Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, 43, 557–560
The Road to REDD RHITU CHATTERJEE
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Paying countries to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation could help mitigate climate change, but the road to that solution is rocky.
Cordillera Azul is Peru’s second largest national park, but the country cannot afford to fund conservation of the park. It wasn’t hard for Debra Moskovits to convince the Peruvian government to protect the rain forest in Cordillera Azul. One of the last continuous stretches of forest in the Andean foothills, Cordillera Azul is home to a rich assortment of plant and animal life. Three weeks into her fieldwork in the region, Moskovits, senior vice president of Environment, Culture, and Conservation at the Field Museum in Chicago, had found “30 species new to science.” On May 22, 2001, only 9 months after Moskovits’s team finished the inventory, the Peruvian government declared the forest a national park. The reality of saving Cordillera Azul from deforestation, however, turned out to be more challenging. “Although the land is set aside for protection already, it means nothing unless you can implement that protection,” says Moskovits. That implementation requires money, and Peru had no money to spend on conserving protected landscapes like Cordillera Azul in addition to its other parks. Moskovits and her Peruvian colleagues at a local nongovernmental organization called the Center for Conservation, Investigation, and Management of Natural Areas (CIMA) received initial funding from several international agencies. But as those funds began to run out, they turned their hopes to a new mechanism people were talking about, by which developed countries would pay developing countries to reduce carbon emissions through “avoided deforestation”. The mechanism is now best known as reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, or REDD. As forests are wiped outscut down for timber or firewood, burned to clear land for agriculture, or destroyed for mining 10.1021/es803353g
2009 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 01/29/2009
or oil and gas extractionsthe carbon stored in the trees is released as CO2; this adds to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Twenty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are thought to be from deforestation. Lawmakers and businesspeople around the world are seriously considering investing in avoided deforestation as a way to mitigate climate change. The idea behind REDD is that developing countries like Peru would get paid to protect their forests and reduce emissions associated with deforestation. The funds could come as voluntary donations from foundations, governments, or financial agencies such as the World Bank. Alternatively, industries in developed countries could get credits for saving trees in developing countries through a carbon marketsa kind of specialized commodity market. Carbon markets, already in place for industrial emissions, work like this: industries or other polluters in developed countries pay companies or communities in developing countries to reduce emissions. At the 13th UN Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007, the 192 countries that ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed that REDD ought to be part of the post-Kyoto international treaty for mitigating climate change. This was part of the Bali Action Plan, a document that outlines the important issues in international climate negotiations. As nations gear up to mitigate climate change, several of them, including Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, and Kenya, are trying hard to figure out how to make REDD projects effective and incorporate them into future international climate agreements. Moskovits and her colleagues in Peru received funds from the utility company Exelon to figure out how a REDD project could be implemented in the region. They started the project hoping to be in the market by 2010. But the reality of implementing a REDD project, as Moskovits has learned over the past few years, is much more complicated than she expected. “It’s all going to take a lot longer than I thought,” she notes.
It’s all about the money Researchers like Moskovits, and others in environmental groups around the world, have been struggling for decades to stop deforestation in developing countries. But the drivers of deforestation are strongsincreasing demand for food, timber, and energy (biofuel and oil and natural gas)sand countries have found it economically more beneficial to cut down forests because markets do not value standing forests. Stretching eastward from the Andean foothills, Cordillera Azul lies in what Moskovits describes as the “breakfast belt” of Peru. The region is full of coffee and tea plantations and farms that grow cereals. “This is an area of Peru where the rate of deforestation is extraordinarily high,” she says. Proposals for growing such cash crops and for building roads in the region continue to pour in, threatening the long-term sustainability of the park. Such changes in land use bring much-wanted money into a country or region but also have grave environmental consequences. Besides the countless tons of CO2 released from deforestation, the intensive VOL. 43, NO. 3, 2009 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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agriculture has eroded soil, polluted waters, and brought droughts to the region. But the cash flow generated by these crops makes stopping deforestation a difficult and ongoing challenge. Conservation of Cordillera Azul requires continuous stabilization of land use in the area, which means encouraging among local communities sustainable land-use practices that also help improve their quality of life. Moskovits calculates that such incentives cost about 50¢ per hectare. That might not sound like much, but it adds up to $2 million annually for this one park, and Peru has eight national parks and 41 additional protected areas. From a practical standpoint, conservation efforts will need money from the private sector, she says, “because Peru just cannot keep carrying more and more and more parks.” This is where REDD comes in. Moskovits hopes that REDD will allow the Peruvian government to invest in standing forests, which will benefit both local and global communities.
