What Gets Cut Down... Years of lucrative deforestation for timber and palm oil plantations has entrenched the practice of clearing vast areas of rainforest for unsustainable agriculture which results in the permanent destruction of irreplaceable tropical ecosystems. Now, in a sudden reversal keeping forest cover intact may become a hot investment ticket in a warming world. With growing environmental awareness, the concerns regarding global deforestation are rising. Presently the Marrakesh round of the Kyoto Accords do not allow avoided deforestation to be part of the CDM. A tonne of carbon saved from the atmosphere thus came with a high price tag. There was no way developing countries could easily trade avoided deforestation rainforest credits on the international market to raise moneys for the long-term financial planning needed for continued preservation.
Why Is It Needed?Deforestation, especially in the tropics, contributes about 20 percent of man-made global carbon emissions, some two billion tonnes of carbon per year. Trees are 50 percent carbon and release carbon dioxide (CO2) when they rot or burn. Forests soak up vast amounts of CO2 and clearing the land erodes soils that are also carbon stores. Forests contribute more to the global emissions tally than the entire transport sector (14 percent) but they are not included under the existing emissions reduction framework, the Kyoto Protocol, which focuses on industrial and transport-related emissions.
The influential Stern climate change report suggested preventing emissions from deforestation would be cheaper than some other methods of emission reductions. It also predicted emissions from deforestation could reach 40 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2008-2012 if not stopped.
Who Backs the Idea?Ex-World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern. He suggests avoided deforestation measures be included in the post-2012 commitment period under Kyoto. He urged pilot schemes to begin as soon as possible in his Stern Review on Climate Change published in Oct. 2006. he World Bank is positioning itself as the lead agency on avoided deforestation. It has proposed a Forest Carbon Partnership Facility to be part of its new NGO and private sector led mega-fund, the Global Forest Alliance, scheduled to start operations in early 2008.
How Would It Work?Various schemes propose compensating government, the private sector and forest owners for protecting forests, and giving economic investments to counter economic drivers of deforestation, such as palm oil expansion, industrial tree plantations and conversion to agriculture. REDD schemes would be run via national carbon accounting and verification, rather than being project-based. Remote sensing technology and "ground proofing" checks would verify reductions and monitor their "additionality" (a net reduction) and "leakage" (man-made damage to forest carbon stores).
What Do Critics Say?Schemes are vague about who would be compensated. They could create incentives for governments and business to displace millions of forest peoples to capture carbon funds, further disenfranchising communities by increasing state control of forests at the expense of collective customary land rights. Global carbon trading is contradictory and ethically problematic. Its premise, that companies which invest in carbon trading schemes buy the rights to continue polluting elsewhere, can create serious costs to the environment, and indigenous people's well being.
How Much Money Could Be Involved?Payments could range from $200 to $10,000 per hectare of forest, the World Bank says. It estimates using avoided deforestation to reduce the annual deforestation rate in developing countries by 20 percent would cost between $2 and $20 billion annually - or $100 billion to halt it altogether. The Stern Review estimated it would initially cost around $5 billion a year to protect forests in the eight countries responsible for 70 percent of emissions from land use.The case of Canada, experts say, highlights the crippling effect that the US has had on other countries' lack of progress under Kyoto. The absence of the US from the process is the single most important reason why the whole system didn't do as well as it should. Although most climate experts have long acknowledged that Kyoto's first round of emission cuts would make only a small dent in the build-up of greenhouse gases, it was viewed as a significant first step towards long-term stabilization of the world's climate.
Protecting This...The Protocol was adopted unanimously in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan and entered into force in February 2005, after Russia's ratification brought it into acceptance by industrialized countries representing 55% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Developed, 'Annex I', nations that ratify are legally bound to mandatory emissions reductions that vary from country to country, with a goal towards bringing all nations' combined global emissions to at least 5% below 1990 levels during the first commitment period.World Bank Carbon Finance UnitBank Information Center Carbon Projects