The recent 70% decline in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon suggests that it is possible to manage the advance of a vast agricultural frontier. Enforcement of laws, interventions in soy and beef supply chains, restrictions on access to credit, and expansion of protected areas appear to have contributed to this decline, as did a decline in the demand for new deforestation. The supply chain interventions that fed into this deceleration are precariously dependent on corporate risk management, and public policies have relied excessively on punitive measures. Systems for delivering positive incentives for farmers to forgo deforestation have been designed but not fully implemented. Territorial approaches to deforestation have been effective and could consolidate progress in slowing deforestation while providing a framework for addressing other important dimensions of sustainable development.

Government commitments and market transitions lay the foundation for an effort to save the forest and reduce carbon emission.

The hydrological connectivity of freshwater ecosystems in the Amazon basin makes them highly sensitive to a broad range of anthropogenic activities occurring in aquatic and terrestrial systems at local and distant locations. Amazon freshwater ecosystems are suffering escalating impacts caused by expansions in deforestation, pollution, construction of dams and waterways, and overharvesting of animal and plant species. The natural functions of these ecosystems are changing, and their capacity to provide historically important goods and services is declining. Existing management policies-including national water resources legislation, community-based natural resource management schemes, and the protected area network that now epitomizes the Amazon conservation paradigm-cannot adequately curb most impacts. Such management strategies are intended to conserve terrestrial ecosystems, have design and implementation deficiencies, or fail to account for the hydrologic connectivity of freshwater ecosystems. There is an urgent need to shift the Amazon conservation paradigm, broadening its current forest-centric focus to encompass the freshwater ecosystems that are vital components of the basin. This is possible by developing a river catchment-based conservation framework for the whole basin that protects both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

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Tropical rainforest regions have large hydropower generation potential that figures prominently in many nations' energy growth strategies. Feasibility studies of hydropower plants typically ignore the effect of future deforestation or assume that deforestation will have a positive effect on river discharge and energy generation resulting from declines in evapotranspiration (ET) associated with forest conversion. Forest loss can also reduce river discharge, however, by inhibiting rainfall. We used land use, hydrological, and climate models to examine the local "direct" effects (through changes in ET within the watershed) and the potential regional "indirect" effects (through changes in rainfall) of deforestation on river discharge and energy generation potential for the Belo Monte energy complex, one of the world's largest hydropower plants that is currently under construction on the Xingu River in the eastern Amazon. In the absence of indirect effects of deforestation, simulated deforestation of 20% and 40% within the Xingu River basin increased discharge by 4-8% and 10-12%, with similar increases in energy generation. When indirect effects were considered, deforestation of the Amazon region inhibited rainfall within the Xingu Basin, counterbalancing declines in ET and decreasing discharge by 6-36%. Under business-as-usual projections of forest loss for 2050 (40%), simulated power generation declined to only 25% of maximum plant output and 60% of the industry's own projections. Like other energy sources, hydropower plants present large social and environmental costs. Their reliability as energy sources, however, must take into account their dependence on forests.climate change | land-use planning | electricity | climate policy | forest policy T ropical rainforests are globally significant because of their cultural and biological diversity (1), their productivity (2), and their enormous carbon pools (3). The abundant rainfall that has allowed these ecosystems to develop is also associated with large volumes of river water flow and high potential for the generation of electricity through hydropower dams. As a result of this confluence of rainforests and hydropower potential, many nations with large areas of tropical rainforest-including Brazil, Peru, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, and Malaysia-plan to expand their hydropower energy capacity over the next 20 y (4, 5).Hydropower is an attractive energy option for many reasons. It is cheaper than thermoelectric power and most other renewable forms of electricity (6), can provide energy at scale more easily and with fewer disruptions than wind or solar (6), and can potentially provide electrical energy with lower levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than thermoelectric energy (7), although its effect on methane production could counteract this benefit (8). As with any energy source, hydropower also brings important social and ecological costs. Dam construction and flooding that often accompanies reservoir establishment can negatively affe...

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The United Nations climate treaty may soon include a mechanism for compensating tropical nations that succeed in reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, source of nearly one fifth of global carbon emissions. We review the potential for this mechanism [reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD)] to provoke ecological damages and promote ecological cobenefits. Nations could potentially participate in REDD by slowing clear-cutting of mature tropical forest, slowing or decreasing the impact of selective logging, promoting forest regeneration and restoration, and expanding tree plantations. REDD could also foster efforts to reduce the incidence of forest fire. Potential ecological costs include the accelerated loss (through displaced agricultural expansion) of low-biomass, high-conservation-value ecosystems, and substitution of low-biomass vegetation by monoculture tree plantations. These costs could be avoided through measures that protect low-biomass native ecosystems. Substantial ecological cobenefits should be conferred under most circumstances, and include the maintenance or restoration of (1) watershed functions, (2) local and regional climate regimes, (3) soils and biogeochemical processes, (4) water quality and aquatic habitat, and (5) terrestrial habitat. Some tools already being developed to monitor, report and verify (MRV) carbon emissions performance can also be used to measure other elements of ecosystem function, making development of MRV systems for ecological cobenefits a concrete possibility. Analysis of possible REDD program interventions in a large-scale Amazon landscape indicates that even modest flows of forest carbon funding can provide substantial cobenefits for aquatic ecosystems, but that the functional integrity of the landscape's myriad small watersheds would be best protected under a more even spatial distribution of forests. Because of its focus on an ecosystem service with global benefits, REDD could access a large pool of global stakeholders willing to pay to maintain carbon in forests, thereby providing a potential cascade of ecosystem services to local stakeholders who would otherwise be unable to afford them.

The concept of the Alcohol Dependence Syndrome has been influential in the field of alcohol studies in the 1980s. The Severity of Alcohol Dependence Questionnaire (SADQ) is one of a generation of alcohol problem scales developed to measure degree of dependence rather than presence or absence of 'alcoholism'. This paper describes the development of a form of the SADQ for community samples of drinkers (SADQ-C) and its relationship to a brief scale designed to measure impaired control over drinking. In a sample of 52 problem drinkers, SADQ and SADQ-C correlated almost perfectly (r = 0.98). In a larger sample of 197 attenders at a controlled drinking clinic, Principal Components Analysis revealed one major factor accounting for 71.7% of the total variance. High internal reliability was indicated with a Cronbach's Alpha of 0.98. Application of this instrument in a random survey of Western Australian households is then described. It was necessary to remove items relating to 'reinstatement of dependence' for this sample. A single major factor was identified by principal components analysis, accounting for 69.1% of the total variance. In both the clinic and the community samples SADQ-C scores correlated highly with Impairment of Control scores. The findings are interpreted as supporting the view that there is a single dimension of alcohol dependence upon which all persons who drink alcohol with any regularity may be located.