As the world's leaders gathered to discuss the anticipated adoption of REDD, CIFOR took the opportunity to release an in-depth report, 10 years in the making, which warns that this new push is imperiled by a routine failure to grasp the root causes of deforestation.
High on the agenda at the 13th Conference of the Parties in Bali was how to reduce the 1.6 billion tons of carbon emissions caused each year by deforestation, which amounts to one-fifth of global emissions and more than the combined total contributed by the world's energy-intensive transport sectors.
A new study from CIFOR - entitled "Do Trees Grow on Money" - argues that although there is ample opportunity to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), this will only be successful if financial incentives are sufficient enough to flip political and economic realities that cause deforestation.
"After being left out of the Kyoto agreement, it's promising that deforestation is commanding center-stage at the Bali climate talks," said CIFOR's Director General, Frances Seymour. "But 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."
In other words, Seymour said, stopping deforestation in Indonesia caused by overcapacity in the wood processing industry is a completely different challenge from dealing with deforestation stemming from a road project in the Amazon or forest degradation caused by charcoal production in sub-Saharan Africa.
Forces such as fluctuations in international commodity prices; agricultural and, more recently, biofuel subsidies; and roads and other infrastructure projects can encourage forest clearing.
For example, according to the study, Indonesia, which is estimated to lose 1.9 million hectares of forest each year, has emerged as one of the world's leading sources of carbon emissions, in part due to a global spike in prices for palm oil and a surge in China's demand for wood pulp. Together, these forces have pushed deforestation into carbon-rich peatlands that are being cleared and drained to make way for oil palm and pulpwood plantations.
Meanwhile, CIFOR notes that in South America, the loss of 4.3 million hectares a year is driven in part by meat consumption that encourages conversion of forests to pasture lands throughout the region. In sub-Saharan Africa, fuelwood extraction and charcoal production are factors behind the continent's loss of 4 million hectares a year.
Markku Kanninen, one of the authors of the report, said "policies that seek to halt deforestation will need to be crafted to address diverse local situations and target activities such as agriculture, transportation and finance that lie well beyond the boundaries of the forest sector."
"The perverse subsidies that provide incentives for clearing forest must be removed and efforts to secure property rights for local forest communities should be encouraged," Kanninen said.
The report also sees promise in the increasingly popular notion that deforestation can be addressed with financial incentives that compensate landowners for "environmental services." Seymour said discussions in Bali to fight deforestation by compensating forest stewards for protecting the carbon-storage capacity of forests through what is now a multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credit are potentially powerful.
"Such payments to individual land-users have the potential to "flip" financial incentives from favoring forest destruction, as they now do, to favoring conservation," Seymour said. "But the key question is whether or not REDD incentives will be sufficient to flip political and economic decisions at the national level that drive deforestation."
Story by Jeff Haskins, Burness Communications