Paul Eccleston, Telegraph 3 Dec 07;
Carbon trading could be the key to stopping the destruction of the rainforests, a new report claims.
In the past deforestation has been driven by the belief that a forest was worth more dead than alive.
But new research shows that the forests have the potential to earn substantially more from carbon offsetting if they are left intact.
Research for the Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins showed that forests torn down to make way for agriculture earned between $1-$5 per ton of carbon they released.
But traders in the emerging European carbon market were currently paying up to five times that amount - $35 - for an offset tied to a one-ton reduction in carbon.
The new research, issued to coincide with the Bali climate summit, said the comparison was important because industries in developed countries were looking to spend billions of dollars on carbon credits to meet new requirements for curbing greenhouse gases.
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The study examined the money made from deforestation over the last 10-20 years in areas of Southeast Asia, Central Africa and the Amazon Basin which was mostly driven by the desire for farm land or timber.
Brent Swallow, leader of the study and Global Coordinator of the Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins, said: "Deforestation is almost always driven by a rational response to what the market values and for some time now, it has just made more financial sense to many people in forested areas to cut down the trees.
"What we discovered is that returns for deforestation are generally so paltry that if farmers and other land users were rewarded for the carbon stored in their trees and forests, it is highly likely that a large amount of deforestation and carbon emissions would be prevented."
Halting deforestation, responsible for 20 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions, is high on the agenda at Bali.
Confusion over how to value and monitor the large amounts of carbon stored in tropical forests has so far prevented forests being included in the carbon offset market.
Meine van Noordwijk, Southeast Asia Regional Coordinator of the World Agroforestry Centre, said: "We understand that allowing people in forested regions of developing countries to participate in carbon markets presents major challenges, but it's naive to think that conservation is going to occur absent a market incentive.
"Everyone has a stake in finding a way to make it work because it's hard to see how any global effort to combat climate change will succeed if it ignores a major source of the problem."
The study examined the trade-offs between carbon and financial returns in three areas in Indonesia, and one area each in Peru and Cameroon, all of which have undergone extensive deforestation.
They found that in most instances at the sites in Indonesia, deforestation returned less than $5 per ton of carbon released and in some areas, less than $1. In forested areas rich in peat, which is particularly efficient at trapping carbon, the figure was about $0.10 to $0.20 per ton.
An analysis of deforestation in the Amazonian forests of the Ucayali Province of Peru produced similar results. Most of the deforestation, which was mainly driven by a desire for crop land, generated less than US $5 per ton of carbon released.
The Cameroon study sites produced a better return. Deforestation returns about US $11 per ton of carbon emissions, which was mainly due to an increase in secondary forest and the fact that in Cameroon, cocoa production-which elsewhere has decimated tropical forests-has tended to occur within forests, and resulted in more in forest degradation than outright deforestation.
The study claimed that paying for the preservation of the rainforests not only encouraged conservation but could also help recoup some of the carbon already lost to deforestation through sustainable agriculture.
Dennis Garrity, Director General of the Nairobi, Kenya-based World Agroforestry Centre said that, "Not only does agroforestry have the potential to store carbon, it also addresses the need for alternative livelihoods amongst populations who currently benefit from deforestation."
The report said that establishing a forest-based carbon market would be complicated.
Frances Seymour, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia, said: "The challenge will be to ensure that payments for maintaining forests actually reach local people, and do not end up in the wrong pockets.
"For the system to be effective, we will need new mechanisms for allocating payments that are efficient as well as fair."
