Misunderstanding the Value of Forest Carbon
I love Greenpeace and donate regularly but sometimes they come out with some terrible ideas and today’s is a doozy. Business eZine FastCompany is reporting that “Forest Credits Could Crash The Price of Carbon, Greenpeace Says“. They of course neglect to explain that, even if it were true, and I doubt it, lower cost abatement is a good thing!
Deforestation is responsible for up to 20% of all carbon emissions, so stopping it would seem to be a pretty effective way to halt global warming, as I chronicled last year. But there are too many forests worldwide, and the oversight and regulation in the tropical, less developed countries where they are located is generally too weak to allow robust verification of reforestation or preservation projects, according to Greenpeace. Polluting countries could meet their targets by buying cheap, dubious forest offsets, instead of investing in clean-energy projects stateside, delaying the hard work required to truly halt global warming.
Do the folks at Greenpeace really think there are too many forests already? Are they on crack?
Preventing deforestation is the single easiest, cheapest and most effective means we have of immediate drastic permanent emissions reduction. Forestry protection, funded via carbon trading mechanisms such as REDD is only now emerging as a viable scheme. Writing this off, or putting it in the same basket as previous avoided doforestation projects is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just to make it clear, REDD credits are not issued out of thin air. To create REDD credits you need to develop a methodology that the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Carbon Community and Biodiviersity Alliance will be happy with, one that incorporates all of the complex land-tenure arrangements in host countries, ensures ethical and responsible funds distribution, insures buffers against leakage and loss, and bypasses many of the governance issues that plague forest nations. Carbon Planet has been working for years on this so I know what I am talking about here, in contrast the the writers of the Greenpeace paper who seem to be stuck in the 1800s.
Let’s keep this in mind too. The whole point of the carbon trading scheme is a fixed amount of emissions reduction at the lowest possible price. Complaining that REDD will collapse the price of carbon firstly underestimates the complexity of creating REDD credits, and secondly misses the whole point of emissions trading. The world does not have the luxury of waiting for new energy sources to be built, we have to cut emissions now as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Of course I am not advocating cesation of new energy projects, and indeed under the CDM and Gold Standard VER schemes emissions are being reduced via investments in new technology, and that’s a very good thing. But the fastest road to global emissions reduction is the preservation of what remains of the world’s forests; especially tropical rainforests.
Forests provide a wealth of environmental services that are currently disregarded by the world economy. Indigenous peoples work in virtual slavery for massive multinational corporations to tear up the very forests that have sustained their cultures and their very lives for generation upon generation. Logging camps are rats’ nests of sexual predation, forced labour and alarmingly low levels of occupational health and saftey. REDD projects promise to generate improved income levels for the people on the ground with money being distributed more fairly and, of course, those incomes are sustainable as the trees stay in place.
Some people criticise REDD as paying people to do nothing, calling REDD projects a kind of non-project. Once again that fails to appreciate just how complex proper REDD propjects can be and it fails to acknowledge that the environmental services provided by forests have a real value, and paying the traditional owners of those forsts to maintain the health and wellbeing of these valuable assest is just as valid as paying those people lucky enough to be born on top of an oil well; something we do every time we fill up the car with petrol.
No matter the eutopian visions promoted by groups such as Greenpeace, the fact is we’ll be burning coal and oil for some time yet. So, in the absence of a genuine ‘clean coal’ solution we need a way to reduce emissions quickly and immediately. REDD is the only technology that offers such a promise in the very short term. A tonne of CO2 saved now is worth many tonnes in the future. This is a concept I call Net Present Environmental Value. REDD projects, with their spectum of benefits from social, biodiversity preservation, and carbon perspectives are unmatched in their economic efficiency. — DS