To Save a Forest: World Eyes Grand Plan of Payoffs to Preserve Trees, Protect Climate
Michael Casey - The Associated Press
EDITOR'S NOTE - December's Bali climate talks cleared the way for a last-ditch effort to preserve the world's rain forests, by turning trees into tradable securities. This is the last in a three-part series on the tropics' disappearing forests.
Bali, Indonesia - For decades, a flood of aid and an army of conservationists couldn't save Indonesia's rain forests from illegal loggers, land-hungry peasants and the spread of giant plantations. Now the world is looking at a simpler approach: up-front cash.
Whether it was arming forest police or backing schemes to certify legal logs, no tactic could silence the chain saws or douse the intentional fires that each day destroy 20 more square miles (50 more square kilometers) of Indonesia's rain forests, and an estimated 110 square miles (285 square kilometers) elsewhere in the world's tropics.
The problem was pure economics: Neither local authorities nor the rural poor, in Indonesia and elsewhere, have a material incentive to keep their forests intact.
That could now change because of a decision at December's U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a deal, as part of the next international climate agreement, under which countries would be rewarded for reducing their galloping rates of deforestation, a big contributor to global warming.
The cash might come directly from a fund financed by richer northern nations, or through "carbon credits" granted per unit of forest saved. The credits could be traded on the world carbon market, where a northern industry can buy such allowances to help meet its own required reductions in emissions of global-warming gases.
Indonesia and other tropical countries backing the "avoided deforestation" concept hope this carbon price will outpace what landowners could get from logging the forests or clearing them for palm oil, rubber, soybean or other plantations.
"For the next decade, the international community and countries that negotiate this convention have tremendous potential, tremendous power in their hands," said Benoit Bosquet, head of a World Bank project to prepare poorer countries to take part in the new initiative, known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.
"There will be a lot of money going in there," he said. "You will see actors currently converting forest to plantations and cattle ranches saying, 'Wait a minute. If I get more money to preserve my forest than to produce beef, then of course I will keep my forest standing.'"
But turning REDD into reality is far from guaranteed, given competing interests among tropical countries, the world's growing demand for plantation products, and its poor track record in controlling deforestation.
The tangled question of forests has dogged climate negotiations for years.
Deforestation was left out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol because of concerns that tradable credits for saving forests would take pressure off northern nations to reduce their own industries' greenhouse-gas emissions as required under that accord. But scientific uncertainty also muddies the picture.
The carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by the burning and rotting of deforestation is estimated to account for 20 percent of manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. But from Brazil's mahogany trees to Papua New Guinea's thick-trunked kauri, how much carbon is stored in which of the world's forests? How much carbon dioxide is absorbed by which trees?
How will the world fix baselines, judging what a country's "usual" deforestation rate is, in order to gauge rewards for a lower rate? And who's to verify the numbers?
A technical body under the U.N. climate treaty is collecting proposals from governments on how to address such issues. It's the first step toward negotiating a deal by 2009, as part of an overall agreement on deeper emissions cuts to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012.
Beyond the technical, however, political disputes will complicate the U.N. talks.
The focus may be on today's deforestation, but India, Costa Rica and others believe they should get credit for having been "good" ? protecting their forests over the years. Some rain-forest governments, meanwhile, want commercial tree plantations counted in the mix, a move environmentalists oppose.
Some fear "avoided deforestation" credits flooding the market will drive down the carbon price. That's why REDD's advocates want the next round of emissions reductions to cut much deeper than Kyoto, raising demand for credits.
Brazil, whose energy projects already make it a big player in carbon credits, has opposed extending that market to trees, favoring instead a global fund to compensate rain-forest nations directly for income lost when land sits undeveloped.
The British government's Stern Review of climate economics argued that targeting deforestation is among the cheapest ways to reduce greenhouses gases. It estimated halting 70 percent of rain-forest destruction would cost $5 billion a year in compensation.
Some rain-forest nations, on the other hand, calculate REDD could generate as much as $23 billion a year.
Whatever the amount, into whose pockets would these credits or cash flow?
Over the years, in Indonesia and elsewhere, many initiatives ? from arresting illegal loggers to promoting sustainable logging operations ? have failed because of widespread corruption. Bribed officials look the other way. Politically connected elites often reap the profits from deforestation. Such problems remain.
Few governments have the means or money to monitor their deforestation. Land-rights disputes leave ownership of much forested land in question. Some environmentalists fear governments might push indigenous people out of newly protected forests ? as they did when many national parks were created.
"We need to have clear property rights so we know who owns these forests that we're paying not to convert," said Frances Seymour, head of the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia. "We need mechanisms to get (the funds) down to the local level so they are not just skimmed off at the top."
Powerful interests have much at stake. European money is bringing pressure on Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, to clear land to produce biofuels, and Brazil faces demands from China to plant soybean to feed their growing middle class.
"It doesn't stop at national borders," said the World Bank's Bosquet. "What Brazil is doing is supplying more beef and soy to the outside world. You don't control that within Brazil."
The challenge in the Amazon became clear again in late January, when Brazil's government met in emergency session to deal with a sudden burst of deforestation after three years of decline.
Two months earlier, visiting the Amazon, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon learned how dying rain forests will feed global warming, and he went on to Bali to urge the world's nations to act. "It is time to wake up," he said.
Cutting through the political tangle to produce the grand plan called REDD ? money for doing nothing to forests ? will itself prove a challenge.
"There is a hell of a lot to negotiate and many controversial issues," said Christoph Thies, a Greenpeace forest campaigner who observed the Bali talks. "It's a long and difficult road ahead. To be honest, there is quite a good chance of failure."
