Suriname cancels controversial Mennonite pilot program, but bigger problems loom

[Judi Lynn]

2. Can Carbon Offsets Save a Fragile Band of Belize's Tropical Rainforest?

The Maya Forest Corridor is a 2.5 mile-wide stretch of forest, wetlands and savanna that connects the jungles of southern Belize with forests in the north and in Guatemala and Mexico. Together, this Selva Maya is the largest tropical forest north of the Amazon. Credit: Kevin Quischan

Conservationists are racing to save what’s left of the largest tropical forest in Central America, as commercial farming and population growth threaten to cleave it in two.

By Nicholas Kusnetz
March 10, 2024


GALLON JUG, Belize — Deep in a jungle in northern Belize, Elma Kay stood at the base of a rare, ancient mahogany tree, perhaps the only one for miles around. On the trunk above her head were healed gashes where loggers had erected a platform decades ago in an aborted attempt to fell the giant hardwood, prized for its richly hued lumber.

The Big Tree, as Kay calls it, is a relic. Centuries of extraction removed nearly all the old-growth mahoganies from northern Belize, first under British colonial rule and then commercial logging.

“This is a testament that this forest can support trees like this,” said Kay, a leading Belizean conservationist, her hand resting on the tree’s trunk, more than eight feet across. She was wearing a white, long-sleeved utility shirt to deter biting insects, despite richly humid heat, and carried binoculars around her neck.

Kay spent her childhood outdoors, looking for snake eggs and swimming in the lagoon next to her village. But it was a week spent in the jungle only about 20 miles from the Big Tree, in what was then a newly-created forest reserve, that hooked her on conservation. Kay was 16 when she won a scholarship to join a trip organized by a group called Save the Rainforest, which brought teachers from North America to the jungle. It was the first time she realized that conservation biology could be a career. Almost 30 years later her work brought her back to the same jungle.

In 2021, the forest surrounding the Big Tree was for sale and the most likely buyers were Mennonite farmers prepared to clear the jungle. The owner, an American logging firm, had extracted only select trees while leaving the rest of the forest largely intact. It had already sold smaller parcels, and those had been quickly cleared for row crops or pasture. If this much larger patch were cleared, too, it would eliminate a crucial connection between Belize’s jungle and the rest of the Selva Maya, which stretches into Guatemala and Mexico and forms the largest tropical forest in the western hemisphere outside the Amazon.

More:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10032024/belize-tropical-rainforest-deforestation-carbon-offsets/

They should ban the practice by US American "green" lumber companies of doing "selective" harvesting of trees then selling them to groups who convert the land to farmland, destroying every tree left standing by the lumber companies. )