In December 2008, at the 14th UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan ´ , Poland, policy makers, researchers, and environmentalists discussed the opportunities and challenges of REDD. Brazil, which committed to cutting emissions at this meeting, also pledged to halve Amazon deforestation by the year 2018. Some of the funds to conserve the Brazilian Amazon will come from the $1 billion that the Norwegian government pledged to a new Amazon Fund. But for most people who think and breathe REDD, the real deadline is next year’s climate change conference in Copenhagen (often called COP-15), where leaders are hoping to formalize an agreement on how to move forward with this mechanism. With numerous pilot projects under way, the participants are trying to iron out the details and find appropriate ways to implement REDD, should it be incorporated into future international climate mitigation treaties.
Road bumps
Recent spurt of activity
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The idea of paying developing countries to prevent deforestation has been around for a long time, but it was not included in the Kyoto Protocol because of concerns over the effectiveness of such a mechanism. The international treaty did have a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for forestry, which allowed companies to get credits for planting new forests in open spaces or in deforested areas (afforestation and reforestation, respectively) but not for avoided deforestation. However, the forestry CDMs were unpopular because the project criteria and calculations of emissions and credits were too complicated to be implemented. Now, “REDD is part of the big picture,” notes Federica Bietta, deputy director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, a nonprofit group representing tropical countries, such as Papua New Guinea. Kevin Conrad, the executive director of the coalition, conceptualized REDD and argued for it in international forums, including the climate conference in Bali in 2007. To finance such projects, the coalition promotes both market-based and non-market-based mechanisms, notes Bietta.
Businesses continue to submit proposals for building roads through Cordillera Azul national park. “As soon as you get into any of these valleys, it’s over,” says Moskovits, referring to the damage roads can do to the integrity of the forest. Several international agencies and financial organizations recently have invested in REDD. In the summer of 2008, the World Bank launched a Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. Fourteen countries, including Bolivia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam, will receive funding to pursue REDD projects. In October 2008, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), along with the government of Norway, invested $350 million toward several REDD pilot projects around the world. 558
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First and foremost, “we are trying to get a handle on reference emission levels,” says Tim Kasten, deputy director of UNEP’s Division of Environmental Policy Implementation. Most countries interested in implementing REDD projects are deforesting at a certain rate, and the emissions associated with the existing rate provide the reference emissions level. Once a reference level is established, researchers can use it as a benchmark against which to compare future changes. “Where you set that line, that baselinesthe reference scenariosmakes a big difference about how much you could get credited for reducing your emissions,” says Florence Daviet, a climate expert at the World Resources Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “That is [a] pretty complicated thing to do, because they [the countries] want it to somehow be based on historical emissions. There’s very little good data on historical deforestation rates.” Setting a reference emissions level is difficult even for countries, like Brazil, that have collected fairly good annual data for at least a decade, Daviet notes. “If you look at the rates of deforestation in Brazil since 1988, it’s all over the place. It goes up, it goes down. It goes way up, it goes way down, it goes a little bit up. And so how do you project that forward? This is going to be a question...[and] a source of uncertainty.” Monitoring forestssin terms of acreage as well as qualitysis also crucial for establishing the baselines and looking at future changes. Although the quality of forests remains hard to monitor remotely, advances in technologies have made monitoring easier, notes Douglas Boucher of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group for environmental issues and scientists. For example, a remote sensing technology called LIDAR (light detection and ranging) has improved the monitoring of carbon density, he says. When a country decides to join REDD, it must be able to “demonstrate that forests have increased or that it has decreased deforestation,” says Bietta. And therein lies one of the toughest challenges of REDD, say most experts. In order to get credits for reducing emissions, countries need to reliably and verifiably demonstrate that their projects will reduce emissions beyond what would have occurred without the extra funding. In the language of carbon markets, this is referred to as “additionality”. In Cordillera Azul, too, proving additionality has been a long and painstaking effort. Consider this complication: companies and other parties who want to do business in developing countries like Peru propose one road project after another. “There are schemes that come from everywhere, not just from within Peru but from Europe and other countries, in other continents,” says Moskovits. “Schemes of sugarcane plantations or palm plantations or tobacco or you name it.”
