Here's an example where cap and trade would not work. However a carbon
tax, comprising a levy on fossil fuel (carbon out of the ground), could
help to pay for this "carbon stock management" type of geoengineering -
natural carbon air capture and storage, by keeping the carbon locked up
in trees...
>From New York Times, August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/science/earth/22degrees.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/science/earth/22degrees.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th
By Degrees
In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let
the Trees Stand
QUERENCIA, Brazil — José
Marcolini, a farmer here, has a permit from the Brazilian government to
raze 12,500 acres of rain forest this year to
create highly profitable new soy fields.
The New York Times
But he says he is struggling with his conscience. A Brazilian
environmental group is offering him a yearly cash payment to leave his
forest standing to help combat climate change.
Mr.
Marcolini says he cares about the environment. But he also has a family
to feed, and he is dubious that the group’s initial offer in the
negotiation — $12 per acre, per year — is enough for him to accept.
“For
me to resist the pressure, surrounded by soybeans, I’ll have to be paid
— a lot,” said Mr. Marcolini, 53, noting that cleared farmland here in
the state of Mato Grosso sells for up to $1,300 an acre.
Mato
Grosso means thick forests, and the name was once apt. But today, this
Brazilian state is a global epicenter of deforestation. Driven by
profits derived from fertile soil, the region’s dense forests have been
aggressively cleared over the past decade, and Mato Grasso is now
Brazil’s leading producer of soy, corn and cattle, exported across the
globe by multinational companies.
Deforestation, a critical
contributor to climate change, effectively accounts for 20 percent of
the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and 70
percent of the emissions in Brazil. Halting new deforestation,
experts say, is as powerful a way to combat warming as closing the
world’s coal plants.
But
until now, there has been no financial reward for keeping forest
standing. Which is why a growing number of scientists, politicians and
environmentalists argue that cash payments — like that offered to Mr.
Marcolini — are the only way to end tropical forest destruction and
provide a game-changing strategy in efforts to limit global warming.
Unlike
high-tech solutions like capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide or
making “green” fuel from algae, preserving a forest yields a strikingly
simple environmental payback: a landowner reduces his property’s
emissions to zero.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations
Framework on Climate Change, said that deforestation “absolutely”
needed to be addressed by a new international climate agreement being
negotiated this year. “But people cut down trees because there is an
economic rationale for doing it, and you need to provide them with a
financial alternative,” he said.
Both the most recent draft
of the agreement
and the climate bill passed by the House in late June in the United
States include plans for rich countries and companies to pay the poor
to preserve their forests.
The payment strategies may include
direct payments to landowners to keep forests standing, as well as
indirect subsidies, like higher prices for beef and soy that are
produced without resorting to clear-cutting. Deforestation creates
carbon emissions through fires and machinery that are used to fell
trees, and it also destroys the plant life that helps absorb carbon
dioxide emissions from cars and factories around the globe.
But
getting the cash incentives right is a complex and uncharted business.
In much of the developing world, including here, deforestation has been
tied to economic progress. Pedro Alves Guimarães, 73, a weathered man
sitting at the edge of the region’s River of the Dead, came to Mato
Grosso in 1964 in search of free land, pushing into the jungle until he
found a site and built a hut as a base for raising cattle. While he
regrets the loss of the forest, he has welcomed amenities like the
school built a few years ago that his grandchildren attend, or the
electricity put in last year that allowed him to buy his first freezer.
Also,
environmental groups caution that, designed poorly, programs to pay for
forest preservation could merely serve as a cash cow for the very
people who are destroying them. For example, one proposed version of
the new United Nations plan would allow plantations of trees, like
palms grown for palm oil, to count as forest, even though tree
plantations do not have nearly the carbon absorption potential of
genuine forest and are far less diverse in plant and animal life.
“There is the capacity to get a very perverse outcome,” said Sean
Cadman, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society of Australia.
