President Of COP6 Presents Forest Destruction Plan

Environmental Defense today slammed the proposed treaty text COP6 President Jan Pronk presented to climate negotiators for creating huge cash incentives for tropical forest destruction. The text, presented as a basis for breaking deadlocks and moving the negotiations forward, allows developed countries or companies to get credit for carbon emissions reductions in tropical countries in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by funding tree plantations, but not for stopping forest from being cut down. “Negotiators have to include forest protection in the CDM if it is to have environmental integrity,” said Environmental Defense forest economist Robert Bonnie. Tropical deforestation is responsible for about 20% of annual, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Pronk’s text proposes no environmental standards for the carbon trading mechanism and could increase tropical deforestation.

“This is the most perverse of all possible results for forests,” said Environmental Defense senior scientist Stephan Schwartzman. “It is a recipe for subsidizing industrial forestry companies to destroy tropical forest.” Given the lack of environmental safeguards in Pronk’s text, a landowner in the Amazon could cut down and burn pristine old-growth forest, plant eucalyptus on it, and sell the carbon removed from the atmosphere by the new tree plantation to a company to meet its Kyoto Protocol emissions reduction obligations. Burning primary forest releases far more carbon than plantations sequester, so more carbon would be released into the atmosphere rather than less.

“Grassroots groups and environmentalists, such as the National Council of Rubber Tappers, in the Amazon who are proposing forest protection and management in the CDM will be cut out. It is critical that the CDM support forest peoples’ sustainable development. Plantation forestry in the developing world also has often been responsible for the invasion and seizure of indigenous peoples’ territories and serious social conflicts,” said Schwartzman.

Under the proposal, forest conservation would be relegated to an “adaptation fund” in the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF). Neither Bank “environmental” projects nor GEF grants have, after billions invested over the last decade had any observable effect on deforestation in the tropics. Much of the funding is siphoned off into disfunctional bureaucracies and consultants’ fees. “Unlike GEF projects, market - based conservation projects could be held to performance standards,” said Schwartzman.

The major beneficiaries of the proposed text are large-scale forestry and pulp and paper companies. Brazil, the principal proponent of the language, has a dynamic pulp and paper industry, and significant comparative advantage in plantation forestry.