REDD – does money grow on trees?

Picture by FXP

Saving the rainforest. It’s the classic environmental struggle, which has been going on so long we have almost become immune to the depressing numbers of football-pitches-felled-per-minute.

So a policy that aims to save the trees while tackling climate change must be good, right? Unfortunately, there are several critical problems that could make deforestation and climate change worse.

The policy in question is the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) programme. This scheme is likely to be the main outcome of climate negotiations in Cancun later this year.

It is a worthy cause – the UNFAO (2005) estimates that 20% of CO2 emissions come from deforestation.

There are also the other benefits (denoted by the ‘+’ in ‘REDD+’) : forests are also home to 70% of the world’s land animals and plants, and the UNFAO estimates that up to a billion people depend on forests in various ways – for food, fuel, shelter, clothing and so on. And as Rumsfeld would say, there are unknown unknowns – possibly thousands of plants and animals that have not been discovered or catalogued, with huge potential human benefits, from medicine to new materials.

REDD means danger

REDD aims to slow deforestation by paying landowners and governments with carbon credits, based on the amount of carbon it is estimated that they have preserved. Let’s look at a few problems, before we get to the twisted thinking behind the scheme that I mentioned earlier.

First, estimating the carbon stored in a forest is notoriously difficult. Even the most advanced satellite technology has a wide margin of error, although new satellite technologies are being developed all the time.

Second, what about all those people who live from the forest I mentioned earlier? Some indigenous groups are concerned that they could be kicked out of the forests by governments keen to protect their carbon credits – even though some of these tribes have proved to be the best environmental stewards of the trees for thousands of years.

Third, we have seen before how powerful interests have twisted climate legislation to turn a profit. REDD is no different – there are even plans to classify palm oil plantations as forest to gain credits, even though the forests are often cut down to make way for these monoculture plantations.

Fourth, the scheme is based on additionality – future deforestation has to be avoided to earn credits. Aside from the impossibility of accurately predicting the future, it is also unfair. For example, Costa Rica, which has been diligently protecting its forests, would get nothing, while Indonesia could cash in on its previously zealous logging.

Problem number five is something called ‘leakage’. For example, if you do manage to stop the trees from falling in a particular national park, what’s to stop loggers just moving on to other forests? When this happens, the carbon credits become meaningless. A better (though not foolproof) approach would look at the net change in forest cover on a national level – but many US NGOs have campaigned for REDD on a smaller, project scale, in order to cash in on the potential funds.

REDD in the carbon markets

Money to pay for REDD projects could come from a variety of sources – but one idea is that the cash could come directly from the carbon markets, in the form of offsets. For example, a power station in Britain exceeds its quota of emissions permits, so buys more from a forest in Borneo. The problems described above may be compounded in this case – potentially leading to increases greenhouse gas emissions. In these cases, when credits do not lead to the reductions they claim to represent, the so-called ‘hot air’ credits are still used to offset emissions elsewhere – so CO2 rises in both places.

These problems represent a challenge, but supporters argue they could be overcome with a well-designed policy (see here for other supportive arguments). But even the best-designed scheme would probably fail because of the twisted idea that forms the basis of REDD.

This is the idea that underpins offsetting: releasing CO2 from burning coal is the same as releasing CO2 from burning trees. By following this assumption, REDD allows us to continue burning coal once we have avoided burning some trees.

But this is the problem. Climate change is caused by the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Those forests which could be used as offsets have not yet been burnt and transformed into emissions – but we are doing pretty badly in controlling climate change. Most scientists have agreed we need to reduce emissions, but an offset is not an emissions reduction. If offsetting works as planned, emissions stay the same – they are not reduced. This point has been repeatedly ignored by policy makers.

There is also a particular danger to offsetting using forests. As the climate warms up, our precious REDD offsets could go up in smoke. The IPCC states that the Amazon is particularly sensitive to even minor temperature changes, and large parts could burn up within a few years, ‘flipping’ from forest to savannah, while recent studies have shown Canadian forests have become net producers of CO2 due to rising temperatures.

So, REDD could cause more problems than it solves, although they could be solved. Maybe. What is certain is that if the scheme is used to create cheaper offsets, it will become the biggest loophole in climate policy ever.

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