"Vast Scale Of Burning" In Amazon Forests = 3/4 Of Brazil's GHG Emissions

[hatrack]

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - "Burning of the Amazon and other forests accounts for three quarters of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions and has made the country one of the world's leading polluters, a long-delayed government report showed on Wednesday.

The report is the first official recognition by Brazil of the vast scale of burning of the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest and home to up to 30 percent of the planet's animal and plant species. Environmentalists said the findings in the report would probably make Brazil the world's sixth largest polluter. They said it could give impetus to rich countries' calls for leading developing nations to share in the burden of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming.

The report, or inventory greenhouse gas emissions, showed Brazil produced 1.03 billion tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent in 1994, up from 979 million tons in 1990. "That figure represents about three percent of total global emissions," Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos said, adding that the responsibility of slowing global warming "substantially" falls on rich countries.

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"This is the most serious ever," said David Cleary, head of the Amazon program of the Nature Conservancy in Brazil. "We haven't had three consecutive years of this level of deforestation since the middle of the 1980s, and even then it was slightly lower and that was at the height of the bad old days of Amazon destruction."

EDIT

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20041208/sc_nm/environment_brazil_dc