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Forests earn poor farmers more money left standing than if they’re cut down for planting crops.

Deforestation offers little income compared with potential post-Kyoto carbon deals.

With the European carbon market last week paying 23 Euro per ton of CO2 and some emissions in Indonesia receive as little as 0.23 Euro per ton of CO2, there is a very real opportunity for the country to benefit from a carbon market which compensates for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Photo by Ryan Woo

BALI, INDONESIA (5 December 2007)—Deforestation in tropical countries is often driven by the perverse economic reality that forests are worth more dead than alive. But a new study by an international consortium of researchers has found that the emerging market for carbon credits has the potential to radically alter that equation.

The study, released today at UNFCC Conference of Parties in Bali, by the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF),  the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), three of the15 centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR),and their national partners compared the financial gains generated by deforestation over the last 10 to 20 years in areas of  Southeast Asia, Central Africa and the Amazon Basin—most of it driven by desire for farm land or timber—to the amount carbon that was released by the destruction. That comparison has become critically important because many industries in developed countries are set to spend billions of dollars to meet new requirements for curbing greenhouse gases by purchasing carbon “credits” tied to reductions elsewhere. 

Media release in English ׀ B. Indonesia