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$3 Carbon Price Could Cut Amazon Deforestation to Zero    [

    The Tropical Global Warming Solution
    By Glenn Hurowitz
    Grist

    Monday 03 December 2007

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight.

    Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

    Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases - providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people - who need them to survive.

    The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

    Polluters would jump at this opportunity. Protecting forests from destruction can cost as little as 75 cents per ton of carbon dioxide - even at higher costs, it's a fraction of the price (PDF) of cleaning up most industrial pollution. In the past, some environmentalists criticized carbon ranching for this very reason: they were concerned that if polluters focused their greenhouse gas reduction efforts on forest conservation, that would divert money from necessary clean-ups in industrial pollution. That's the wrong way to look at it. Because locking up carbon dioxide by protecting forests is so cheap, it means that the world can achieve bigger reductions in global warming pollution faster and for less money. Carbon ranching should be an argument for bigger immediate pollution reductions, from both forests and industry, not a way for polluters to get around their responsibility to clean up their own pollution.

    Another concern is what's known as leakage (PDF): the idea that if you protect one parcel of forest, ranchers, loggers, and biofuel interests will just move their operations elsewhere, resulting in little additional protection. That worry, however, can be addressed if the forest protection project is global in nature, as the Bali conference is considering. If forests and other wildlands everywhere are valued for the carbon they store, it means that loggers, ranchers, and agribusiness everywhere will for the first time have to include environmental costs in their bottom line calculations - and not just move their operations to an area with loose environmental protections. That will have a major side benefit, shifting production into areas where it does the least environmental harm.

    Finally, there are concerns about enforcement: how can we ensure that once a polluter gets credit for protecting a forest that that forest stays protected? Many of the tropical countries whose carbon-rich forests will be the initial beneficiaries of the program lack the resources to implement existing environmental protections and are plagued by corruption. In many tropical countries, for instance, it's common for one underpaid forest ranger to have responsibility for an area of land the size of a small American state. And what happens if a government decides not to honor its international commitments - could they just take a polluter's money, promise to protect a forest, and then let the loggers in anyway?

    Fortunately, the unprecedented resources that carbon ranching will bring to forest conservation will provide the means to solve these challenges. Based on current carbon prices on European markets, a hectare of rainforest would be worth more than $10,000 purely for the carbon it stores. Applying just 1/10 of that amount towards enforcement will provide more resources than have ever before been available for forest conservation. In Indonesia, for instance, it could support more than 300,000 well-paying jobs in forest conservation (or one person for every 200 hectares of forest), while still leaving plenty of money for high-tech satellite monitoring. That would help ensure conservation provides permanent benefits and provides a major boost to the local economy.

    Further guarantees can be secured through a system in which polluters don't receive all of the carbon credit at once for protecting a forest, but only get it on an annuity basis - receiving credit for 1/50 or one 1/100 of the carbon stored in a forest per year. If the forest were destroyed, polluters wouldn't be able to recoup the remainder of their investment - providing the polluters themselves with a powerful incentive to keep the forests safe.

    Carbon ranching is a transformative idea whose time has long since come. Policy wonks and polluter lobbyists have spent the last ten years arguing over its merits and working out the details. In the meantime, the world lost (PDF) a whopping 125 million hectares of forest, resulting in a release of more than 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the biofuel boom has intensified the threat: in Brazil, agribusiness interests - financed by George Soros, Goldman Sachs, and others - are destroying the wildlife mecca of the Cerrado, at a rate of seven million acres a year. In the Congo, charcoal cartels are turning the living forest into fuel - threatening to push mountain gorillas and other wildlife into extinction.

    A decision at Bali to immediately give financial value to intact forests (and not wait until 2012, as some are proposing), would end this destruction (PDF) almost overnight (PDF). The world's climate - and the forests and their creatures - can't wait for anything less.

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    This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction.

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    Amazon Deforestation Could Be Reduced to Zero at $3 Carbon Price
    By Rhett Butler
    mongabay.com

    Tuesday 04 December 2007

    The Amazon rainforest could play a major part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that result from deforestation, reports a new study published by scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia, and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. At a carbon price of $3 per ton, protecting the Amazon for its carbon value could outweigh the opportunity costs of forgoing logging, cattle ranching, and soy expansion in the region. 2008 certified emission-reduction credits for carbon currently trade at more than $90 per ton ($25 per ton of CO2).

    The report, published as more than 10,000 policymakers and scientists meet for UN climate talks on the Indonesian island of Bali, presents a conceptual framework for estimating the costs to tropical nations of implementing programs to reduce emissions by reducing deforestation (REDD). During the 1990s, tropical deforestation and forest degradation contributed 7 to 28% of global, human-induced carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Cutting deforestation would reduce these emissions as well as provide other ecosystem services.

     The report, titled "The Costs and Benefits of Reducing Carbon Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in the Brazilian Amazon," uses Brazil as a case study for REDD. Brazil is home to the bulk of the world's remaining tropical forest cover but has had the world's highest average annual loss of forest for more than three decades. Nevertheless, Brazil's forests contain more carbon (38-56 billion tons in the Amazon alone) in tropical forest trees than any other country.

    The study argues that reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to zero over a ten year period from a current average of 20,000 square kilometers per year is not only acheivable at a low cost ($8 in direct government outlays and $18 billion in forgone opportunity costs over 30 years), but would bring benefits to a wide range of Brazilians, including some of the country's poorest people-forest dwellers-who would see their income double. The initiative would also reduce fire-based costs to society (respiratory illness, deaths, agricultural and forestry damages) of $10 to $80 million per year, protect the rainfall system that fuels the Brazilian grain belt and hydroelectric energy generation, and conserve the Amazon's unmatched biodiversity. Importantly the effort would reduce carbon emissions 6 billion tons below the historical baseline and 13 billion tons below projected levels.

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    Daniel Nepstad (2007). The Costs and Benefits of Reducing Carbon Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in the Brazilian Amazon [PDF]. The Woods Hole Research Center. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP), Thirteenth session. 3-14 December 2007.