The recent death of rainforest activist Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva demonstrates that the endemic problem of illegal logging is closely linked with local law enforcement corruption, and no amount of activism will remedy this problem unless the federal government in Brazil takes a firm stance on the matter. 

Brazil remains a difficult country to invest in forestry assets and to fund reliable carbon credits programmes because of this problem. Illegal loggers, often backed by violent gangs, are a threat to landowners wishing to establish a long-term investment in forestry assets, whether it is for the purpose of sustainable timber harvesting or carbon credit origination.

President Dilma Rousseff recently announced she is sending an elite force to provide backup for local law enforcement following the recent spat of killings of activists in the provinces of Para and Rondonia, but given the size of the country and the rainforest itself, this is bound to be a drop in the ocean and it will only drive the problem elsewhere, where law enforcement is corrupt or can be corrupted, to turn a blind eye to illegal logging, as has long been the tradition in Brazil.

The Cancun UN climate talks ended last week with an accord, to set the pace for next year's Durban meeting. This was real progress, in spite of subzero expectations and plenty of disagreements during the 2 weeks of the meeting.

There is reason for cautious optimism: there's a commitment to extend the CDM framework beyond Kyoto and to include new aspects such as CCS and REDD. This is good news for carbon trading but as usual the devil is in the detail - and all technicalities need to be worked out in the new year. One can anticipate that funding for these projects will have to come from the sale of carbon credits, which is the obvious way to raise funding in developed nations to fund clean energy projects in the developing world. The economic potential of carbon trading as a force to fight climate change far exceeds the economic might of governments.

Progress with REDD was difficult, with Bolivia showing strong opposition to the plans. REDD and forestry in general (to include afforestation and reforestation) must play a central role, and in a sense Cancun was a triumph because, in spite of the hurdles and cacophony of the UN forum, for the first time ever a consensus is in place to acknowledge that our two main priorities are the protection of the rainforests and the generation of clean electricity. This statement in itself makes Cancun a significant success.

Copenhagen ended without an agreement but a lot of progress has been made, so we shouldn't be too discouraged.

For the first time ever, specific proposals have been discussed to fund REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) and there's widespread support from many countries to put a price on the preservation and rehabilitation of the rainforests, and to allocate funds to do so.

The "accord" presented (a five-page draft document presented by the UNFCC without specific signatories and certainly not ratified) contains a statement of funding REDD with up to $30 billion during the period prior to the expiry of Kyoto (i.e. 2010-2012) and setting up a "Copenhagen Green Climate Fund" that will put together up to $100 billion per year by 2020 to "address" the needs of developing countries.

This so-called accord is remarkably unspecific, but the explicit inclusion of REDD in all this is very good news.

The devil is in the detail and all of it is missing. It's not clear where this money is going to come from and how it's going to be spent, when and if put together, and in particular the REDD scheme needs a detailed protocol of verification and disclosure so that it achieves the right objective. We are not there yet.

This accord was put together in haste pressumably in the early hours of Friday morning and tweaked by world leaders during the day, and by all accounts it's a very sloppy document, containing meaningless statements such as the intention of keeping global warming under 2C (I am afraid we don't have such supernatural powers or control over the laws of physics). The Appendix contains a table of emission reduction targets for 2020 and it is tellingly blank. A statement of intentions that emission reductions would be worked out sooner rather than later during 2010 would have reassured the markets.

The first predictable reaction to this uncertainty has been a nose-dive in the price of carbon. The long term damage is that carbon markets are left to their own without any clear sense of direction.

Copenhagen has shown that the UN can always be counted on to mount a circus, and a very slow moving one. Perhaps this demonstrates that  serious climate change agreement can only happen outside of this framework.  After all, world leaders haven't taken this meeting seriously, only showing up in the last minute and trying to dash off a poorly structured document just to save face.

Actually one can say that we don't need the nearly 200 countries that took part in Copenhagen to agree on a consistent and strong climate change treaty. We just need to put together the top 10 emitters around a table and agree on specific emission cuts and the logistics -and  costs- of how to achieve them. The agreement will be global, but to be blunt, we don't particularly need to know the opinion of countries whose emissions are negligible - the emissions game has relatively few players. And more to the point, we certainly do not need the oil/gas rich countries to sit around the table determined to derail the talks, as has happened in Copenhagen.

