REDD for Green
By Claudio Guler for ISN
The irony is that in putting many of us out of work, the external pageglobal economic recession has reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at an unprecedented scale. This portends well for the environment, particularly in the short run. But in considering the big picture, the recession has dented the menace of climate change only marginally.
Participants to the UN climate change summit on 22 September in New York (hailed by the UN as the largest so far in terms of heads of state and ministerial-level participation) underscored this assessment. President Hu Jintao of China won substantial plaudits for proclaiming his country's commitment to curb GHG emissions, albeit offering up few specifics.
In his speech, Hu repeatedly framed coming efforts under the banner of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” acknowledging the need for developing countries to partake, and maybe, but unlikely, hinting at the developing world’s own fast-accruing record of atmospheric pollution.
Part of the solution will likely be REDD, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The process is riddled with pitfalls and burdened by a tree-hugging stigma, but deforestation accounts for roughly 20 percent of global GHG emissions, the second largest driver of anthropogenic climate change after the burning of fossil fuels.
Although big emitters China and India will likely have little to do with REDD – they host few tropical forests – other middle- and low-income equatorial countries will be primary targets. REDD will have to focus on tropical forests because of their elevated climate change mitigation potential. Tropical forests have a higher albedo and recycle carbon dioxide better than their northern counterparts. What is more, they exhibit the most alarming rates of deforestation.
The prime target regions for REDD include the Amazon in Brazil; Southeast Asia, from Myanmar/Burma to the Philippines and Indonesia; the Congo basin; Madagascar; and the southern tip of Central America.
Pros and cons
REDD presents several benefits. First, REDD may be rather inexpensive. Numbers floated by researchers so far range in the neighborhood of $50 billion per year. (Caveat: REDD costs are highly dependent on the development of an effective monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) regime that prices the carbon in trees.)
Second, as suggested above, the emissions reduction and consequently ecological impact of REDD could be considerable.
Finally, if carried out graft-free – and this remains a big if – REDD could have positive developmental effects by funneling money to some of the world’s poorest.
REDD, however, also entails numerous challenges that will likely try its implementation. Monitoring and verification of REDD projects could turn out to be onerous undertakings.
Protecting the tenurial rights of indigenous people living in forests, a constituency that already enjoys little voice in international circles, will also be difficult. They risk being neglected altogether.
David Brown and Neil Bird have pointed out in an Overseas Development Institute opinion that for REDD to be developmentally sound and socially just, policymakers have first to understand, “the social, institutional and political conditions that drive land use change and that often operate beyond the forest sector at local, national and international scales.”
Deforestation, moreover, is in large measure the result of illegal land use that for many governments is difficult to control. The countries that host the largest swaths of tropical forest often also happen to suffer from anemic and dysfunctional legal systems.
As such, the greatest obstacle to REDD is misaligned economic incentives. For some, land use that causes deforestation is a lone avenue to escape the misery of poverty. For others, and less nobly, illegal logging and land use yields handsome profit that is hard to forgo. To counter this, REDD will have to pay people to plant, and more crucially, to not cut down trees.
Creeping action
Under the existing Kyoto framework developing countries can apply for Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) to help fund projects that mitigate GHG emissions, but REDD does not qualify, yet. The CDM Executive Board can only fund projects that demonstrate ‘additionality.’ In other words, planting a new tree counts, but saving one from being felled does not.
Critics of channeling REDD through CDMs moreover fear that if approved, developed countries may use the mechanism to outsource the business of emissions reduction by earning Certified Emission Reductions or carbon credits, which they can then turn around and use to meet their own emissions reduction targets. If a developed country concomitantly eschews improvements back home, this would in effect amount to cheating.
The private and non-for-profit sectors also carry out REDD projects. However, their impact is limited, and setting and maintaining standards for emissions reductions on an individual basis is highly problematic.
Seeking to tackle the problem from an alternative angle, environmentally conscious policymakers in net timber consuming countries have taken to defensive measures to limit deforestation outside their borders.
The EU’s FLEGT initiative – Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade – partners with producing countries on a voluntary basis to set up licensing schemes that discriminate against illegal timber entering the European marketplace. The US has also started to control the importation of illegal timber under the 1900 Lacey Act. It was amended in 2008 to include such protections.
Curiously, some researchers suspect import controls may ultimately yield more benefits than paying people for REDD.
As the deadline for action in Copenhagen nears, REDD may come to define equatorial developing countries’ “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Given the wholesale potential for REDD to attenuate the deleterious effects of global climate change, continuing its exclusion in a post-Kyoto agreement may be passing up an imperfect but potentially constructive opportunity.
Speaking with ISN Security Watch by telephone from London, Jade Saunders, an associate fellow of the Energy Environment and Development Programme at Chatham House, a UK think tank, is nevertheless cautious.
“Don’t assume that all of this comes down to money. There are complicated cultural and capacity challenges to reducing deforestation. If we raise $50 billion and spend it in ways that we already know don’t work, there is a good chance we won’t have any impact at all on global carbon emissions.
“My call would be for a more thoughtful approach to REDD, one which bears in mind and learns from the history of forest interventions over the past several decades.”