Tags: greenhouse gas, carbon credits, climate change, conservation, reforestation, EPA,Waxman-Markey legislation, Kyoto protocol, paulownia
By Jeff Horowitz
The tropical forest provisions in the recently passed Waxman-Markey legislation represent a rare area of emerging US leadership on climate policy – one that will create a new era for forests, tropical development and carbon markets.
If these provisions are enacted into law and equaled or surpassed by other developed nations, the world can rapidly (and affordability) reduce and reverse deforestation, eliminating the 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation and provide a sustainable route to prosperity for the planet’s millions of forest dependent people.
The legislation bridges a political gap that has long plagued efforts to tackle climate change in the US and around the world: the dispute over whether companies should be able to receive credit for investing in tropical forest conservation or whether efforts to protect forests should rely exclusively on government funding.
Instead of continuing to debate these questions while the planet’s forests burn (300 million acres of forests have been lost since the Kyoto protocol excluded tropical forest protections in 1997), major US environmental groups and companies decided to do something about it – and entered a negotiating process facilitated by Jeff Horowitz, the founder of Avoided Deforestation Partners.
This process yielded a major insight: it’s not a choice between governments and markets. Rather, both government funding and incentives for private investment are essential to end deforestation – and will build on one another.
This insight was embodied in a Forest-Climate Unity Agreement signed by groups and companies across the ideological spectrum, from the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council to the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, American Electric Power and Duke Energy.
With such a powerful alliance behind it, policy makers took note and the Waxman-Markey legislation broadly reflects this consensus. First, it sets aside five per cent of the bill’s emissions allowances to help tropical government’s end illegal logging, conduct conservation activities to which markets may not be suited, and build the capacity they need to meet the legislation’s strict requirements for participation in carbon markets.
Companies can only get credit for reducing emissions from forest conservation once the reductions have already occurred – and either they or EPA has to compensate for any subsequent reversals that occur because of fire, logging, or other intentional or unintentional activities.
In major emitting countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, companies can receive credit only if conservation activities are part of a national plan that ensures a countrywide reduction in deforestation, not just a local one. In the program’s early years, conservation projects run through major emitting states and provinces will also be eligible, as will projects in small-emitting countries that are working to develop national plans for reducing deforestation.
Critically, no conservation will receive credit unless biodiversity is protected, and indigenous and forest-dependent people share in the proceeds. Consider the numbers: by 2015, the combination of the set-aside funding and offsets will generate $12-15 billion annual investment in tropical forest conservation, preventing the destruction of millions of hectares of forest and reducing pollution by a conservatively estimated one billion tons of CO2 a year – equivalent to wiping away all of Germany’s pollution.
Many of these funds will go directly to forest dependent and indigenous communities – and for the first time on a large scale, the quest for a better life will be tied to conservation of the earth’s natural treasures, not their destruction.
The legislation also credits environmentally-sound reforestation and afforestation activities, giving hope that the millions of acres of forests that have already been destroyed might one day approach something like their former glory (and carbon storage capacity).
All this is achieved on an extremely affordable basis. EPA has estimated the bill would be 89 per cent more expensive without international offsets, most of which will be forest based, allowing the US to take on more ambitious emissions reduction targets than would otherwise have been politically possible.
That could be an important insight for European countries and others with stronger pollution reduction targets than the US: although they’re starting from a better baseline, including affordable, high quality tropical forest offsets in their climate policies would allow these countries to achieve even greater pollution reductions at the same economic and political cost –with extraordinary benefits for the climate.
For more information on carbon credits and REDDs and reforestation you may read www.paulownianow.org and www.panampro.com which explains how paulownia acts as a carbon sink helping to restore the environment.
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