Tread Heavily: China's Tire Demand Rolls over Southeast Asian Forests

Thursday, May 21, 2009 - 18:49 in Earth & Climate

Geographer Jefferson Fox thought he was on to something big when the Chinese military stripped his team's weather monitoring equipment from a montane rubber plantation in the run-up to last year's Olympics. How big? In the past 20 years, more than 1.2 million acres (485,000 hectares) of evergreen broadleaf and secondary forests have been cleared throughout Southeast Asia to make way for rubber plantations to fuel China's growing appetite for automobile tires. [More]

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