WWF ends contentious debate, will now support effort to fight climate change by saving rainforests

mongabay.com 24 Sep 08;

WWF, one of the world's largest environmental groups, says it will now support policy mechanisms that would compensate tropical countries for reducing carbon dioxide emissions generated by deforestation and forest degradation, according to remarks by the group's president and CEO at an "avoided deforestation" meeting in New York.

Speaking to an audience that included Former Vice President Al Gore; Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Prize-winning the Kenyan environmentalist from Kenya; veteran newscaster Dan Rather; Barrhat Jagdeo, sitting president of the South American country of Guyana; and dozens of executives and high-ranking officials from NGOs and governments around the world, Carter Roberts said Monday that WWF would no longer oppose efforts to include forests in international climate negotiations.

“The Amazon, if it were a country, would be in the top seven emitters of greenhouse gases in the world," Carter said. "Unless the world has policies that recognize that value of standing trees and forests, we will have failed.�

"In Kyoto, WWF was pivotal in keeping forests out. We have changed our position," he added.

The news was welcomed by groups pushing forest conservation as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Tropical deforestation and degradation accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector. Some economists say that "avoided deforestation" represents one of the most-effective means for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases, while many environmentalists see the concept as offering the best hope for saving endangered tropical forests.

WWF had opposed including forest conservation in climate talks due to concerns over monitoring and implementation as well as a desire to focus on reducing industrial emissions. The group, along with other campaigners, argued at the time that "avoided deforestation" would allow developed countries to meet emission reduction requirements without cutting emissions from industrial sources, including power generation, construction, and transportation. WWF and other avoided deforestation opponents feared that rich countries would be "let off the hook" by simply paying tropical countries to cease forest clearing, instead of pushing energy efficiency, pollution controls, and other measures. In the meantime, deforestation continued unabated, with Indonesia and Brazil alone losing some 300,000 square kilometers of forest -- an area the size of Italy or the Philippines -- since talks in 2001 officially excluded avoided deforestation from the Kyoto Protocol.

WWF's opposition in the face of ongoing forest destruction sparked a bitter rift among environmentalists, but the group last year signaled that it might be having a change of heart when it hosted a public symposium on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation (REDD), a proposed avoided deforestation mechanism. Now with his comments at the Avoided Deforestation Partners meeting, Carter has publicly thrown WWF's considerable clout into the campaign to get forests recognized as a critical component of addressing climate change.

Roberts said that WWF will now support avoided deforestation as part of a broader set of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"We need forests to be in there, but energy efficiency and movement to renewables are equally important," he said, adding that the basis for climate change mitigation "must be absolute deep cuts in emissions in the U.S."

"If the cuts are real and deep, that will force cuts across all sectors... [they] can't be superficial," he continued.

"There is no silver bullet for resolving the climate crisis. We need a broad effort that targets all sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Tropical deforestation, which accounts for nearly a fifth of global emissions, obviously must be an integral part of a comprehensive climate change strategy.�

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore agreed.

"We have to start reducing our pollution and substituting renewable sources of energy," Gore said. "But, we also have to provide the means for stopping deforestation. One of the most effective things we can do in the near term to address the climate crisis is to protect the world’s tropical forests."