Forests in Question: As World Warms, Scientists Urgently Seek Answers to Amazon Puzzle
By Michael Astor
The Associated Press
Sunday 03 February 2008
EDITOR'S NOTE - As the world tears up its rain forests at a rapid rate - 60 acres (25 hectares) a minute, the UN says - scientists in the Amazon are working to understand the ominous feedback link between deforestation and a warming world. This is the second of a three-part series.
Manaus, Brazil - Julio Tota stood atop a 195-foot (60-meter) steel tower in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, watching "rivers of air" flowing over an unbroken green canopy that stretched as far as the eye could see.
These billows of fog showed researcher Tota how greenhouse gases emitted by decaying organic material on the forest floor don't rise straight into the atmosphere, as scientists had supposed.
Instead, they hover and drift ? confounding scientific efforts to unlock the secrets of the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness.
"What we've learned is, the Amazon rain forest is much more fragile and much more complex than we had first imagined," Tota said. "My research is pretty specific. It's aimed at showing why all our measurements are probably off."
Tota is part of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment, a decade-old endeavor involving hundreds of scientists, led by Brazilians and with funding from NASA and the European Union. Their open-air "laboratories" are 15 such observation posts spread over an area of rain forest larger than Europe.
The project's goal is to make the best scientific arguments for why this vast rain forest ? along with other endangered forests in Africa, southeast Asia and elsewhere ? is essential to combating global climate change.
But as the first phase of the $100 million (?67) experiment draws to a close, its researchers acknowledge that the data have raised more questions than answers.
Scientists can now say with certainty that the Amazon is neither the lungs of the Earth, nor the planet's air conditioner. Paradoxically, the forest's cooling vapors also trap heat, by reflecting it back toward Earth in much the same way greenhouse gases do.
But a key question remains unanswered: Does the Amazon work as a net carbon "sink," absorbing carbon dioxide, or is it adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it is subtracting, because of burning and other deforestation that have claimed an average 8,000 square miles (21,000 square kilometers) ? an area the size of Israel or New Jersey ? each year of the past decade?
Scientists also can't predict every way in which continued destruction of the Amazon ? for timber, for cattle ranching, for soybean farming ? might affect global climate. But it will almost certainly lead to drier conditions over a wide area, since ground moisture taken up and evaporated through trees is recycled as rainfall.
Some computer simulations suggest deforestation could cause droughts as far afield as the U.S. grain belt, apparently because chain reactions in the atmosphere would shift the Polar Jet Stream and the precipitation it brings.
These questions take on new urgency as global warming's effects become ever more apparent, and as forests fall at a nonstop pace. In one sign of growing concern, Brazil's national leadership met in emergency session on Jan. 24 to deal with a sudden surge in deforestation after a three-year slowdown.
New studies suggest the Amazon may be approaching a tipping point, at which the drier conditions caused by deforestation will reduce rainfall enough to transform the humid tropical forest into a giant savanna.
If preserving the 80 percent of the Amazon still standing would help offset some greenhouse emissions, destroying it would almost certainly accelerate global warming, by releasing perhaps 100 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere ? equal to some 10 years' worth of total global emissions.
"If you cut down all the tropical forests in the world you may increase CO2 concentrations by 25 percent," said Brazilian climatologist Carlos Alberto Nobre. "It's important to keep the forests intact because we are in a global warming crisis and it's important not to reach a tipping point from which we can't come back."
Deforestation ? both the burning and rotting of wood in the Amazon ? already releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, accounting for up to 80 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gases, boosting this country to sixth place or higher among emitter nations.
By contrast, each acre of rain forest that remains intact takes somewhere between 80 and 480 pounds (each hectare of rain forest that remains intact takes somewhere between 90 and 545 kilograms) of carbon out of the atmosphere each year through the process of photosynthesis.
The uncertainty in that range hints at the unknowns still puzzling researchers. In the next phase of the grand Amazon experiment, two airplanes will measure emissions higher in the atmosphere, to try to answer definitively whether the rain forest absorbs more carbon than it produces.
Viewed from above, the Amazon appears to be an almost uniform carpet of green, spreading over 2.7 million square miles (7 million square kilometers) and nine countries. But in truth it's home to a wide range of ecological systems and micro-climates.
That's why Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment specialists are helping design development models for each region, from managed logging to fruit farming to the low-intensity harvesting of forest products such as rubber, cocoa, fruits and ingredients for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
"We're looking at what all this means for the prospect of sustainability of the Amazon and how we can best inform decision-makers about sustained productivity and land use," Diane Wickland, who manages NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program, said from Washington.
The experiment has already yielded troubling conclusions, Wickland said. Refined satellite surveillance, for example, finds that selective logging affects about as much area as clear-cutting, adding significantly to carbon dioxide emissions and casting doubt on whether managed forestry can save the Amazon.
Brazilian physicist Paulo Artaxo, a veteran Amazon researcher, said it's essential that Brazil, home to almost 70 percent of the rain forest, sharply slow the destruction of its woodlands. "There is no cheaper way to reduce emissions than by controlling deforestation," he said.
Scientists estimate it would cost about $1 billion a year in lost income for Brazil to end the clearing of forest by loggers, ranchers and farmers, largely giant soybean-growing conglomerates.
At the Bali conference, the world's nations decided to explore possible plans for compensating rain-forest nations for rolling back their rates of deforestation.
That money could come as "carbon credits," in the trading system under the Kyoto Protocol climate pact whereby industrial nations that overshoot their greenhouse emissions quotas can get credit for emissions reductions at power plants or other projects in the developing world. By awarding credits to rain-forest states, richer nations would now also be financing protection of carbon sinks.
The negotiations over such a complex global plan promise to be long and difficult.
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NEXT: Part III - To Save a Forest.
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