The Age, AU
Saturday 08 December 2007
Vast tracts of tropical rainforests will be protected under a declaration signed last night by the governor of Brazil's Amazonas state and his counterparts from the Indonesian provinces of Aceh, Papua and West Papua.
Dubbed the "green governors", they will impose moratoriums on logging across their provinces, home to much of the world's tropical forests.
With growing frustration at faltering negotiations in Bali to include programs to reduce deforestation in a post-Kyoto climate treaty, the governors have decided to take the lead.
Emissions from forestry account for about a fifth of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority from Indonesia and the Amazon.
The Bali meeting is considering paying developing nations to protect their forests by creating a new market in carbon credits.
The governors have also joined with an innovative Australian company, Carbon Conservation, to create a voluntary carbon credit market to sell shares in the carbon saved by protecting their forests.
The governors' move came as environment groups blasted the lack of progress in forestry negotiations in Bali.
Greenpeace spokesman Marcelo Furtado said: "What we are seeing in the deforestation debate is a potential crime scene and when the ministers arrive next week they may find a dead body in the house."
Action in Bali was essential, or there risked being no forest left to save, Mr Furtado said.
He welcomed the governors' declaration. "They are acting because nations aren't. I hope it serves as a jump-start for national and international action."
Fauna and Flora International spokesman Frank Momberg said the declaration would protect a vast chunk of the world's forest, setting an international example to combat climate change. FFI was already developing pilot programs for the provinces so they could participate in international deforestation-reducing schemes.
The declaration states the governors will halt all logging, conserve forests and commit to reducing greenhouse emissions. It calls for international support for the initiative.
Aceh's Governor Irwandi Yusuf said he wanted to plant more trees in Aceh to keep it green. "The world needs the forests of Aceh," he said.
Governor Yusuf has been leading patrols against logging, cutting the trade by more than half. One thousand forest rangers have been recruited to enforce the ban and another 2000 should join them next year.
Carbon Conservation chief Dorjee Sun said the environment could not wait for international initiatives to save the world's "emerald necklace" of tropical forests covered by the moratorium.
Funds raised by the sale of carbon credits, supplemented by environmentally friendly investments around the forests, would generate income. It would also provide work for local communities that had been forced to depend on illegal logging, Mr Sun said.
"The only way to stop deforestation is to go on the offensive, with economic incentives," he said.
During the moratorium on logging, the provinces' forests will be mapped and assessed for their carbon finance value.
The trading mechanism Mr Sun proposes is based on the concept that developing countries should be compensated if they lower rates of deforestation and associated carbon emissions.
The carbon credit created could be purchased by companies and countries to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions.
New Report on Deforestation Reveals Problems of Forest Carbon Payment Schemes
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
Friday 07 December 2007
New report outlines underlying causes of deforestation based on 10-year analysis.
Bali, Indonesia - A new study by one of the world's leading forestry research institutes warns that the new push to "reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation," known by the acronym REDD, is imperiled by a routine failure to grasp the root causes of deforestation. The study sought to link what is known about the underlying causes of the loss of 13 million hectares of forest each year to the promise-and potential pitfalls-of REDD schemes.
Based on more than a decade of in-depth research on the forces driving deforestation worldwide, the report by researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) found that there is ample opportunity to reduce carbon emissions if financial incentives will be sufficient enough to flip political and economic realities that cause deforestation.
The report was released today at the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP-13) in Bali, where environment ministers from 190 countries are meeting to plot a long-term strategy for combating global warming. High on the agenda is reducing the 1.6 billion tons of carbon emissions caused each year by deforestation, which amounts to one-fifth of global carbon emissions and more than the combined total contributed by the world's energy-intensive transport sectors.
"After being left out of the Kyoto agreement, it's promising that deforestation is commanding center-stage at the Bali climate talks," said CIFOR's Director General, Frances Seymour. "But the danger is that policy-makers will fail to appreciate that forest destruction is caused by an incredibly wide variety of political, economic, and other factors that originate outside the forestry sector, and require different solutions."
