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Well meant as it is, the whole Kyoto affair as proposed and agitated now is an absurd farce with not the slightest smidgen of the tiniest hope of success. It is a ridiculous absurdity. Here we are, talking - it's mostly talk - about reducing carbon emissions, while huge areas of the world's forests - one of the most benign, effective and useful carbon sinks (they provide the oxygen for our breath of life) - are being eradicated on massive scale. |
We haven't got a hope in the proverbial hot place. Even if we should, by some planetary miracle, manage to hold carbon emissions steady at the current rate, the carbon dioxide content of our atmosphere is going to increase by the release of carbon caused by deforestation. It is, for all the world, as if we are talking about bailing out the good ship Earth with a tin cup, while others are busy cutting huge holes in the hull with chainsaws. Exactly. |
Original Article: NATURE, Oct. 21, 2002
COMMUNITIES MAKE FOREST CARBON TRADING WORK
Big businesses can mitigate their contribution to global warming, and help to lift developing countries out of poverty, by funding forest planting in collaboration with local people, a new report concludes. But major changes to international carbon trading rules are required to ensure this, the report says.
Signatories to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change will meet this week in New Delhi, India, to debate carbon trading rules. The report's authors hope that their research will give a much-needed boost to the option of forest planting as a solution to global warming.
The protocol requires developed countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to around 5% of 1990 levels by 2008. A company unable to meet the anti-pollution targets may either buy carbon credits from an under-polluting company, invest in making its operations less polluting, or plant forests to soak up carbon.
The difficulty of maintaining and monitoring forests as carbon sinks has made this type of carbon trading slow to take root. But planting forests "can be the fairest and lowest-cost way of pulling carbon out of the air", says Sara Scherr, of the Washington DC-based organization Forest Trends, which co-authored the new report.
And it can have far wider effects than curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. Developing countries suffer most from deforestation, and so are prime targets for carbon trading forest projects. "This would bring social, economic and local environmental benefits to hundreds of thousands of poor rural people in the developing world," says David Kaimowitz, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research, which is also involved in the report.
Companies fear that they could be throwing their money away in developing countries because there are insufficient rules to enforce forest management. Environmental groups caution that corporations could end up leaning towards monocultures. These vast forests of one tree species are easy to manage, but benefit only multinational logging firms; they have few, if any, ecological advantages.
Evidence such as that contained in the report is beginning to bring the two sides together, says Tia Nelson, acting director of the carbon-change initiative at Nature Conservancy, a US environmental group that works with industry. "Early on it was very polarized, but now we're willing to consider that [forest planting] has potential," she says.
John Palmer of the Forest Research Programme, which advises the UK government on how industry should meet Kyoto targets, agrees. The benefits to poor countries could be huge, he says. "This is one of the very few opportunities they have for long-term, secure, cash funding that foreign aid agencies cannot provide."
The report compares around 20 pilot forestry projects in developing countries funded under carbon trading rules. One, replanting and managing 10,000 hectares of forests in Madhya Pradesh, India, is worth US$300,000 a year in carbon payments. It could protect threatened species and water supplies and provide 95 impoverished villages with income from hunting, fuel wood and timber, the report finds.
Where deforestation has degraded land and living conditions, the value of forests will be appreciated, says Scherr, ensuring the forests thrive enough to fulfil polluters' obligations to the Kyoto rules. "To get sustainable forests you need significant local involvement, otherwise they just don't get looked after," she says. Forest Trends and the Center for International Forestry Research are calling for this conclusion to be incorporated into the "Clean Development Mechanism", a Kyoto Protocol rule book.
But drafting rules to enforce local community involvement is easier said than done, says Tipper. The Kyoto Protocol requires safeguards to ensure that polluters' money actually goes towards soaking up carbon - forests are audited, for example, to see that they are actually absorbing as much carbon as has been paid for.
The more people there are using a forest, and the more functions a forest has to fulfil, the harder it is to audit. "These rules make it extremely hard for community-level projects," Tipper says. The added complexity of rules enshrining the rights of local communities could make businesses shy away from investing in forest carbon sinks.
But it may be the only way forward. The track record of some projects funded by big businesses has been "dismal", Scherr says. So useless were many forests in Indonesia that locals burnt them to clear ground for agriculture despite government opposition.
References: Smith, J. & Scherr, S. J. Forest carbon and local livelihoods: Assessment of opportunities and policy recommendations. Centre for International Forestry Research, (2002) ISSN: 0854-9818. |Article| © Nature News Service - TOM CLARKE, October 21, 2002./ Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002
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