Avoiding deforestation
Carbon Planet has been seeing a huge upturn in interest in avoided deforestation carbon credits. Explaining this idea, the Environmental News Network is reporting Rainforest coalition proposes rewards for ‘avoided deforestation’.
The Coalition of Rainforest Nations, led by Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have told the UN climate change summit in Nairobi, Kenya that they want to be rewarded for the vast swathes of rainforest they have left intact.
The Coalition says it wants to receive ’carbon credits’ similar to ones given to countries like Brazil, which has chopped down many of its rainforests and is now receiving credits for new plantations.
There’s no denying that the burning of tropical forests is a major source of atmospheric carbon, and the cheapest, and most obvious solution to this is to put a cash value on the forests in-situ, providing economic incentives for people to simply leave those forests there. The science is not as straightforward as other carbon abatement schemes and some groups such as the World Wildlife Fund have very strong objections to any forestry based carbon schemes at all. For example the CDM Gold Standard, keenly supported by WWF and others, is entirely focussed on energy efficiency and is utterly dismissive of forestry. At a meeting last year hosted by the UK’s DEFRA one academic, Anja Kollmuss from Tufts, stated outright that “there is no place for forestry in a modern carbon credit system.” Yet the destruction of forests, tropical forests in particular, and land use change in general accounts for almost 20% of the world’s carbon emissions. The WWF acknowledge this in a 2002 paper entitled Climate change and forest carbon sequestration [a PDF file]:
Land disturbance – burning, loss, and degradation of forests, rangeland and soils – accounts approximately for the remaining 20%.
In addition, the WWF point out in their own forest conservation site that:
The cutting of trees and unsustainable management of forests lead to the loss of nearly 36 million acres of natural forests each year - an area bigger than the state of New York. The world’s poorest people bear the brunt of forest loss, since forest resources sustain most of the 1.2 billion people in the world who live in extreme poverty.
One of the main advocates of avoided deforestation credits is Papua New Guinea. The BBC cite Request for forest carbon credits:
Rainforest protection should be added to measures to prevent global warming, a seminar of climate experts from more than 150 countries has heard in Bonn.
The forestry proposal from Papua New Guinea ran counter to the pattern of most of the discussions.
While other developing countries rejected any spreading of responsibilities beyond the industrialised countries already signed up to the Kyoto Protocol - “you caused the problem, so you show us how to fix it first” being the essence of the argument - Papua New Guinea actively welcomed the chance to be held accountable for greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the destruction of its rainforest.
We want to save our rainforest, runs the PNG argument, but you have to help us pay for it.
And PNG does not want to wait until 2012 - “there won’t be any rainforest left to save if we do,” it says.
More recently, in August 2007 the report Climate change,’Avoided Deforestation’ and Indonesia tackled this issue head-on.
Based on data from 2000, Indonesia’s annual emissions from forestry and land use change are calculated at 2,563 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), dwarfing the yearly amount from energy, agriculture and waste which amount to 451 MtCO2e. The total emissions - 3,014 MtCO2e compare with China’s total of 5,017 and the US’ of 6,005 MtCO2e. The study, Indonesia and Climate Change: Current Status and Policies, was sponsored by the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development to inform the next world summit on climate change in December in Bali.
Carbon Planet is enthusiastic about the potential for avoided deforestation credits to not only secure both the carbon, and the inherent bio-diversity of vital tropical forests, but also to provide a steady source of funds for indigenous forest peoples. — DS
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