected and may have missed an opportunity.”

“The issue is the huge reduction in funding for research and development in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Mr Adams. “Although there has been an exodus of many of the rising stars of Russian research, there is still a great pool of talent there. It is not in the interests of the rest of the world for the exodus to continue, and we need more co-funding arrangements to help Russian research get back up to speed.”

By Clive Cookson Financial Times March 29, 2013 6:21 pm

The Panama Canal watershed, where scientists are measuring the economic benefits of nature conservation

Under the wide green umbrella of the Panamanian rainforest, the only signs of human intrusion are yellow, orange and blue marks painted around some of the tree trunks. Those marks help measure the plants’ water efficiency, as trees are believed to steady the flow of rivers.

“We are trying to understand the services provided by forests,” says Jefferson Hall, a Yale-educated forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

For the past five years Hall has been working on the Panama Canal watershed, on forest regeneration and measuring the effects of different land uses on water flows, as well as carbon sequestration and biodiversity. At the same time he is assessing the potential economic return from investment in environmental protection.

His research, in one of the most bio-diverse countries in a region at the forefront of carbon negotiations, is part of a growing effort to give the environment a realistic financial value.

According to recent findings by the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, Latin America and the Caribbean are home to half of the earth’s tropical forests. The region hosts 40 per cent of global biodiversity, which in turn supports 15 per cent of its GDP and 50 per cent of its exports.

In a novel initiative, the IDB believes this “wild wealth” could be turned into a spur for growth and innovation by including the value of biodiversity in key economic sectors.

The wealth of biodiversity generates some critical benefits, such as food, shelter, clean water and air, flood and drought mitigation, disease and pest control. These “ecosystem services” directly support important economic sectors – mostly agriculture, fisheries, forestry and tourism – which together employ 17 per cent of the region’s labour force.

The list of current “services” is long. To name a few, eco-tourism generates $60bn annually in the region; coral reefs in the Caribbean protect the shores and allow the generation of $15bn in revenues; the global economic value of bee pollination is estimated at $200bn.