Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
Each week we share insights on the fight against climate change from our adoptive countries – this week from the UK and Thailand, where lockdown is sparking reconnections with forest homes.
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From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
Singing in the dark
No. 22 by India Bourke
Thailand’s community forestry bill allows communities living in Baan Samakkee Dham to sustainably use forests and resources for community-based enterprises. Image credit: @RECOFTC
This time two years ago I was lying in the moss and the dark in a wood in Kent, listening to the wildly spiralling calls of nightingales, at an event hosted by the folk-singer Sam Lee.
The feelings sparked that night were so wide-winged they sat inside me for another year until I finally felt ready to write something of them down - just before my move to Hong Kong, and during a visit to a very different but equally transportive forest in Laos, filled with fireflies.
And now this spring, home in Devon, I’ve been listening to the nightingales once again. Except this time via YouTube: on a series of free broadcasts that Lee and guests have put together to help bring their sylvan voices into our locked-down lives.
Hearing their soaring sounds while tucked up under the covers has been one of the most beautiful experiences of these strange few weeks, and has got me remembering both Kent and Laos - and what this precarious moment may mean for humanity’s relationship to all our ancient, woodland homes.
Thailand's new forest law
For many in the UK, the need to be close to nature has gained new force during this enforced period indoors, especially for those without gardens or balconies.
Yet in countries like Thailand that need is taking on other layers of urgency still, with thousands of unemployed labourers returning home to their rural communities in need of work and food.
When I spoke on the phone the other week with Warangkana Rattanarat, Thai country director at the Centre for People and forests (RECOFTC), she stressed that a terrible drought season has left much of the country ravaged by wildfire - but also that, where the forest is still healthy, it is proving a vital source of food security.
“Everyone that can realise income from forests is now doing so,” she explained, through harvesting things like mushrooms, honey, small animals and insects.
Furthermore, thanks to a new community forest law, it has become easier for people to support themselves this way. Instead of having to get permission from the centralised Royal Forests Department they can now register to govern commercial access from within their communities.
Such local control is essential, Rattanarat believes, since people who feel they have rights over their forests are more likely to save and care for them.
“If we allow people to manage the forest resources, they can access essential water and food and they can help to protect it from illegal activities like logging, as well as help put out fires."
“We believe if people get benefits from forests they will protect the forest and the forest will stay for generations.”
Together in the dark
There are still challenges and contradictions to be faced when it comes to Thailand’s plans to expand community forestry. Not least that the proposed law excludes communities in conservation areas from applying for the new status.
COVID-19’s impact is not helping, with the Lockdown making it harder for people to attend the public hearings on revisions to the law.
What may help in the long run, however, Rattanarat says, is further laws supporting the wider principles in play; laws that will help highlight origins of the food and furniture people consume.
And that is a message for governments the world over, not only for Thailand and Asia Pacific.
Just as the pandemic is showing how we must pay much greater attention to the ways we’re encroaching upon the natural world, so too is it revealing how our place never been separate from nature -- but right there alongside it; singing in the dark.
Nightingales’ numbers have declined since humans have retreated from the woods and the practice of coppicing has thinned. While the virus is reminding many just how much we ache to be outside with sun on our skin.
Sam Lee has said that each year someone writes to him to say how they were moved to change their life in some major way after attending one of the nightingale events. I can only hope that, this year, the biggest change garnered is on behalf of the woods themselves.
Must reads from the region
WWF video linking consumption to deforestation outrages some in China, by Wang Chen, China Dialogue
A film linking Chinese shoppers to Amazon deforestation sparked accusations that it was “insulting China” and unfairly appointing blame -- before being taken down.
Breaking down the Amazon: how deforestation could drive the next pandemic - by Lucy Jordan and Emma Howard, UnEarthed
The news that deforestation has jumped during the coronavirus pandemic is devastating but unsurprising. Jordan and Howard cover the issues excellently in this Amazon-focused report.
Obstacles abound in bid to protect Indonesia’s forests and cut emissions, by Hans Nicolas Jong, Mongabay
Countries may plan to cut their emissions -- but some, like Indonesia, have already parcelled out logging concessions that will take them over their limits.
Racism is fuelling more than wildfires, by Sanitsuda Ekachai, Bangkok Post
"Is there a chance that the government and mainstream society will understand that they cannot save the forests without saving forest dwellers and communities?": as Thailand reels from a terrible wildfire season, thoughts are turning to how to prepare for the next.
Use it, don’t lose it: Q&a with Amazon eco scientist Marcelino Guedes, by Deborah Pinto, Mongabay
Not all is gloom. This fascinating interview with a researcher at Brazil’s Amapa Federal University explores how indigenous soil management in the Amazon resulted in improvements in its quality.
What else I've been listening to...
Simon McBurney read his Letter to the Earth: ‘The Act of Naming’
Alongside the nightingales on Sam Lee’s Earth Day special, was a reading by the mighty theatre-director (and voice of Dobby in Harry Potter) Simon McBurney …. which is basically an amalgamation of most of my favourite things in one place.
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