Global as well as local economic forces are driving deforestation —
Brazil and Indonesia lead the world in the extent of their rain forests
lost each year. The forests are felled to help feed the world’s growing
population and meet its growing appetite for meat. Much of Brazil’s soy
is bought by American-based companies like Cargill or Archer Daniels
Midland and used to feed cows as far away as Europe and China. In
Indonesia, rain forests are felled to plant palms for the palm oil,
which is a component of biofuels.
Brazil has tried to balance development and conservation.
Last year, with a grant from Norway that could bring the country $1
billion, it created an Amazon Fund
to help communities maintain their forest. National laws stipulate that
80 percent of every tract in the upper Amazon — and 50 percent in more
developed regions — must remain forested, but it is a vast territory
with little law enforcement. Soy exporters officially have a moratorium
on using product from newly deforested land.
Here in Mato Grasso, 700 square miles of rain forest was stripped
in the last five months of 2007 alone, according to Brazil’s National
Institute for Space Research, which tracks vanishing forests.
“With so much money to be made, there are no laws that will keep
forest standing,” John Carter, a rancher who settled here 15 years ago,
said as he flew his Cessna over the denuded land one day this summer.
Until
very recently, developing the Amazon was the priority, and some
settlers feel betrayed by the new stigma surrounding deforestation.
Much as in the 19th-century American West, the Brazilian government
encouraged settlement through homesteaders’ benefits like cheap land
and housing subsidies, many of which still exist today.
“It was
revolting and sad when the world said that deforestation was bad — we
were told to come here and that we had to tear it down,” said Mato
Grosso’s secretary of agriculture, Neldo Egon Weirich, 56, who moved
here in 1978 and noted that to be eligible for loans to buy tractors
and seed, a farmer had to clear 80 percent of his land.
He is
proud to have turned Mato Grosso from a malarial zone into an
agricultural powerhouse. “Mato Grosso is under a microscope — we know
we have to do something,” Mr. Weirich said. “But we can’t just stop
production.”
Even today, settlers around the globe are buying or claiming cheap
“useless” forest and transforming it into farmland.
Clearing
away the trees is often the best way to declare and ensure ownership.
Land that Mr. Carter has intentionally left forested for its
environmental benefit has been intermittently overtaken by squatters —
a common problem here. In parts of Southeast Asia, early experiments in
paying landowners for preserving forest have been hampered because it
is often unclear who owns, or controls, property.
There are various ideas about how to rein in deforestation.
Mr.
Carter has started a landowners’ environmental group, called Aliança da
Terra, whose members agree to have their properties surveyed for good
environmental practices and their forests tracked by satellite by
scientists at the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM),
ensuring that they are not cultivating newly cleared land. Mr. Carter
is currently negotiating with companies like McDonalds to purchase only
from farms that have been certified.
The United Nations
program, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation or REDD, will reward countries that preserve forests with
carbon credits that can be sold and turned into cash for forest owners
through the global carbon market. The United Nations already gives such
credits for cleaning factories and planting trees. Carbon credits are
bought by companies or countries that have exceeded their emissions
limits, as a way to balance their emissions budget.
Daniel Nepstad, a scientist at the Woods
Hole Research Center, has mapped out
large areas of the Amazon “pixel by pixel” to determine the land value
if it was converted to raise cattle or grow soy, to help determine how
much landowners should be paid to conserve forest. Most experts feel
that landowners will accept lower prices as they realize the benefits
of saving forest, like conserving water and burnishing their image with
buyers.
Mr. Weirich, the agriculture secretary, said he was
skeptical about that. But he, too, senses that there may for the first
time be money in forest preservation and has recently decided to be
certified by Aliança da Terra.
“We want to adopt practices that will put us ahead in the market,”
he said.
The
initial offer Mr. Marcolini has from the environmental group is perhaps
not enough to save the forest here. But, he said, if his land was in a
more remote part of the Amazon, with less farming potential, “I’d take
that offer and run with it.”
----
Cheers,
John
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
