This article from the Economist was brought to my attention by a chap I met at a trustee meeting for a new Charity called Leapfrog.

Leapfrog is a unique business-led not-for-profit organisation that channels pro bono (free) services from top businesses into activities that deliver carbon reductions and they look set to make a huge difference by leveraging the desire of professionals in the corporate world to utilise their acquired skills for the not for profit sector, specifically in the climate change arena.

The article talks about how the Amazon ‘could’ develop into the future, focusing on both the needs of the  population within the forests of Brazil and the need for lond term sustainability and forest conservation.

Given the fact that the forest is one and a half times the size of India (8 times the size of Texas according to the article) and is home to over 10 million people, it’s an issue that needs a plan.

The article has some great case studies about villages and towns that have grown and thrive in the forest like Manaus,

About 900 miles (1,500km) downriver to the east, in Amazonas state, stands Manaus. Rubber barons built the city from the 1860s onwards. Its early residents made up for their distance from the European centres of fashion by trying to outdo Paris during the BELLE ePOQUE in drinking and debauchery. Now Manaus’s Zona Franca is the workshop for most of the televisions, washing machines and other white goods sold in Brazil. Special arrangements allow firms such as Sony and LG to import parts tax-free from elsewhere in the world and assemble them there. Despite being surrounded on all sides by thick forest, Manaus hums with manufacturing.

Have a read of it, I think it sounds like a good plan for the future development.

Another great article from the Guardian. A little bit of the copy is below about an expedition, sponsored by the Darwin Initiative in Southern Malawi, Africa.

Here is a link to the article, because there is an audio broadcast on the article thats really worth listening to.

The unique lost rainforest of Mount Mabu is to be given protection from exploitation, following a new expedition to the remote area revealed a host of new species.

The existence of the pristine forest in northern Mozambique was revealed by the Observer last year, and was originally discovered with the help of Google Earth. It is now thought to be the largest such forest in southern Africa.

At a meeting this week in the capital Maputo, government ministers agreed to put conservation measures in place before any commercial logging occurs there after meeting representatives from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust (MMCT), and numerous other groups involved in the project.

“The three messages we conveyed were that there is rich biodiversity in Mozambique, that butterflies and botany can be as important as mammals, and that conservation policy should take into consideration areas such as these mountains or the coastal forests, that do not easily fit into the usual category of national park,” said Kew’s Jonathan Timberlake. The media coverage had clinched the participation of the government, added Paul Smith, head of the Millennium Seed Bank project at Kew.

Julian Bayliss of MMCT, who first identified Mount Mabu as an area of possible exploration using satellite imagery on Google Earth said: “As scientists it is incredibly exciting to go into a previously unexplored area and discover new species of butterfly, snake and chameleon, but our aim was always to secure pledges of conservation towards the protection of these sites.”