Green IT & Green Hosting

Battling the Clouds of Extinction

18/10/10

The world’s rainforests are being uprooted and destroyed at breakneck speed. But the fight back to save them from annihilation is gathering pace, as Brian Wall, editor Green IT Magazine, reports.

At the southern end of the Chocó-Andean Rainforest Corridor in Ecuador, between the Paso Alto Mountain Range and the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve, lies an area known locally as Intag.

No reason why you should have heard of it, unless you’ve been to the region – or have read about the many ways in which such rainforests, which took between 60 and 100 million years to evolve, are now threatened to extinction.

The Intag cloud forest is not unique in that sense, of course. In the past 50 years, much of the rainforest in Africa and Asia has been destroyed. Large areas are being cut down as we speak, often in order to remove just a few logs. The trees that we all purport to admire and love, and want to see preserved, are being destroyed at double the rate of all previous estimates – and that brings with it a very high rate of extinction of the flora and fauna, as the wildlife so dependent on the forest dies with it.

Cattle ranching, logging, agriculture and mining have all contributed to the rape of the rainforests and surrounding lands. So too, have the oil companies, searching for new oil deposits – see box item.

Rainforest Concern

However, the rainforests also have their champions and protectors. Amongst them is Rainforest Concern. This is the British-based conservation charity established to protect threatened natural habitats, particularly rainforests and the biodiversity they contain, together with the people who still depend on them for their survival, which has been working to develop the Chocó-Andean Corridor Project in northwest Ecuador since 1993.

The southern phase of the corridor is located at the confluence of two of the world’s biological ‘hotspots’: the Chocó-Darien and Tropical Andes. The idea is to create habitat connectivity that aids species’ survival by linking the last unprotected forests between the Maquipucuna, Mindo y Pululahua reserves to the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve and following north to the Awa Reserve in the province of Esmeraldas.

Though only the sixth largest hotspot in the world, the Tropical Andes that passes through the Intag region is considered the single richest biological hotspot on the planet, containing approximately 15-17% of the world’s plant species and nearly 20% of its bird diversity.

Since 2003, Rainforest Concern has been able to purchase and preserve over 3000 acres of cloud forest in the Intag region.

Fighting Back

The work being undertaken by Rainforest Concern has attracted the attention of other concerned bodies in the UK, who have thrown their weight behind its campaigning efforts, in order to help preserve what is so rapidly and aggressively being destroyed. One such company is iomart Hosting, which has launched its own scheme, called ‘Racks 4 Acres’.

“The mechanics for the scheme are simple,” says Phil Worms, director, corporate communications, iomart Group. “We will sponsor an acre of rainforest for every additional MegaWatt of power that is used in each of our five data centres from September 2010 onwards. We have asked that our acres are predominantly in the Ecuador Cloud Neblina Reserve Project, so that we have the synergy with cloud computing and cloud hosting.”

While the plight of the world’s tropical rainforests has been well documented of late, we are,” says Peter Bennett, director of Rainforest Concern, “still witnessing wholesale destruction on a daily basis. Projects like the Racks 4 Acres have an important role to play in highlighting the threats faced by the world’s rainforests and hopefully will inspire other people and organisations to support our efforts to protect them.

“I am especially delighted that the campaign will support the Neblina Reserve in the Chocó-Andean Forest Corridor, as this is a true, community-based conservation and eco-tourism effort, which we have supported for many years, and is playing a vital role in sustaining the conservation aims of Ecuador. It proves what can be done when people are prepared to work together and tackle issues head on.”

What appealed to him most about the Racks 4 Acres campaign was its simplicity of approach. “The correlation between power consumption, carbon emissions and conservation is a vital element in the bigger climate change debate and this campaign makes that point effectively. I hope that other organisations will step forward and offer their support in a similar fashion. We all benefit from every acre of rainforest saved, wherever we live in the world.”

Hot Topic

The ‘Racks 4 Acres’ concept first took hold a couple of years ago, he adds, but the timing wasn’t quite right. “Back then, the greening of the data centre wasn’t really a hot topic, whereas now it is. With the CRC Energy Efficiency scheme coming into effect [the UK's mandatory climate change and energy saving scheme, operated by the Environment Agency], and the government drive to cut carbon emissions, that has all changed, as iomart’s Phil Worms explains.

“When we speak to our customers and prospects now, they want to know how they can minimise their CO2 emissions,” he says. “Yes, price and service are priorities for any business, but increasingly they are also aware of the need to deal responsibly with their environmental impact. And they are recognising that virtualisation and cloud computing have a major role to play in this.”

