The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, a bipartisan, non-profit group of business, government, and conservation leaders released a report on October 7th asking the United States policymakers to cut emissions from tropical deforestation by half by 2020.
The group is co-chaired by Lincoln Chafee, former US senator, Rhode Island, and John Podesto, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress. The report also recommends that the US should invest roughly $1 billion in private sector investments and at least $9 billion in private investments to fight tropical deforestation.
This funding, in addition to monies for other international reductions, would help reduce climate US climate expenses by 50 percent, saving nearly $50 billion by 2020. Currently tropical deforestation accounts for about 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the world's entire fleet of cars, planes, and trains.
The report, entitled “Protecting the Climate Forests: Why reducing tropical deforestation is in America's vital national interest,” presents a plan that puts the US in the driver's seat in the global effort to address tropical deforestation during the UN climate talks coming up in Copenhagen in December.
The report provides 13 specific recommendations for action, key among them a cap-and-trade program allocating five percent of the value of tradable emission permits to new international forest conservation programs. Climate legislation that passed in the US last June already includes provisions for international offsets that might allow companies to pay for forest preservation in developing nations rather than spending money on controlling their own emissions.
While everyone agrees tropical deforestation must be curbed, there are many harsh critics of the cap-and-trade plan, including Greenpeace. In October, the organization released a report called “Carbon Scam,” exposing how coal and oil companies, including American Electric Power, BP-Amoco, and Pacificorp, are trying to use forest-offset programs to “cheat the environment.”
Greenpeace alleges that the three energy companies, which were supported by The Nature Conservancy, invested in the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project (NKCAP) in Bolivia to expand and protect forests in the Noel Kempff national park. The project is a REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) project similar to that of the United Nations REDD programme, created to help developing countries financial incentives to preserve their forests and providing businesses with a way to pay instead of reducing their own emissions.
According to the Greenpeace report, overall deforestation rates in Bolivia have increased since the project started in 1997. And The Nature Conservancy's data shows that from 1997 to 2009, the estimate for NKCAP's potential emissions reductions fell by more than 90 percent.
Eric Haxthausen, director of US climate policy for The Nature Conservancy, said in an article posted at Solve Climate.com, “The ultimate goal is to have countries implement national-level activities that can protect forests on the scale needed to effectively halt climate change. We need to get there as quickly as we can.”
The report by the Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests points to Brazil as a case study, showing both the difficulties posed by tropical deforestation as well as a model for moving forward. Emissions from deforestation in Brazil make up 2.5-5.0 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report, which makes the country the world's fourth largest emitter.
Brazil has set a national target of reducing deforestation in the Amazon by 2020, and it plans to monitor and verify emissions reductions. One of the report's recommendations is for the U.S. to work to make sure that international agreements and financial incentive programs emphasize transparent and credible means for evaluating whether residents are participating in and benefitting from tropical conservation programs.
As Greenpeace puts it, the debate isn't about whether to protect tropical forests but how to do it.
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