The challenge in all this is to get the US to extricate itself from the financial interests of the oil industry. It is difficult. We already know that we will never persuade the likes of Saudi Arabia or Russia to support global decarbonisation and turn the taps off. Decarbonisation will only happen by addressing energy policy consistently and creating capacity for low-carbon energy, effectively reducing demand for fossil fuels as much as possible (the supply side is not something we can aspire to change).

Mikel Susperregi

A study published in Nature last week shows that the extra CO₂ in the atmosphere is causing trees to grow bigger in the rainforests, absorbing a net extra 5bn tons of CO₂.

Tropical trees are absorbing more carbon than they would naturally, grow bigger, and unwittingly provide a helping hand in the fight against climate change.

It is very much a case of eat as much as you can, while food is abundant and readily available. It appears that trees, like humans, do have a good go at the buffet while it's there. It's not surprising that in areas such as the tropics, where rain is abundant and growth can be sustained, the excess of CO₂ can just be the thing for the largest tree specimens to go supersize.

This emphasises the importance of the rainforests as carbon sinks and how urgent it is that we restore them to their past glory. The earth has lost over three quarters of its forests during the last century, so we do have quite a lot of ground to recover. This is the challenge to combat climate change.

It's good news that governments are now talking about REDD (reduction of emissions by preventing deforestation) to include reforestation and prevented deforestation in the successor to the Kyoto protocol. For a while reforestation projects didn't have a good reputation but this is fortunately changing and there's now talk of financial commitments to prevent deforestation.

The UK government commissioned a report, the Eliasch Report, on financing global forests and the cost of preventing deforestation. Indirectly, all this has a lot to do with the financial incentives for countries such as Brazil and Indonesia to prevent illegal logging. I think this might be the wrong angle - paying people to stop destroying their own forests doesn't address the issue of why they are doing it in the first place. Illegal logging can move elsewhere and the subsidies will be money wasted. The real solution is to turn deprived communities into skilled farming communities who will benefit from sustaining the rainforests. So long as everyone can have a vested interest and views the rainforest as an asset of greater financial value than its timber content, then we will have a solution.

I believe, as we all do in Carbonica, that reforestation is the only acceptable form of carbon offset. The rainforests are the only mechanisms we have to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Other projects, such as renewable energy projects are often a disguised form of deception. For example, if I was to put a wind turbine on my roof and sell carbon offsets from the emissions I have saved (by not connecting to the national grid and being self-sufficient in my electricity consumption), I would probably be able to get CDM certification, the Gold Standard and all possible rubberstamped "certified" and "authenticated" credentials one can imagine. However, it does seem ethically objectionable. Why should I pay for my own wind turbine by allowing other people to emit CO₂ into the atmosphere with these so-called carbon "credits"?

How can we talk about "credits" or "allowances" to release CO₂? It is a farce in this day and age of global warming. 

I don't know how my wind turbine differs from some hydroelectric project in the developing world. Such a project would be deemed as contributing to "renewable energies" but it would create tons of CO₂ in carbon credits because the local community is no longer using a coal-fired station. Well, my question is that they shouldn't be using a coal-fired station in the first place. If they stop doing that, then that's great, but that does not entitle someone else to spew into the atmosphere all the junk that the coal-fired station would have emitted. Otherwise the end result is the same, and we have gained absolutely nothing in terms of addressing climate change.

If, on the other hand, we restore the rainforest as a form of carbon offset, we recapture the CO₂ emitted and in the long term even more than was emitted, as well as adding to the planet's biodiversity, and helping local communities earn a living. And it's important that we talk about reforestation and not only about prevented deforestation. Reforestation means progress in the fight against climate change, because we increase the capacity of the planet to absorb CO₂. Prevented deforestation simply leaves us where we are.

In my opinion deforestation can be prevented by turning illegal loggers into farmers and effectively the drivers of reforestation.  

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

"Even if your steak was reared in the UK, there's a good chance it was fed on food grown on land that was once rainforest" is the message of a report by Friends of Earth ("What's Feeding Our Food?"), discussed on this month's issue of The Ecologist.

It is a chilling message, showing that our appetite for meat (and the growing trend in China) is turning huge areas of rainforest in Mato Grosso into monoculture soybeans farming at record speed. 

Apparently, the area of land required to produce soybeans for Europe's livestock farming industry since 1996 is roughly equal to the amount of rainforest that has been cut down in Brazil to make way for plantations since then.

In the last 15 years, production of soybeans has skyrocketed by 170% since it became the preferred animal protein feed since the BSE crisis. The large soybeans plantations are detrimental to local communities because they're industrially run and require very small numbers of staff (on average 1 employee per 500 acres).