Rights and ownership issues Tropical forests are inhabited by poor peoplessome indigenous to the area and others migrants. And yet, they rarely own the land that they live on. Conservation efforts around the world are already plagued with conflicts over land rights, and experts warn that recognizing the rights of forest dwellers will be key to the success of forest carbon projects. The core question is, Who owns the forest?, says Sharachchandra Le´le´, a forest policy expert at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore (India). “If the rights around forests are not well defined, if you do not clarify those rights, how do you ensure that the right people get the payment?” Forest ownership remains central to the concerns raised by groups representing indigenous people and organizations like the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Washington, D.C.based global coalition of associations that promote policy and market reforms to benefit the poor. In October 2008, a study released at the Rights, Forests, and Climate Change conference in Oslo used data from 325 sites in 12 countries to show that community ownership of forests can be the best possible way to sequester carbon and alleviate poverty in forest areas. In Cordillera Azul, the problem of accountability is slightly less complicated because a single agency, CIMA, is responsible for managing the park, and all the funds must therefore be funneled through it, says Moskovits. But ultimately, the quality of life of the poor people living in these areas is at stake because their well-being depends on the health of the natural resources. “The local people are losing and losing and losing! They’re losing resources, and they’re losing land,” Moskovits states. Unless their rights and livelihood are ensured, such projects cannot be effective, she adds. “Implementing REDD is complex,” admits Bietta. It will involve changes to many institutions in the developing countries. It will require a good understanding of issues, such as the drivers of deforestation inside the countries, and appropriate revenue distribution. “So it’s quite complex. It’s
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To prove that the forest would be more vulnerable to deforestation without the external funding, “we have to find the designs for the road; we have to find a budget for the road,” she says. Such data are crucial to proving that the threats to conservation of Cordillera Azul are real and not an exaggeration, she adds. Another concern that some experts raise is the oversimplification of realities at the local level. The concept of REDD is that if you provide an economic incentive, it will automatically induce conservation, says Elizabeth Shapiro, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who has studied the Mexican federal payment for ecosystem services program as part of her Ph.D. thesis. When the Mexican National Forestry Commission first implemented the payment for ecosystem services project, the agency gave money to the local communities and simply asked them not to cut down the forests, she says. Rather than require active forest management, it simply set aside areas for conservation, which left these forests open to threats from forest fires, pests, and illegal logging. Only after personnel in the regional offices of the forestry commission, along with members of a nationwide rural social movement, persuaded local community members to sign a contract agreeing to fence the forest to keep cattle out and to create firebreaks, did the conservation efforts prove effective. “When you apply basic [economic] principles to the realitys the very, very complicated realitysof trying to implement a conservation program in a rural community, just paying people, just providing economic incentives, is not enough,” Shapiro notes.
Nearly 200,000 people live in more than 100 different villages in and around Cordillera Azul. Giving land tenure to the local forest dwellers can ensure that they don’t migrate from one area to another, working dangerous and poorly paid jobs that ultimately lead to deforestation, says Moskovits. not like implementing a legal project.” But that’s no reason not to pursue the opportunities, she says. Other experts agree. “We may not have all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed by the time Copenhagen comes around,” says Kasten. “But in my view, the complications can be overcome.”
From REDD to PINC? As Moskovits irons out the details of her REDD project in Cordillera Azul, she admits that protecting forests for their carbon actually undervalues the services that the forests provide. Her concerns are shared by many others, including Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an international alliance of scientific institutions involved in research on forest canopies. “It’s not just about carbon,” says Mitchell. “It’s about water, it’s about cooling the atmosphere, it’s about maintaining biodiversity, and it’s about maintaining the livelihood of the poor who depend on these forests.” And these are services that the forests provide for free, notes Mitchell. “We don’t quantify that economically in any way.” Forests can be thought of as savings accounts, says Mitchell. “If you weren’t getting enough interest in your savings account, you wouldn’t feel it was working very hard for you. And it’s the same thing with these big standing forests in these countries.” In today’s world, a forest cut downsfor agricultural production, timber products, oil and gas extraction, or miningshas more cash value than a forest left standing. If, however, countries could be paid for all the ecosystem services that their forests provide, conservation would become more profitable than deforestation, he says. “If we’re going to halt the destruction of tropical forests, we have to look at them in a new way,” says Mitchell. “The new way that we’ve come up with is seeing them as global eco-utilities, if you like. And what these utilities do is provide us with ecosystem services that we are using right around the world but we’re not paying for.” And that led Mitchell to introduce a new concept called proactively investing in natural capital, or PINC. “We started to think of PINC as a mechanism for these forests which could be regarded not [just] as a source of emissions, or merely as a store of carbon, but as a public utility,” he says. “Even though they are just sitting there, we should find a way to add value to them, because otherwise countries will have no financial incentives to maintain them.” Mitchell and his colleagues hope that PINC will complement REDD. “As REDD payments decline over time and emissions decline...eventually, if it was a perfect situation, VOL. 43, NO. 3, 2009 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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then REDD should decline to nothing, and you will end up with everything graduating into PINC payments.” Numerous regional and local projects already pay people to conserve individual ecosystem services. For example, Costa Rica has established a system to pay landowners to protect forests for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and watershed services. But Mitchell envisions something much larger in scale: he wants global efforts that make conservation profitable for countries. The payment mechanisms will need to be worked out, but he sees many options, like levying a tax for conservation or setting up forest bonds. However, PINC is only a concept so far. Mitchell has circulated the idea among his peers and is conducting
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workshops, including one at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Poland. But the idea is already catching on. Moskovits gives it the status of a “movement” and calls it a wonderful effort to proactively invest in the environment. “In a way, I see it [as] a bit like where the carbon market was 15 years ago, 16 years ago, when people were saying, ‘How do we create a market for carbon dioxide, that one can’t feel, touch, see?’” Mitchell says. Today, “we have successfully created a market in a public poison. What we’re trying to do with PINC is create a market in a public good.” Rhitu Chatterjee is an associate editor of ES&T.
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