Putting a new value on forests

 

 

It all started with rock star Sting, this fad for owning a patch of tropical rainforest, though it is probably unfair to blame him entirely for creating the boom industry that buying up forests piecemeal has become.

It is 20 years since the musician first set foot in Brazil and pledged to fight the cause of the Yanomami Indians, setting up the Rainforest Foundation to protect the forests and their indigenous inhabitants.

Today, protecting forests has acquired a more international purpose. Climate change, rather than assuring the livelihoods of local people, has become the issue.

Celebrities and politicians, and many others in search of a quick buck, are falling over each other to advocate plant-a-tree conservationism as a salve to global warming.

Actors Sienna Miller and Josh Hartnett, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, and Britain’s Prince Charles all endorse Global Cool, an initiative that encourages individuals to reduce their carbon emissions by, among other things, buying a “tonne of cool”.

British naturalist Sir David Attenborough is a patron of the World Land Trust, which is currently offering to “save a whole acre in perpetuity”, for just £50 (Dh363). However, critics say that there can be no ultimate guarantee of the future of any piece of land.

Wealthy UK financier, Johan Eliasch, who advises UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on deforestation and green energy, provoked the ire of the Brazilian Government with his purchase, in 2006, of 400,000 acres of Amazon rainforest.

“The Amazon is not for sale,” said the Brazilian President, Lula da Silva. Eliasch then joined forces with British MP Frank Field, and launched a grand tree-buying plan called Cool Earth late last year.

Cool Earth stresses that it “leases” rather than buys land, to keep it safe from eager logging companies. Its website explains that saving one acre of endangered rainforest keeps 260 tonnes of carbon safely “locked up” within the forest itself, unable to escape and pollute the atmosphere.

Whoever owns the land or the trees, this method of “capturing” or “locking” carbon into forests is not going to have the knock-on effect of saving the planet.

Cool Earth does not claim explicitly to be in the offsetting game, but the carbon that it claims can be “locked up” in one acre of forest would offset 30 round-trips to Rio de Janeiro, say.

 For the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, this forestry offsetting craze is acting as a smokescreen, and detracting from real solutions to the escalating emissions crisis.

“Taking a dodgy accounting proposition, which is that you can somehow identify the amount of carbon that any given new bit of forest picks up out of the atmosphere and sequesters, and make that correspond somehow to emissions elsewhere,” is how Greenpeace sees carbon offsetting, according to its senior climate adviser Charlie Kronick.

“It can’t be done. The methodology is poor, and the logic isn’t very good either. Once the carbon you’ve put in from fossil fuels is up there, nothing is going to make it go away.”

Friends of the Earth’s Marie Reynolds points out that not only is offsetting no substitute for real emissions cuts, but also there is no guarantee, when you plant a tree, what the future of that tree will be.

Robin Oakley, Greenpeace’s climate and energy campaigner, agrees: “The issue with offsetting is that, fundamentally, it doesn’t undo the damage done by carbon pollution. The vast number of players in the offsetting market are not reducing emissions in any accountable or measurable way.”

In some cases, local people, far from benefiting, suffer when huge new plantations spring up. Survival International campaigner, David Hill, says: “Numerous reports show how indigenous peoples have suffered as a result of carbon projects: invasion of their land, evictions, the destruction of villages and crops, reduced access to or destruction of traditional resources, and violent conflict.”

Offsetting is popular because it makes people feel much better about taking long-haul flights or driving gas-guzzling vehicles. “They are being misled,” says Oakley. “Most carbon offsetting companies are making a killing.”

Climate Care, the company that British opposition leader David Cameron pays his green-guilt tax to, has recently been bought by the investment bank JPMorgan. In the credit-crunch climate, any new acquisitions are thought through very carefully, and only the most watertight pass muster. This move suggests that carbon offsetting is currently considered a risk-free industry.

Very few not-for-profit offsetting companies exist. Myclimate is one, and only uses “Gold Standard” offsets, a strict set of criteria for measuring where the money is going, drawn up by a number of international campaigning organisations.

Redd – reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation – is the UN’s proposed trading mechanism, which aims to pay countries not to cut down their forests.

“Turning the forest into just another commodity is not going to protect the climate or the lives of the people who live there,” says Kronick. Surprisingly, perhaps, Greenpeace is in favour of extracting value from forests in other ways, such as the deal that was recently hammered out between Guyana and Canopy Capital, a group of British financiers, to protect the Iwokrama Forest.

The Guyanan President, Bharrat Jagdeo, made a plea last November, to structure exactly this type of deal for all of Guyana’s forests.

Michael Woods, a partner in the British law firm Stephenson Harwood and head of its environment department, oversaw the deal. “It focuses on eco-systems services and the value a forest provides,” he explains. “Rainfall is the best example. Without the trees, the eco-system will not produce the rainfall that then benefits other parts of South America, even as far as the American Midwest. It is a global utility service on which agriculture relies, and its value should be recognised.”

However, this sort of protectoral behaviour, especially when overseen by foreign advisers, provokes worried disapproval from many green corners, giving rise to cries of neo- or eco-colonialism.

“If there’s going to be financial compensation for eco-systems services, which recognises that they provide a service other than locking up carbon, it should be for the people who live in those forests,” says Kronick.

“How do they get a share of the proceeds? How do you preserve national sovereignty, so that under the banner of climate change it doesn’t become a kind of eco-colonialism?”

“This is not about buying land or trees,” says Andrew Mitchell, a director of Canopy Capital and an experienced conservationist. “It is about trying to put a new value on forests for countries such as Guyana that are not destroying their forests. We need a new economic paradigm that values them, so that there’s more of an incentive to leave them standing than cutting them down.”

This sort of deal is in its infancy. It is described by climate-change specialists as “avoided deforestation”, and similar projects should be rolled out in the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

Other countries are already envious of Guyana’s pioneering deal. Indonesia, Brazil, Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo would all benefit massively from similar arrangements.

Despite the potential quagmires over forest ownership, Greenpeace is in favour, because safe-guarding a forest, as well as ensuring the livelihoods of its inhabitants, has a real effect on climate change. “It is like sticking a cork in an industrial process,” says Kronick.

“It is taking one of the sources of climate change – deforestation accounts for up to 30 per cent of carbon emissions in the atmosphere – and removing it. It must be a part of whatever solutions we come up with for climate change. Protecting forests is one of the smartest things that we can do.” (The Independent)

 

The people who live in forests are the first to be hit by their destruction. Survival International and the Forest Peoples Programme help indigenous communities to protect their rights to manage and control their own habitat. Visit:

www.forestpeoples.org

 

Do not expect your money to save trees; most of the Gold Standard projects involve switching communities from fossil fuel to other types of power. Visit: www.myclimate.org

But if you’ve got your heart set on ‘buying’ your own patch of rainforest, The World Land Trust claims to do just that – acre by acre. The idea is the land is then protected indefinitely as part of private reserves, owned and managed by local organisations, for the benefit of both wildlife and indigenous people.

Since its foundation in 1989 as the World Wide Land Conservation Trust, the trust has helped purchase and protect more than 350,000 acres of habitats, in Asia, Central and South America and the United Kingdom. Visit: www.worldlandtrust.org