This high proportion reflects the fact that tropical forests store enormous amounts of carbon and that its release, through deforestation, accounts for one-fifth of annual carbon emissions. In response, a proposal for ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation’ (or REDD) was agreed as part of the ‘
Banking on forest carbon
The logic underpinning REDD is fairly simple. At present, the short-term economic gains from deforestation outweigh the long-term good of forest conservation. By investing up to £7.5 billion globally per year into saving forests, the economic balance is believed to change in favour of the latter. This money would be paid in the form of carbon credits, worked out in relation to national deforestation rates – the more a country saves, the more it earns.
The Bali roadmap was vague on how this might be achieved, but in handing the World Bank responsibility for administering REDD pilot schemes through its new Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), it laid a clear foundation for a market-based approach. ‘The facility’s ultimate goal is to jump-start a forest carbon market,’ according to Benoit Bosquet, the Bank official who lead the development of the facility. The Bank has considerable form in this area. ‘When the Bank launched its first prototype carbon fund in 1999, it was envisioned as a short-term catalyst to jump start private finance in the international carbon market,’ explains Janet Redman of the US-based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. ‘Eight years later the Bank’s portfolio has grown to more than ten carbon funds with over $2 billion in offset money.’
The World Bank has an alarmingly poor track record in relation to forests, however. During the 1980s, it funded a series of disastrous commercial logging projects, mega-dams and road building programmes that opened the way to widespread deforestation. Mounting criticisms led to a new forest policy in 1991 which, at least on paper, ended the Bank’s support for commercial logging, while stressing conservation and local peoples’ rights. In practice, though, the Bank continued to incentivise forest destruction through its structural adjustment programmes. It then issued a revised forest policy in 2002, signalling its return to a more active role in this sector.
Talk of ‘sustainable forest management’ could not mask the fact that the Bank had gone back to its bad old ways, encouraging further logging and the growth of plantations at the expense of natural forests. In early 2007, for example, the Bank launched a strategic plan to invest in up to 7 million hectares of new industrial plantations in
The FCPF, which conceives of REDD pilots as a means to stimulate an international market in carbon credits from ‘reduced deforestation’, should be seen against this backdrop: not so much an approach to saving forests as a means to grow money on trees.
Putting a price on forests
Such a scheme is fraught with problems; and the evidence of existing carbon trading projects shows why. According to the UK Treasury’s 2006 Stern Review, climate change is ‘the greatest market failure the world has seen’ – in response to which, somewhat perversely, it advocates the expansion of carbon markets. These take the form of carbon trading, a system that allows polluters to pay others to cut their emissions so they don’t have to.
The idea, as encapsulated in the Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), is that carbon markets offer an efficient system of global emissions reductions because the market’s hidden hand will guide investment towards the cuts that are the cheapest. In practice, though, the CDM offers handouts for continued pollution in both the global North, where companies and governments are offered a cheap means to keep on with business-as-usual, and in the South, where the CDM projects that generate the most credits offer subsidies to some of the world’s most polluting companies.
REDD schemes apply a similar approach to the problem of deforestation, reducing this complex problem to a carbon pricing mechanism that fits the models of mainstream economists. ‘REDD simplifies the function of forest ecosystems to that of a carbon store,’ says WAHLI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia). This undervalues them as water catchment areas, habitats for biodiversity and as the basis of indigenous and local peoples’ livelihoods.
An additional danger is that schemes to ‘avoid deforestation’ become a further means for rich countries to avoid responsibility for over-consumption and evade emissions cuts. ‘The debate on REDD changes the focus away from Northern country behaviour to what is happening in the South, which is politically very palatable for industrialised countries,’ says Jutta Kill of the Forests and European Union Resource Network (FERN).
But carbon stored in forests is not equivalent to the carbon released by burning fossil fuels. ‘Carbon in forests is always released into the atmosphere at some point, as part of a cycle, whereas the release of fossil carbon is a one-way road,’ says Jutta Kill. In the case of industrial tree plantations, this ‘storage’ capacity is very short – since they involve the planting of fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, which are cut after only eight to 15 years. For this reason, among others, the proposed inclusion of tree plantations as carbon ‘sinks’ within the CDM proved highly controversial when the Kyoto Protocol was first negotiated.
Seeing REDD
When the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, measures to protect natural forests were excluded from the CDM on the grounds that investment in deforestation projects in one area would simply displace the problem to other areas. REDD schemes now under discussion try to address this by requiring a reduction of deforestation on a national level rather than just a project-by-project basis. But this brings with it a new set of problems.
‘In many tropical countries, states … legally define the remaining forests as so-called “state land”,’ explains Tom Griffiths of the Forest Peoples Programme. This provides them with a means to ignore the land claims of indigenous peoples. With REDD payments administered top down by governments, companies and conservation NGOs, ‘the risk is that forest-dependent peoples would be evicted in order to "protect lucrative forest carbon reservoirs”’.
The real drivers of deforestation
Such an approach targets indigenous and marginalised peoples as the ‘drivers’ of deforestation. In the Kampar Peninsula in Riau, Indonesia – which, aside from its rich biodiversity and being the habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger, sits on one of the deepest peatland stores of carbon in the world – the APRIL pulp and paper company has proposed a ‘ring’ of plantations to protect the remaining forest from illegal logging. It is now seeking additional funding for the project from the REDD scheme.
Yet the project itself would directly clear nearly half of the remaining forest cover in the region, while doing nothing to address the underlying driver of deforestation: the overcapacity of APRIL and rival firm APP’s paper mills. Between them, the two companies process over 4 million tons of pulp each year, the bulk of which comes from the deforestation of the region’s natural forests and is exported either as pulp or paper to the North.
The problem is not restricted to the Riau province. Across much of
Instead of REDD?
What, then, would be a better solution? There is no simple answer, but activists in Riau province, and throughout
Financial incentives could play a role here, insofar as they support the recognition of land rights for indigenous communities or education projects. Such measures, which would cost far less than the proposed financing for REDD, could be of genuine worth in avoiding deforestation. But they are unlikely to show up on the balance books of a forest carbon-trading scheme whose main purpose seems to be providing Northern countries with yet another escape from their responsibility to reduce emissions at home.
An earlier version of this article appeared in Red Pepper magazine (February/March 2008).
Oscar Reyes is editor of Red Pepper magazine (www.redpepper.org.uk) and communications officer at the Transnational Institute (www.tni.org).
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate