Ten years ago, Greenpeace launched "Kleercut: wiping away ancient forests", a campaign to draw attention to paper goods giant Kimberly-Clark's practice of felling ecologically important boreal forests in Canada.
The rate is consistent across most of the world's major "biomes"—such as grasslands, boreal forest and tropical moist forest.
About a third of the ring is in Canada, which has some 570 million hectares (1.4 billion acres) of boreal forest: only Russia boasts more.
The council has until May 17th to publish its results.In this section Schooling the whole family A close count Boreal blues Reprints Related items Education in Mexico: Schooling the whole familyMay 12th 2011The outcome will further polarise Ecuador's politics, by emboldening both the president and the opposition.
Alarmed by their bad press, Canadian timber companies announced in May this year that they would work with greens to improve the management of 72m hectares of boreal forest.Yet such progress tends to be exaggerated, and even if it were real it would be insufficient because of two huge threats to the forest.
As the permafrost melts, the boreal or taiga forest is shifting northwards.
The second-biggest forest area, about a third of the total, is in the boreal, or taiga, biome: a belt of spruce, birch, fir and aspen that encircles the far northern hemisphere, mostly in Russia, Scandinavia, Finland, Canada and a small part of America.
Steaming the heavy oil out of the ground, or mining and processing the tarry sand, require large amounts of energy and water, and the deforestation of vast tracts of boreal forest.
Although enrolment improved from 52% of 15-year-olds in 2000 to 66% in 2009, Brazil jumped from 53% to 80% in the same period.In this section Schooling the whole family A close count Boreal blues ReprintsMoney is not the problem: education accounts for 22% of public non-capital spending, the highest share in the OECD (though well below the group's average in dollars per pupil).
This was partly because of a plague of bark-beetles in its temperate and boreal zones, a record number of which have been surviving the recent mild winters.
All this could make much of the current forest area inhospitable to trees.Such damage is already more common than most climate models had predicted, with the boreal belt especially hard hit.
