October - December, 2009
World Forestry
Whatever you may think about the Copenhagen talks on climate change, they may be remembered as a time when the world concluded that it must protect forests, and pay for them. In the Kyoto protocol of 1997, forests were a big absentee: that was partly because sovereignty-conscious nations like Brazil were unwilling, at any price, to accept limits on their freedom to fell. Skillful campaigning by pro-forest groups has successfully disseminated the idea that trees cannot be ignored in any serious deliberation on the planet’s future.
Most people at the summit accepted the case that cutting down trees contributes up to 20% of global greenhouse emissions, and avoiding this loss would be a quick, cheap way of limiting heat-trapping gases. Unless forests are better protected, so their argument goes, dangerous levels of climate change look virtually inevitable.
In December six rich nations gave advocates of that view a boost when they pledged $3.5 billion as a down payment on a much larger effort to ?slow, halt and eventually reverse? deforestation in poor countries. These nations—Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Britain and the United States—endorsed tree protection in terms that went beyond the immediate need to stem emissions. Keeping trees standing would protect biodiversity and help development of the right sort, they said. The money was a first installment of the $25 billion needed between now and 2015 to cut deforestation by a quarter.
Impressive as it was, the rich nations’ offer did not settle the questions that need resolving in any global forest deal. One was whether or not to include timetable and targets. The most ambitious proposals called for a 50% reduction in deforestation by 2020 and a complete halt by 2030. But poorer, forested nations were unwilling to accept those ideas until they saw what the rich world was offering.
The other question was how so much money will be spent, how it will be raised and who would receive it: national governments, regional authorities or local people, including the indigenous. Any plan that did not give local people cause to keep their trees standing would surely fail. But some have argued that doling out cash to forest-dwellers to too crude an approach; it may be better to help non-forest areas yield more crops, or to concentrate on restoring marginal land to farming. Advocates of national approaches – including entire countries, not small areas – say local efforts cause ?leakage? as felling is stopped in one place but shifts to another.
The question of how much money to raise from government transfers, and how much from carbon trading, is not merely of concern to environmentalists. Some Europeans fear that throwing forests into the carbon market will depress the price; but for Congress, a healthy market in offsets may be the only thing that makes payment to protect forests palatable.
The proposal’s critics insist that a superficially good deal could prove terrible because of loopholes in carbon accounting. These may come from inflated national baselines for deforestation, or allowances that permit some sorts of tree-felling to be ignored. Skeptics also say that the plan ignores some causes of deforestation, like the demand for soy, beef, palm oil, and timber which temps people to act illegally. However, in the long term, Copenhagen’s decisions may do a lot more to make the forests lucrative in themselves.
Source: The Economist