The Independent UK
Monday 14 May 2007
In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis?
The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.
The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.
Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total.
"Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change," said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP.
Scientists say one days' deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere.
No new technology is needed, says the GCP, just the political will and a system of enforcement and incentives that makes the trees worth more to governments and individuals standing than felled. "The focus on technological fixes for the emissions of rich nations while giving no incentive to poorer nations to stop burning the standing forest means we are putting the cart before the horse," said Mr Mitchell.
Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.
Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.
What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.
According to the latest audited figures from 2003, two billion tons of CO2 enters the atmosphere every year from deforestation. That destruction amounts to 50 million acres - or an area the size of England, Wales and Scotland felled annually.
The remaining standing forest is calculated to contain 1,000 billion tons of carbon, or double what is already in the atmosphere.
As the GCP's report concludes: "If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change."
Standing forest was not included in the original Kyoto protocols and stands outside the carbon markets that the report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed to this month as the best hope for halting catastrophic warming.
The landmark Stern Report last year, and the influential McKinsey Report in January agreed that forests offer the "single largest opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions of carbon emissions".
International demand has driven intensive agriculture, logging and ranching that has proved an inexorable force for deforestation; conservation has been no match for commerce. The leading rainforest scientists are now calling for the immediate inclusion of standing forests in internationally regulated carbon markets that could provide cash incentives to halt this disastrous process.
Forestry experts and policy makers have been meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to try to put deforestation on top of the agenda for the UN climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, this year. Papua New Guinea, among the world's poorest nations, last year declared it would have no choice but to continue deforestation unless it was given financial incentives to do otherwise.
Richer nations already recognise the value of uncultivated land. The EU offers €200 (£135) per hectare subsidies for "environmental services" to its farmers to leave their land unused.
And yet there is no agreement on placing a value on the vastly more valuable land in developing countries. More than 50 per cent of the life on Earth is in tropical forests, which cover less than 7 per cent of the planet's surface.
They generate the bulk of rainfall worldwide and act as a thermostat for the Earth. Forests are also home to 1.6 billion of the world's poorest people who rely on them for subsistence. However, forest experts say governments continue to pursue science fiction solutions to the coming climate catastrophe, preferring bio-fuel subsidies, carbon capture schemes and next-generation power stations.
Putting a price on the carbon these vital forests contain is the only way to slow their destruction. Hylton Philipson, a trustee of Rainforest Concern, explained: "In a world where we are witnessing a mounting clash between food security, energy security and environmental security - while there's money to be made from food and energy and no income to be derived from the standing forest, it's obvious that the forest will take the hit."
Carbon Credits Must Reach Indonesian Forests
By Andy Mukherjee
Bloomberg
Monday 14 May 2007
Alarm bells are ringing loudly about the future of our planet.
The environmental mess we find ourselves in has been caused by the developed world, though we need the help of developing countries to solve the crisis.
Of course, they won't be too keen to save the world by sacrificing their own shot at prosperity.
So the key challenge and opportunity for global venture capital may lie in discovering a feedstock, which is at least as cheap as coal. China and India will have an incentive to contain the amount of coal burnt in electricity generation only when they can do so without risking their economic-growth rates.
Otherwise, as Standard & Poor's notes, "if all announced coal-fired plants are built in China and India, additional carbon-dioxide emissions could be multiples of the overall cuts proposed by the Kyoto Protocol."
Reversing environmental degradation isn't only about technology. In the debate on climate change, one large and populous country that's not getting enough attention is Indonesia, whose emission levels make it the third-biggest polluter after the U.S. and China.
While two-thirds to three-quarters of the carbon-dioxide equivalent of toxic fumes released in China and India is related to energy use, Indonesia's enemy is deforestation.
A study done on behalf of the U.K. Department for International Development and the World Bank makes estimates that as much as 85 percent of the harmful stuff that gets pumped out into Indonesian skies comes from degradation of forest lands.
The Biofuel Challenge
Clearing of forests in Indonesia has been historically linked to illegal logging for timber and the diversion of land to oil-palm plantations. Palm oil goes into soaps; it's also used as cooking oil.
Interestingly, biofuels, touted to be the main weapon in the fight against climate change, are going to make the emission challenge worse in Indonesia.
By 2025, Indonesia might put 1.4 million hectares, or an area 2 1/2 times as big as the island of Bali, under oil-palm plantations to meet biodiesel demand, the study says.
"The risks of deforestation - and to some extent land-use conflicts with biofuels - have not been thoroughly assessed," it says.
So what can be done?
Clean Development
It may be time to put to use the Clean Development Mechanism, the carbon-trading system under the Kyoto agreement, to help Indonesia regain its forest cover.
Indonesia has eight ongoing projects - and one more seeking registration - under the mechanism.
They will make money by reducing the equivalent of 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per annum, and by selling the "credit" for this improvement to Western nations that carry numerical targets to cut their emissions under the United Nations' Kyoto Convention on Climate Change.
Indonesia's share of the annual carbon-credit market is a paltry 1 percent. More importantly, none of the Indonesian projects have anything to do with reforestation.
The largest proposed reductions in Indonesia will occur in cement manufacturing.
This problem isn't Indonesia's alone. Reforestation hardly shows up on the global carbon-trading map.
The World Bank's BioCarbon Fund recently signed an emission-reduction purchase agreement that provides an economic incentive to some of the poorest farmers in India to grow timber in an environmentally sustainable manner.
This was the first such initiative for India, which has more than 200 projects registered to sell carbon credits.
No Momentum
There are many reasons why reforestation projects have been slow to take off. First, unlike industrial projects, the rules for forestry-related carbon trading have only been clear for a little more than two years. The momentum is yet to build up.
Second, the approval procedures are cumbersome.
Third, forests that were degraded after 1989 are ineligible.
That's particularly frustrating in Indonesia where a big part of the damaged land is new. The deforestation rate, which was as high as about 1.3 million hectares in the 1990s, is widely believed to have accelerated after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
In October 2006, the air quality in Singapore and parts of Malaysia reached unhealthy levels because of Indonesian forest fires, caused when farmers burn trees to clear land.
Forest fires, manmade or otherwise, undo the emission gains; that, in turn, becomes an additional challenge for investors.
The successor to the Kyoto Protocol must address these difficulties and make sustainable reforestation worthwhile.
After all, creating an economic incentive for planting trees ought to be easier than getting the Americans, the Chinese and the Indians to agree to cut back on energy consumption.
Let Indonesia, the venue for a crucial December meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol, be an acid test: Either we reverse the degradation of the country's forest cover, or we stop dreaming that we will one day overcome global warming.
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