354 Forest Type / World Wide

–Dry Tropical Forests: 32) Summary
–World-wide: 33) REDD is so complicated it may never get off the ground

Articles:

Dry Tropical forests:

32) Tropical dry evergreen forest has restricted global distribution — limited to parts of Asia (on the Coromandel coast of India, northern Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand), Africa and Central America — but is highly variable in terms of height and the species it contains, depending on site location, soil type and the level of human impacts. A new study, published in the June issue of Tropical Conservation Science by N. Parthasarathy and colleagues, looks at tropical dry evergreen forest on the Coromandel coast of India where the ecosystem occurs both in patches and as sacred groves or temple forests protected by the local people on religious grounds. Surveying plant diversity and flowering and fruiting events, the team of Indian researchers from Pondicherry University classified the state of tropical dry evergreen forest across 75 sites. “We classified the sites based on the level of species diversity, human interactions and efforts made for site protection into relatively undisturbed, moderately disturbed and much disturbed,” the researchers told mongabay.com. “More importantly plants of medicinal value were listed out and their local traditional knowledge documented. The authors recommend forest protection initiatives for diverse sites with limited disturbance and restoration strategies using native plant species in moderately and heavily disturbed areas. Parthasarathy and colleagues suggest that “revitalizing the cultural traditions associated with sacred groves by promoting awareness of the ecological and bioresource values of tropical dry evergreen forest” would help the conservation effort. http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0609-parthasarathy_tcs.html

World-wide:

33) My worry is that REDD is so complicated it may never get off the ground,’ says programme founder Andrew Mitchell. ‘It’s also open to abuse. You could spend years cutting down trees, then suddenly reduce your deforestation and earn money on carbon credits. It offers nothing to local communities. Our scheme calls for a valuing of the entire forest ecosystem, with local communities as the custodians.’ Rather than trade carbon internationally, the Global Canopy Programme proposes bundling up forest ecosystems into ‘funds’ to be traded by long-term investors, with profits split between them and the communities managing the forests. Such funds may be 10 years from market, but a legal framework is already being drafted, and is attracting the attention of hedge and pension fund managers. This commodification of ecosystems is raising hackles, however. ‘Trading schemes promote an “offsetting mentality” – that the West can pay someone to reduce emissions for us,’ explains Friends of the Earth international climate campaigner Tom Picken. ‘On an economic level, the price of carbon is simply too low for them to work. The West would need to make serious carbon cuts of its own before the price of carbon became high enough to trade in tons of forest.’ Picken also warns an awful lot of people are waiting to make an awful lot of money from ‘driving forests to market’. He foresees logging companies, many of which, with state consent, have built up vast land banks, cashing in on land that may not even be their own. He points instead to Costa Rica, where deforestation rates have tumbled through state intervention. By offering families $50 a month not to log their land, it makes sense to become a forest custodian. Picken is insistent solutions should come from the grassroots. ‘These people have acted as guardians of the forests since time immemorial, and have done a pretty damn good job of it,’ he says. ‘And the Costa Rican programme has cost a fraction of an equivalent carbon market programme.’ Mitchell agrees community participation is the way to proceed, but argues the Costa Rican experience simply isn’t ‘scalable’. http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1860