Africa News
Forests in Africa will continue to be decimated unless money is invested in renewable energy resources, warned officials at a UN meeting on climate change being hailed as a "forest conference".
"It is pointless to throw money on forestry projects in Africa,"
remarked Ogunlade Davidson, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. "You would rather spend money on renewable energy
projects in Africa," he told IRIN.
The meeting in Bali, to
launch negotiations for a new agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions
after 2012, has recognised the need to deal with deforestation to stem
global warming. The agreement will replace the first commitment phase
of the Kyoto Protocol, under which industrialised countries have to
reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least five percent against
a 1990 baseline.
"People often do not take into account the
main driver of deforestation, which is very different in Africa, where
it is the need for fuel wood," said Kevin Conrad, director of the
Coalition for Rainforest Nations at the Earth Institute of Columbia
University. "Unless we address the driver of the problem first, I agree
it is pointless throwing money into forestry projects."
Deforestation
is responsible for 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon emissions every year,
amounting to one-fifth of the global total, and to more than the
combined total contributed by the world's energy-intensive transport
sectors, according to the Indonesia-based Centre for International
Forestry Research (CIFOR).
"Deforestation contributes almost
as much to climate change as does US fossil fuel use," said Conrad.
"Yet deforestation was specifically excluded from the Kyoto Protocol in
1997, which failed to address this significant source of carbon
emissions."
The Congo Basin, covering around 241 million
hectares, is the world's second largest tropical forest, according to
the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). "It spans across eleven
Central African countries, namely Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central
African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Sao Tome and Principe."
The
annual deforestation rate in the Congo Basin is around 934,000ha, the
FAO says, mainly as a result of land-use change to agriculture and the
need for fuel wood. Logging and the collection of non-wood forest
products add to the degradation of forest resources in the basin.
Need to tackle root cause
CIFOR
cautioned in a new study released in Bali that the Reduce Emissions
from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) initiative, now included in
the new agreement, could be "imperilled by a routine failure to grasp
the root causes of deforestation".
The idea of REDD was first
mooted by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica in 2005 as a reward for
preserving the forests. "Changing forest-use patterns in developing
countries is at least as difficult as cutting industrial emissions in
the developed world," Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, pointed
out in his address to the conference.
According to the FAO,
forests are home to 300 million people, more than 1.6 billion people
depend to varying degrees on forests for their livelihood, and about 60
million indigenous people are almost entirely dependent on forests.
"The
danger is that policy-makers will fail to appreciate that forest
destruction is caused by an incredibly wide variety of political,
economic and other factors that originate outside the forestry sector,
and require different solutions," said Frances Seymour,
director-general of CIFOR.
Indirect forces like fluctuations
in international commodity prices; agricultural and, more recently,
biofuel subsidies; and roads and other infrastructure projects can
encourage forest clearing, the CIFOR study noted. "Deeply ingrained and
routinely corrupt government practices often favour large corporate
interests over community rights to forest resources."
Finding the money
REDD
acknowledged the need to fund the developing world's efforts to fight
deforestation, but it was still unclear how this would be done, said
Peter Frumhoff, main author of the IPCC Special Report on Land Use,
Land-use Change and Forestry, and Director of Science and Policy at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based nonprofit advocacy group.
The
initiative will look at several options in the next two years,
including a market-based mechanism, but there are concerns. "In a
market-related mechanism [to fund efforts to prevent deforestation in
the Amazon rainforests] there is no guarantee of "how and when the
money will come through," said a Brazilian official.
One of
the options in the REDD programme is that countries fighting
deforestation could be rewarded with carbon credits, which they could
sell to rich countries to meet their emission targets.
Under
the Clean Development Mechanism, one of three options offered by the
Kyoto Protocol, the industrialised world can use carbon credits to
reach their emission reduction targets.
Some
environmentalists, like Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace, have warned that
rich countries could end up using the credits without actually reducing
emissions within their own boundaries.
Others feel that
because no value has been put on the price of carbon it would be
difficult to ascertain how much money the developing world could earn
for their forests. "But even ODA [Official Development Assistance] is
not guaranteed, and which market is guaranteed - it all has to be
tested," said Frumhoff.
The World Bank has announced a
multimillion Forest Carbon Partnership Facility to provide funds to
help developing countries build capacity and look at ways to
incentivise emission reductions, to which Norway pledged US$5 million
on 13 December, bringing the facility's resources to $165 million.
Protecting
the rainforests of the Amazon basin, central Africa and southeast Asia
is critical: not only are they carbon banks, but should they die as a
result of increased temperature brought on by global warming, they
could release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"Trees
in the Amazon region of Brazil alone store 49 billion tonnes of carbon;
another 6 billion tonnes is stored in Indonesia's forests. As global
temperatures rise, changing climate patterns could generate processes
that will lead to the release of large amounts of carbon from these
reservoirs," the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report
2007/2008 pointed out.
"Under a business-as-usual scenario,
climate models forecast temperatures in most of the Amazon region
rising by 4-6°C by 2100. This could convert up to 30 percent of the
Amazon rain forest into a type of dry savannah, according to research
carried out under the auspices of Brazil's National Space Research
Institute. Such an outcome would in turn drive up net global emissions
of carbon dioxide."
This IRIN report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations
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