How REDD will really work

Consider: country X announces a large REDD project in a forest being
wrecked by loggers or cattle ranchers. It collects the compensation,
gives the cash to the loggers and ranchers, and the forest is saved.
But the loggers and ranchers don’t sit around doing nothing: they move
into a neighbouring area of forest, and plunder that instead. Overall
there will be just as much deforestation.
To avoid leakage, says Conrad, countries should only get payments if
they can show that the destruction did not relocate. That means
working out a national rate of expected forest loss. Only countries
that reduce deforestation below this baseline figure will get
compensation. “National accounting is essential,” he says. Forest
scientists, however, throw up their hands in despair at the idea of
working out baselines. The rate of forest loss can change greatly from
year to year, depending on the state of the forests, the price of
forest products and land, corruption and law enforcement.

In the
Philippines deforestation rates are falling fast – because there are
not many trees left to cut down. In the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, however, rates look set to rise as civil war subsides. And what
about Brazil, where the deforestation rate doubled from 1990 to 2004,
then fell by two-thirds till the middle of 2007, and is now climbing
sharply again as food prices rise? Here science is likely to take a
back seat to politics, especially as countries’ involvement in REDD
will be voluntary. Rainforest nations could end up determining their
own baselines. If the system ends up rewarding countries with rising
rates of deforestation, however, it will rapidly fall into disrepute.
Many hope that REDD will at least help the poor inhabitants of
rainforests who take the trouble to protect their own forests, as
happens in Costa Rica. But the carbon market is unlikely to be that
benevolent. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon or central Africa, who
have lived in harmony with their forests for generations, will almost
certainly receive nothing. They have not been deforesting, so what
could they be compensated for? What about small farmers? There is a
great deal of uncertainty about how much real damage to forests is
caused by shifting cultivators, who clear forest, farm the land for a
couple of years and then move on as soils lose their fertility.
Conventional forest surveys blame them for destroying large areas, but
much of the cleared land swiftly regenerates. “Poor people are usually
too poor to do much damage,” says Frances Seymour, director of the
Center for International Forestry Research, a World Bank-backed
research agency based in Indonesia. She fears that such farmers will
be thrown off their land by entrepreneurs intent on claiming
compensation for “protecting” the forest.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726481.400-save-the-climate-by-saving-the-forests.html?page=2

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