In other words, Seymour said, stopping deforestation in Indonesia caused by overcapacity in the wood processing industry is a completely different challenge from dealing with deforestation stemming from a road project in the Amazon or forest degradation caused by charcoal production in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to CIFOR, careful examination reveals that complex, indirect forces are often more important than the logging and slash and burn activities popularly understood as the main causes of deforestation. Forces such as fluctuations in international commodity prices; agricultural and, more recently, biofuel subsidies; and roads and other infrastructure projects can encourage forest clearing. Deeply ingrained and routinely corrupt government practices often favor large corporate interests over community rights to forest resources.
Seymour said the CIFOR analysis, which draws on a range of studies of the economic, social and political conditions affecting the world's most vulnerable forests, seeks to ensure that any initiatives to stem deforestation that might emerge in future climate change agreements are firmly grounded in reality.
Most importantly, CIFOR advises decision makers to learn from the past and look beyond the confines of the forestry sector to the array of market failures and governance failures that spark a chain of events culminating in deforestation.
For example, according to the study, Indonesia, which is estimated to lose 1.9 million hectares of forest each year, has emerged as one of the world's leading sources of carbon emissions in part due to a global spike in prices for palm oil and a surge in China's demand for wood pulp. Together, these forces have pushed deforestation into carbon-rich peatlands that are being cleared and drained to make way for oil palm and pulpwood plantations. Limiting deforestation in Indonesia's peatlands should be a high priority because the carbon losses per hectare are substantial.
Meanwhile, CIFOR notes that in South America, the loss of 4.3 million hectares a year is driven in part by meat consumption that encourages conversion of forests to pasture lands throughout the region. In Ecuador, road building has been a major cause of deforestation. In sub-Saharan Africa, fuelwood extraction and charcoal production are factors behind the continent's loss of 4 million hectares a year.
Markku Kanninen, one of the authors of the report, said that "Policies that seek to halt deforestation will need to be crafted to address diverse local situations and target activities in areas such as agriculture, transportation and finance that lie well beyond the boundaries of the forest sector."
"The perverse subsidies that provide incentives for clearing forest must be removed and efforts to secure property rights for local forest communities should be encouraged," Kanninen said.
The report also sees promise in the increasingly popular notion that deforestation can be addressed with financial incentives that compensate landowners for "environmental services." Seymour said discussions in Bali to fight deforestation by compensating forest stewards for protecting the carbon-storage capacity of forests through what is now a multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credit are potentially powerful.
"Such payments to individual land-users have the potential to "flip" financial incentives from favoring forest destruction, as they now do, to favoring conservation," Seymour said. "But the key question is whether or not REDD incentives will be sufficient to flip political and economic decisions at the national level that drive deforestation."
Appealing as they are, Seymour said it's critical to understand that, due to decades of inattention to the rights of forest dwellers, new payment streams tied to conservation could intensify the severe poverty that now afflicts the majority of rural forest communities in the developing world.
"Since forest property rights are often very unclear, payment for carbon services could end up providing incentives for corrupt officials or local elites to appropriate this new forest value from local communities," she said. "We've seen this happen before in similar situations, and there's every reason to believe, given the kind of money now being paid for carbon credits, that it could happen again."
Seymour said such problems can be avoided if policy makers enter the process of designing REDD strategies with a clear understanding of potential pitfalls and what can be done to avoid them. The report advises that reducing carbon emissions from forests will require strengthening the weak governance mechanisms that have long proven unable to enforce many existing prohibitions on forest clearing.
Finally, the report calls for ensuring that the REDD process is fair to poor forest communities.
"We need to temper the desire for maximum reduction in forest-based carbon emissions with regard for the legitimate rights of forest communities to realize the income potential of their forestlands," Seymour said. "At times there will be trade-offs between reducing carbon emissions and reducing poverty."
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About the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Headquartered in Indonesia and with offices in Latin America and Africa, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) is a leading international forestry research organization established in response to global concerns about the social, environmental, and economic consequences of forest loss and degradation. CIFOR is one of 15 research centers within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
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