What next?

Tue, Nov. 29, 2005

ENVIRONMENT

Nations want to be paid for saving forests

Some developing countries are seeking payment for preserving their forests. They say that the trees benefit the global environment.

BY MIGUEL BUSTILLO

Los Angeles Times Service

Until recently, Michael Somare, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, felt that global economic forces were pressuring him to cut down his country's lush tropical rain forest, the third-largest left in the world.

But Somare now believes he has found a financial incentive to save his nation's forests, one that should be far more valuable to the world than hardwood timber or coffee plantations. Left alone, forests serve as natural air filters that suck up greenhouse gases and help ward off global warming.

Arguing that the rest of the world is benefiting from their natural wealth without shouldering the cost, a bloc of developing countries led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica plans to make a novel proposition in Montreal this week at a United Nations conference on climate change: Pay us, and we will preserve our rain forests.

OFFERING A TRADE

''In the rural areas of my nation, where 80 percent of the people live, the only real options for economic growth often require the destruction of natural forests . . . in order to trade low-value commodities with the industrial powers. I call this eco-colonialism,'' Somare said in a recent interview.

''This is a recipe for failure -- failure to preserve our biodiversity, pressure to release our people from poverty, failure to protect the world from the greenhouse effect,'' he added. ``We need to develop a system that will monetize environmental services and capitalize sustainable development.''

The proposal is preliminary, and some experts predict it will be bedeviled by the challenge of finding a fair-market value for nature, as well as international skepticism over whether nations such as Papua New Guinea can shield their forests from illegal logging.

GAINING BACKING

But the idea, which has begun to garner backing from prominent economists, could expand the number of countries interested in joining a new worldwide pact to combat global warming once the current U.N. treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012.

''Right now, these rain forest nations are providing enormous environmental services to the rest of the world -- biodiversity, reduced greenhouse gas emissions -- and they are not being compensated,'' said Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, part of a cadre of academics at Columbia University championing the proposal. ``From the viewpoint of global economic efficiency, the best use for rain forests is to maintain them as rain forests.''

Deforestation and other land-use changes accounted for as much as one-fifth of the excess carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the 1990s, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hundreds of scientists who periodically summarize the consensus on global warming.

Yet international efforts to address the causes of climate change have focused on trying to reduce the burning of fossil fuels by wealthy countries rather than on slowing deforestation.

As an incentive to make reductions under the Kyoto pact, countries that slash greenhouse gas emissions can profit by selling ''pollution credits'' to countries that do not cut emissions enough. Such credits currently are valued at $25 per ton of carbon in Europe and are in demand.

But there is no similar incentive to reward rain forest preservation, despite the elementary scientific understanding that trees consume carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and release sizable quantities of the gas when they burn or decompose.

Interesting article, thanks. "Pollution credits" who'd have thunk it?
Payment to preserve the world a little longer!