I think that now more than ever before a true commitment to fight climate change means to eat less meat. The carbon footprint of meat is simply astronomical. Livestock production is a major source of emissions, using valuable resources such as drinking water (often in countries such as Australia where these resources are a more valuable commodity than they are at the country of consumption, e.g. UK). Then for good measure the feedstock is produced largely from depleting rainforest (greenhouse emissions from change of use of land amount to more than all our transport emissions combined).

A low-carbon footprint diet is to a large extent an "almost vegetarian" diet. Eating red meat is an archaic and barbaric habit that stems from our most primary instincts as hunters. After all, each time you are taking a bite at a steak you're munching a bit of muscle. How disgusting is that? It's positively pre-historic. Besides it clogs your arteries and it is a major factor in causing cancer (because you're eating less veg if you're appetite is satiated with animal protein). Obviously clogging one's arteries was not a problem when men lived to the age of 30 before the Stone Age, but in our day and age it does matter once you hit the age of 80 and beyond.

I can see the roaring abuse and rotten eggs coming my way from opinionated food critics and red meat fundamentalists, but it is true.

A sensible low-carbon footprint diet derives animal protein exclusively from fish and low-fat dairy. A switch to a much more significant consumption of fish should make us rethink sustainable fisheries and creative ways to regenerate fish stocks quickly to keep up with demand. But that's another topic altogether.

It's a fact that a vegetarian person using a 4x4 (SUV) as sole means of transport has a much lower footprint than a meat-eater who cycles. Here's some food for thought for all meat-eaters out there.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

Click  here to reduce your carbon footprint

George Monbiot writes in yesterday's Guardian ("The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us", 25/11/08) saying that to prevent runaway climate change we need a total decarbonisation of our economy. 

 This is correct. Emission cuts on their own will not deliver the mitigation of climate change that we need.

"Mitigation" is a widely brandished term to talk about how to combat climate change. We talk of a "mitigation model" to prevent our planet from warming, and usually this involves CO₂ emission cuts, in the hope that we lessen the damage we are causing to the environment. This is not the same as reversing it.

We can take the analogy of an obese person who is getting fatter and fatter every day because they eat 20 hamburgers a day. Telling them to cut their intake and eat 10 burgers a day instead, will help them decrease the rate at which they are putting on weight, but it will not be a recipe for slimming. If they are more drastic and cut their intake to just a few a day, that will bring them closer to a stable situation, but to reverse this and start slimming requires other ingredients in their life, such as physical exercise.

Our atmosphere has a concentration of greenhouse gases of 430 ppm in CO₂ equivalent, which is tremendously high, and very close to the threshold of 450 ppm that is widely accepted to be a point where climate change can begin to take a very dramatic turn. It is time to start slimming. Eating fewer burgers or cutting down our emissions will not do the job. Any threshold of CO₂ emissions, however low, is a form of environmental vandalism and adds to the already existing problem.

The high concentration of greenhouse gases is already retaining an excess of heat in our planet and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (see our article on global warming).

Even if the UK's Climate Change Bill delivers the target of 80% emission cuts by 2050 and the world joins in with the successor of Kyoto (to be decided in Copenhagen next year) delivering the same level of cuts as the UK (which is very unlikely and over-optimistic), then all we will be able to say is that we have vandalised the environment much less than we would otherwise have done, but the problem of global warming in 2050 will still be much worse than it is now in any event, because during 4 decades of emission cuts there will be emissions nonetheless.

The crux of the matter is that to reverse the problem we must have negative net emissions. This means that our target must be to go beyond zero emissions, beyond decarbonisation and being simply carbon neutral, we must look into capturing carbon from the atmosphere on quite a gargantuan scale.

The world has lost most of its forests in the last century. Redressing the balance involves a reforestation process on a vast and fast scale, in order to dramatically increase the Earth's ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere. The UN's working group on Climate Change has suggested financial compensations to tropical countries who halt deforestation and illegal logging. This is encouraging but not strong enough. Deforestation must stop immediately and we ought to be putting all our financial resources on a very ambitious and long-term reforestation effort.

This is the latest video from The Prince’s Rainforest Project, called Vanishing Species, created to draw attention to the fact that over a million species will be endangered within 40 years, due to deforestation.

It is a powerful video clip and definitely worth seeing. Add it to your site and spread the word.

For more info on The Prince's Rainforest Project, visit  www.princesrainforestsproject.org/