Touch wood-Copenhagen

Climate change and forests

Touch wood

Dec 17th 2009 COPENHAGEN

From The Economist print edition

Everyone agrees on the need to save trees, but the details are still tricky

WHATEVER else historians say about the Copenhagen talks on climate change, they may be remembered as a time when the world concluded that it must protect forests, and pay for them. In the Kyoto protocol of 1997, forests were a big absentee: that was partly because sovereignty-conscious nations like Brazil were unwilling, at any price, to accept limits on their freedom to fell.

All that is history. As the UN talks went into their second week, trees looked like being one of the few matters on which governments could more or less see eye to eye. Over the past two years, skilful campaigning by pro-forest groups has successfully disseminated the idea that trees cannot be ignored in any serious deliberation on the planet’s future.

Most people at the summit accepted the case that is endlessly made by friends of the forest: cutting down trees contributes up to 20% of global greenhouse emissions, and avoiding this loss would be a quick, cheap way of limiting heat-trapping gases. Unless forests are better protected, so their argument goes, dangerous levels of climate change look virtually inevitable.

On December 16th six rich nations gave advocates of that view a boost when they pledged $3.5 billion as a down payment on a much larger effort to “slow, halt and eventually reverse” deforestation in poor countries. The benefactors—Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Britain and the United States—endorsed tree protection in terms that went beyond the immediate need to stem emissions. Keeping trees standing would protect biodiversity and help development of the right sort, they said.

In lines that could have come from a green campaigner, Gordon Brown said the forests “provide a global service in soaking up the pollution of the world.” Unless action was taken, “these forests could be lost for ever, impacting not only the global climate but on the livelihoods of 90% of the 1.2 billion people” who rely on trees for a living. The money stumped by the six countries was a first instalment of the $25 billion needed between now and 2015 to cut deforestation by a quarter. In a rare synergy between Britain’s ceremonial rulers and its real ones, the effort to gather up $25 billion in pledges has been led by the Prince’s Rainforests Project, a charity run by the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles: his predilection for the green and organic has been a gift to British comics but went down well in Denmark.Impressive as it was, the rich nations’ offer did not settle the questions that need resolving in any global forest deal. One was whether or not to include timetables and targets. The most ambitious proposals called for a 50% reduction in deforestation by 2020 and a complete halt by 2030. But forested nations were unwilling to accept those ideas until they saw what the rich world was offering.

The other question was how so much money will be ladled out, how it will be raised and who would receive it: national governments, regional authorities or local people, including the indigenous. Any plan that did not give local people cause to keep their trees standing would surely fail. But some have argued that doling out cash to forest-dwellers is too crude an approach; it may be better to help non-forest areas yield more crops, or to concentrate on restoring marginal land to farming. Advocates of national approaches—involving entire countries, not small areas—say local efforts cause “leakage” as felling is stopped in one place but shifts to another.

Tony La Viña, the chief negotiator on the UN initiative known as “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)” was optimistic, as of December 16th, that the issues left to settle were “manageable.” The fact that REDD has been broadened to include rewards for countries that have conserved their forests (as opposed to repentant sinners) is an encouraging sign. But that does not mean the problems are negligible.

The question of how much money to raise from government transfers, and how much from carbon trading, is not merely of concern to radical greens. Some Europeans fear that throwing forests into the carbon market will depress the price; but for America’s Congress, a healthy market in offsets may be the only thing that makes payment to protect forests palatable.Supporters of REDD say it offers performance-related finance for saving forests on a far larger scale than ever before. It aims to ensure rigorous verification. The proposal’s critics insist that a superficially good deal could prove terrible because of loopholes in carbon accounting. These may come from inflated national baselines for deforestation, or allowances that permit some sorts of tree-felling to be ignored. Sceptics also claim that REDD ignores some causes of deforestation, like the demand for soy, beef, palm oil, and timber which tempts people to act illegally.

But things are changing on that front. Green groups want firms to shrink their “forest footprint”—and some are responding. On December 11th Unilever, a giant food company, said it was abandoning one of its palm-oil suppliers because of doubts about what it is doing in some of the world’s forests. That is sobering for anybody tempted to chop down rainforest and plant something more immediately lucrative. In the longer term, Copenhagen’s decisions may do a lot more to make the forests lucrative in themselves.