A group of developing countries is going to make a radical and ballsy proposal at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, which opens today in Montreal. The "Rainforest Coalition" plans to tell the developed world that if they want to see the rainforests survive, they better pay up. That's right, the Rainforest Coalition is planning to hold the rainforests hostage; it's payola time, or out come the chainsaws and lighters. And I, for one, can't blame them.
More below:
According to a lead
article in the Independent:
The group of 10 countries, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, argues that the rest of the world is benefiting from the rainforests' natural wealth without sharing the cost. Sir Michael Somare, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, said timber was one of the few natural resources available to the countries and their only real option for economic growth involved the destruction of the forests.
The Rainforest Coalition of countries calls that a recipe for failure - failure to preserve biodiversity; pressure to release the poorest people from poverty and failure to protect the world from the greenhouse effect.
Pointing out that the world and its climate benefits immensely from what remains of the developing world's tropical forests, but the rich countries pay nothing to ensure their safety, the Rainforest Coalition points out that: "In many forested rural areas, the only real options for economic growth involve the destruction of the natural forests."
It is true that in developing countries the best real source of income is often lumber. The only other option may be burning the forest for farmland. And that is exactly what is being done around the world. This is from the Guardian:
The Amazonian rainforest is being destroyed at double the rate of all previous estimates, according to research published today in the journal Science. The destruction is leaving the forest more prone to fires and allowing more carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, according to scientists.
A new analysis of satellite images of the Brazilian part of the Amazon basin, which forms part of the largest contiguous rainforest on Earth, shows that on average 15,500 sq km (6,000 square miles) of forest is being cut down by selective logging each year. This is besides a similar amount clear-cut annually for cattle grazing or farming. -snip-
A large mahogany tree can fetch hundreds of dollars at the sawmill, making it a tempting target. "People go in and remove just the merchantable species from the forest," said Prof Asner. "Mahogany is the one everybody knows about, but in the Amazon there are at least 35 marketable hardwood species, and the damage that occurs from taking out just a few trees at a time is enormous."
About 400m tonnes of carbon enter the atmosphere every year because of traditional deforestation in the Amazon, and Prof Asner estimates that an additional 100m tonnes of carbon occurs through selective logging. "When a tree trunk is removed, the crown, wood debris and vines are left behind to decompose, releasing carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere," he said.
A man on Lagoa dos Reis paddles across a blanket of dead and dying fish. Photograph: Marcio Silva/AP
But the Rainforest's value to us in the first world is based on entirely different economics. The forest is a giant carbon sink that stores the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and slows the rate of global warming. Deforestation, on the other hand, adds hundreds of millions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, and there's the rub. In the 1990s the amount of carbon released from deforestation was about equivalent to the carbon released by fossil fuels burned in the US.
Again, from the Independent:
Already under the Kyoto protocol, billions of dollars are changing hands annually in the form of what are called "carbon offsets". The protocol requires countries progressively to lower their gas emissions. Industrialized countries that have trouble reaching emission targets can offset their excess emissions by buying credits from countries that are doing better.
But the countries with some of the biggest carbon sinks do not participate in the program, and they don't think that's fair. They want to participate in the plan and allow developed countries to buy credits from them. This will align the economic interests of the countries in the Rainforest Coalition with those of developed countries. It will offer a financial reward to stop logging and clearing the forest for farms.
Sir Michael said: "If we, the rainforested nations, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we should be compensated for these reductions, as are industrialised nations.
"It's that simple."
The American economist Joseph Stiglitz, has given the proposal a warm endorsement. "Developing countries have long provided a vital global public good: maintaining global environmental assets," he said. "Their rainforests are a vast storehouse of biodiversity, and forests are major carbon sinks, reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere."
Europe, the US, and all other developed areas financed our development through the destruction and sell-off of our natural resources. The great American and European forests are largely gone. The same is true of oil, natural gas, various minerals and gems, and wildlife. If that were not bad enough, we then turned to colonies and exploited the resources of others. The US in particular used, and still uses an especially insidious form of economic imperialism with the help of the World Bank and the IMF.
To suddenly decide that the exploitation by third world countries of their own greatest natural resource is unacceptable is the height of hypocrisy, particularly if the reason for our objection stems from our own irresponsible energy usage. It is we who need the rain forests more than they do, and for that reason we should pay them to keep it standing.