Mangroves offer win-win opportunity

Mark Huxham BBC Green Room 9 Aug 10;

Healthy mangrove forests provide a huge range of environmental benefits and need to be protected, says Mark Huxham. In this week's Green Room, he argues that schemes such as Redd offer a vital lifeline to the important ecosystems.

Like smoke from a bushfire, a pall of black pessimism permeates news from tropical forests.

Every year millions of hectares are lost; usually between 1-2% of global forest coverage.

But in recent years, new units of destruction have appeared measuring mass, not area.

In 2008, we saw 12 billion tonnes of carbon disappear - this is equal to the mass of about 100 million blue whales.

This shift in measurement reflects a change in international priorities.

Whilst the negative impacts of deforestation on biodiversity and indigenous people remain as serious as ever, it is climate change, and units of carbon, that have come to dominate discussions around forestry.

Redd wedge

Approximately 17% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from the destruction of tropical forests. This is more than the total from all forms of transport combined.

So conserving and restoring these forests must form part of a comprehensive climate change deal; reducing emissions from the developed world is essential, but is not enough.

International negotiations have developed a mechanism to achieve forest conservation, known as Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation).

The idea is that tropical nations will be able to apply for funds either to slow the rate of destruction of existing forests or to increase the area of new ones.

Given that the international carbon market is worth in excess of $100bn per year - more than 100 times what is spent on international conservation - Redd holds the potential of injecting large sums into saving tropical forests and of finally reversing the decline.

Mangroves, forests that grow in intertidal areas in the tropics and sub-tropics, and the people that depend upon them could really benefit from Redd-related carbon payments.

Mangroves account for only around 0.4% of all forests; but the multiple services - such as coastal protection, nursery habitat for fish and filtration of pollution and sediments - that they provide, and the rapid rate of their destruction, make them a conservation priority.

They are also highly effective natural sinks for carbon, capturing up to six times more carbon per hectare than undisturbed rainforests.

Community credits

We have been working with conservation charities Earthwatch Institute and Plan Vivo, along with the Kenyan government, to develop a demonstration community mangrove conservation project at Gazi Bay in southern Kenya.

There are many good reasons to carry out this work, and money from carbon credits might just make it possible - not only in Kenya, but in other communities throughout the tropics.

So why don't we seize the chance?

Critics of the carbon market highlight a number of reasons.

First, the carbon accounting approach to forestry may fail to see the woods for the carbon; the best ways of maximising carbon revenue may not be the best ways of maintaining healthy ecosystems.

For example, plantations of fast growing exotic species - such as eucalypts - can rapidly capture carbon but may be a disaster for native wildlife and ecosystems.

But the temptation to do this will usually not arise for mangroves, which are highly specialised and grow in areas that other trees cannot tolerate.

Second, there is the threat that Redd and similar systems will be used by governments to evict "inefficient" local people from forests made suddenly valuable by carbon money.

The recent People's Climate Conference, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, came out against Redd on these grounds.

But this is an argument for bottom-up projects, which are led by local people from the start. While the Redd process is still flexible and evolving, an opportunity exists to model future projects on community-based principles.

In the case of mangroves, governments already own most forests around the world, with local people having no formal rights to their use or powers to protect them. Redd presents an opportunity to design and test new systems of community tenure-ship.

The third argument heard against investing in forests for carbon is that of "permanence": how can we know that carbon locked in forests today will not be released following fires or clear-felling tomorrow?

Such an argument could be made against most low-carbon developments. There is no guarantee that the wind turbine built today will not be struck by lightning tomorrow, and anyhow it will "die" at the end of its operating life of 30 years.

However, mangroves are capable of storing carbon for many thousands of years in the form of peat in their sediments, and much of this carbon may remain in place even if the forests themselves are destroyed.

One UK newspaper columnist compares carbon offsetting to the indulgences paid by the pious in the Middle Ages - a device to absolve your conscience without changing your actions.

This is the "moral hazard" argument - that offsetting carbon is a trick that will excuse business-as-usual and will be counterproductive.

But we no longer have a choice between protecting forests and changing lifestyles. Both are necessary.

Money from offsetting can form a useful bridging mechanism as we move towards reducing emissions and enhancing and protecting sinks. But we do need to make sure that both happen, and that cash generated from offsetting is only a part, and a diminishing one, of the funding required.

And what can be said of the final argument, that pricing ecosystem services such as sequestration is a final capitulation to the market-driven, growth-obsessed logic that has got us into our current mess?

I agree that we need a revolutionary change in our ethical outlook so that ecological sustainability becomes our central concern, but I don't see it happening in time to save the forests.

(Lord) Nicholas Stern, in his landmark review into the economics of climate change, identified climate change as a massive "market failure".

By using the language of economics, his report influenced thinking from governments to tabloid newsrooms, even though it contained no new science.

We should learn from this and use the tools of economics to help correct "market failures" such as the destruction of valuable mangroves for short-term gain.

Meanwhile, the bad news from the tropics continues to drift in.

But for the first time in many years there is an emerging opportunity to clear the smoke, and community-based conservation of mangroves is a good place to start.

Dr Mark Huxham is an Earthwatch researcher based at Napier University, Scotland

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website