By way of example, he points to one of iomart Hosting’s UK customers, Street Smart – coincidentally, another campaigning organisation – which raises hundreds of thousands of pounds for the homeless every year during November and December. Since it was established in 1998, its campaigns have amassed more than £4.2 million, including £455,000 in 2009.

“It wouldn’t make sense for an organisation such as Street Smart to be investing in and powering expensive IT equipment to run its campaigns for two months of the year. By using cloud computing for its winter campaigns, it can maximise its resources, without having to pay for redundant equipment the rest of the year when someone else can be using this capacity,” adds Worms.

All of which might make iomart Hosting seem like something of a campaigning organisation in its own right, but he is quick to downplay that impression. “We certainly don’t see ourselves in that light. We are providers of managed hosting services. Our focus is on offering our customers hosting services that will help them reduce their overall costs and the reduction in power consumption has a big part of that.”

“At the same time, we are conscious of our own corporate responsibility to reduce our environmental impact, which is why we have aligned ourselves with Rainforest Concern and other campaigning organisations. We want to help make a difference, if we can.

Nor is iomart Hosting seeking to take the moral high ground with green IT or attempting some form cynical marketing exercise. “Reducing costs and improving operational efficiency are critical objectives for any organisation, at any time, and adopting genuine energy-efficient measures and practices in the IT arena can help businesses achieve this.

“I am certainly no expert on the subject of climate change, but I can appreciate there are many species that will not be around for too much longer, if we continue to destroy the earth’s habitats at our current rate. Our ‘Racks 4 Acres’ campaign may be but a drop in the ocean, but, if it only serves to raise awareness of the fragile state of cloud forests, and the important work that organisations such as Rainforest Concern are undertaking, then we’ll have considered it worthwhile.” The campaign kicked off on 13 September and is aiming to sponsor and secure a minimum of 500 acres – equivalent to 500 football pitches - over the next 12 months.

What Rainforest Concern and iomart Hosting are doing together is raising awareness of how businesses can be profitable and commercially driven, without taking their eyes off the wider picture. In this case, the ‘picture’ is a very broad canvas: one where exploitation at many levels is destroying vast swathes of our ever threatened world and the fragile ecosystems that depend on it for their very existence.

The Culprits

Cattle ranching, logging, agriculture and mining have all contributed to the rape of the rainforests and surrounding lands. So too, have the oil companies, searching for new oil deposits. This is incredibly damaging, as often large roads are built through untouched forests, in order to build pipelines and extract the oil. This encourages settlers to move into hitherto pristine forests and start ‘slash-and-burn’ farming or cutting more timber for sale, or the production of charcoal. Once established, the oil pipelines which transport the oil often rupture, spouting gallons of oil into the surrounding forest, killing wildlife and contaminating the water supplies of local villages.

Then there is the World Bank and large companies, investing money in developing countries to build dams for the generation of electricity. This can involve flooding vast areas of rainforest. Once submerged, it gradually rots, making the reservoir water acidic, which eventually corrodes the dam turbines. The dams can also become blocked with soil washed down from deforested highlands in heavy rains. This can cause terrible flooding. 

Dire Consequences

If the rainforests disappear, the consequences for the planet might well be disastrous – and irreversible. Here’s a snapshot of what we risk losing…

Rainforests provide a habitat for plants and animals. Tropical rainforests are believed to be the oldest and most complex land-based ecosystem on earth, containing more than 30 million species of plants and animals. That's half of the Earth's wildlife and at least two-thirds of its plant species.

Rainforests store water like a huge sponge. In fact, it is believed that the Amazonian forests alone store over half of the Earth's rainwater. Rainforest trees draw water from the forest floor and release it back in to the atmosphere, in the form of swirling mists and clouds. Without rainforests continually recycling huge quantities of water, feeding the rivers, lakes and irrigation systems, droughts would become more common, potentially leading to widespread famine and disease.

Surprisingly, soil in the rainforest is very poor in nutrients, which are stored in the vast numbers of trees and plants, rather than in the soil. Tree roots bind the soil together, while the canopy protects the soil from heavy rains. When a tree dies and its trunk falls to the forest floor, it decays and the nutrients it contains are recycled. However, if trees are removed from the forest, the nutrients are removed with it, along with the protection provided by the tree roots and the forest canopy. The unprotected soil is then simply washed away in heavy rains, causing blockages and floods in lowland rivers, while leaving upland rivers dry.

More than 25% of modern medicines originate from tropical forest plants. For example, the rosy periwinkle, found in Madagascar, is used to cure leukemia, while the anti-malarial drug quinine is taken from the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The rauvolfa shrub found in Asian and African forests is used to cure high blood pressure and mental illness. Rainforests and the native populations who discovered these medicines could hold the cure to many more diseases. 

 

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