marklynas.orgThe price of a living forest 26 November 07
The blunt economic truth is clear: deforestation can never be stopped as long as trees are worth more dead than alive
The two environmentalists never stood a chance. As they drove into the small Honduran town of Guarizama on 20 December last year, armed men forced Heraldo Zúñiga and Roger Iván Cartagena to the side of the road, dragged them from their car, stood them against a wall next to the municipal building in full view of passers-by, and shot them. Although at least 40 shots were fired, Zúñiga survived long enough to denounce those who had hired the assassins – the timber barons who are making a fortune by razing the region’s pine forests and exporting wood to the United States.
This article was first published in the New Statesman on 22 November 2007. View the original here.
Such is the price of taking on the power of the illegal timber trade. But almost as shocking as the murders of those who try to protect the forests in countries such as Honduras is that neither the US nor the EU has any enforceable means of stopping illegal timber imports.
Now, after a long campaign, the Environmental Investigation Agency is supporting a rare bipartisan legislative effort in the US Congress to choke off domestic demand for imported illegal wood products. Promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as by an unusual coalition of environmental and industry groups, the Legal Timber Protection Act would make it a crime to import or sell illegally sourced timber. The EU is also on the way to similar legislation.
Despite these positive moves, however, the blunt economic truth is clear: deforestation can never be stopped as long as trees are worth more dead than alive. As Andrew Mitchell, director of the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, points out, the only thing that can safeguard the survival of tropical forests in the long term is a market value. This means generating hard-currency income flows to countries and communities that host forests, in recognition of the “ecological services” that these intact woodlands provide to the rest of humanity.
Mitchell is co-sponsor of the Forests Now Declaration – an attempt to persuade governments meeting at the UN climate negotiations in Bali next month to bring forests into the world’s emerging carbon markets and thereby put a price on their protection. Deforestation accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse-gas emissions – more than the entire transport sector, including international aviation – and yet emissions avoided by reducing deforestation are not eligible for carbon credits. Indeed, because its forests are being so rapidly cleared and burned down (in part to produce supposedly climate-friendly palm oil for biofuels), Indonesia is the world’s third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States. With billions now circulating in carbon markets around the world, Indonesia can potentially be paid to keep its forests standing rather than chop them down. Major forest countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Papua New Guinea have already lent the proposal their support.
Climate change presents humanity with a non-negotiable requirement to live within the planet’s ecological limits, but these limits also include the need to protect finite resources such as the world’s remaining forests. Bali presents governments with an ideal opportunity to address both issues at the same time – and to ensure that other environmental problems are not aggravated in our rush to tackle climate change.
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Making sure there are actually emissions cuts
Making sure there are actually emissions cuts
Any such emissions trading be designed to take account of the following:
1. A straight 1:1 emissions trade doesn’t cut emissions, it validates more pollution if there is equivalently less somewhere else; and fraud and other actualities tend to mean a net increase in emissions from such a transaction. Google: Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading.
2. If protection or restoration of peatland, especially tropical rainforest peatland, fell into such a scheme with 1:1 emissions trading, the bottom would simply fall out of the ETS (such as might exist at any one time) since a CO2 offset from this source could cost as little as 1/400 of that from an existing ETS offset source – see table at end of: http://www.wetlands.org/getfilefromdb.aspx?ID=0e21b1a6-33f9-4192-8034-282dd4d5c2dd. So you would have enabled all manner of new emissions permits, to justify just about any new industrial or transport project, with no net emissions saving.
Therefore, incorporation of avoided deforestation or reforestation into the ETS should require a multiplier, i.e. offsetting must save many times the emissions being permitted by the trade. Done correctly, the initial effect would be that both conventional offset sources and non-peatland forest offsets would be unable to compete with offsetting against peatland degradation.
This reflects the fact that conserving tropical deep peatland is a phenomenally efficient use of funds from a climate point of view.
If funding of non-peatland avoided deforestation is to be justified alongside this, it must be evaluated under a more complex consideration basis e.g. species conservation; can it prevent whole Amazon collapse?
Incidentally, it is only peatland forests that have been shown to have significant value in sequestering carbon when in mature state, via the process of laying down peat. Mature Indonesian peatland forest sequesters, by a midrange estimate, 4.48 tonnes of carbon ha-1y-1 (from Boehm and Siegert, 1999, http://www.rhc.at/kalteng/pdf/kalteng_1999_Penang.pdf, p4.
3. It should also be noted that such a process would still be in a race to grab peatland against oil palm and acacia projects whose effect is to destroy it. Therefore it remains just as important to abolish biodiesel targets and institute appropriate import controls against ‘deforestation’ commodities, with ‘sustainability certification’ only potentially interpretable on the basis of a whole country’s performance (as was the US’ stance in the Shrimp-Turtle dispute).
Supply & Demand, & the Forest
Supply & Demand, & the Forest
I read (if I remember correctly) in David Pearce’s BLUEPRINT FOR A GREEN ECONOMY, that the supply/demand principle doesn’t work well to prevent destroying forests. I think he said something like the price doesn’t shoot up (due to low supply) until you get to the very last trees in the forest, at which point the forest and trees are doomed.
And then, of course, governements give subsidies to oil and other finite, diminishing resources, which further blocks any supply/demand effect.
And then neoclassical macro-economics is very flawed when it comes to an environmentally degrading world, since it translates all into exchange-based monetary terms, ignoring the use-based needs and requirements for life to persist. The body needs a variety of foods and vitamins, it needs qualitatively different things—not quantitatively monetarily equivalent things. Ten gallons of vodka may be equivalent in price of a week’s worth of balanced-diet food, but it’ll kill the person, while the other will keep the person alive.
It’s really horrible about those environmentalists being killed. We need to boycott that wood, find out which stores here in the U.S. are selling it.