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Three straws in the wind: Two pieces of policy news and a new piece of research. Two weeks ago, a leaked document from the EU revealed that the European Commission and some member states hope to include oil palm plantations in the definition of forests. Yesterday, the Jakarta Post reported that Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry is drafting a decree to reclassify oil palm plantations as “forests”.
While REDD proponents and critics often provide lists of conditions that should be met before REDD can go ahead, they rarely conclude that REDD should not go ahead if these conditions are not met. As Simone Lovera explains in “REDD Realities” many of the conditions are currently not met and cannot be met – particularly if REDD is to be funded through carbon trading. “The problem with REDD is that there are simply too many ‘ifs’ to be true,” Lovera comments.
The first thing that you need to know about “forests in exhaustion” is that they are not forests. According to the Clean Development Mechanism, the photograph on the left is a forest. All of it. The eucalyptus monoculture plantation in the background is a “forest” because it is bigger than 500 square metres and more than 10 per cent of it is covered with trees taller than two metres, thus meeting CDM’s definition of a “forest”. But the muddy wasteland in the foreground? Well, in UN-speak, that’s a “forest in exhaustion”. While it’s clearly not a forest, it certainly looks exhausted. Bloody knackered, more like.
Global deforestation accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all CO2 emissions. Everyone knows that. We’ve read it over and over again. The figure comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But recent research takes a new look at the data behind the figure and comes up with a figure of around 12 per cent. The research, carried out by Guido van der Werf at the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, VU University Amsterdam and colleagues, is published in Nature Geoscience this week. Van der Werf explains that “While the IPCC estimates were based on the best available information during the time of writing, several deforestation emission assessments have been revised downward since then. In addition, fossil fuel emissions have increased substantially but deforestation emissions remained relatively constant.”
This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is holding the 13th World Forestry Congress, in Buenos Aires. With the slogan “Forests in Development”, the Congress will discuss seven themes, with titles such as “forests and biodiversity”, “producing for development”, “caring for our forests” and “people and forests in harmony”. It all sounds harmless, perhaps even progressive. It is not. As World Rainforest Movement points out, within these themes are topics that ring alarm bells such as “planted forests”, genetic modification, industrial biofuels and forests and climate change. The WFC promotes the frauds that plantations are forests and that offsets address climate change.
The photograph on the right was taken by Global Witness in 2006. It shows an area of illegal logging inside the Bokum Sakor National Park in Cambodia. Here’s the problem: What area should be delineated as forest? You might think that’s easy. The area covered in trees is forest. Isn’t it? Yes, obviously. But according to the UNFCCC’s definition of forests, the logged over area is also forest. The UN describes this sort of destruction as “areas normally forming part of the forest area which are temporarily unstocked as a result of human intervention”. A colleague recently asked the question: What is the possibility of plantations being included in REDD schemes under the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility? It’s an excellent question. The response from FCPF’s Management is extraordinary, since they chose one of the most controversial potential REDD schemes to illustrate the supposed “benefits” of plantations. If it were to go ahead, this REDD scheme would involve paying APRIL, a company which is responsible for destroying vast areas of forest in Indonesia. This appears not to concern FCPF management at all. On the final day in Poznan, a dispute took place between Saudi Arabia and Brazil over the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Saudi Arabia wants carbon capture and storage to be included in the CDM. Brazil wants carbon credits for “forests in exhaustion”. Saudi Arabia’s motivation is obvious. It wants to continue extracting and selling oil. But what is Brazil’s motivation? And what, exactly, are “forests in exhaustion”? As REDD-Monitor has pointed out several times, the way forests are defined is crucial to whether REDD helps to preserve or destroy forests. The UN’s failure, in its negotiations on REDD, to differentiate between forests and industrial tree plantations, creates the risk that governments and companies could replace forests with oil palm, eucalyptus or rubber plantations and claim carbon credits under REDD schemes. Clearly, this is deeply unsatisfactory to anyone who cares about people and forests. Yet the UN continues to define plantations as forests. On 11 December 2008, delegates entering the Poznan climate change conference saw a “Plantations are not forests” banner on the edge of a protest in favour of womens’ rights. Protesters chanted “Plantations, down! down! Monocultures, down! down! Women’s rights, up! up!” The way in which forests are defined will be a crucial factor in determining whether REDD serves a truly useful purpose in helping to protect the world’s forests or, alternatively, is simply used as a means of supplementing the incomes of logging and industrial plantation companies. It is widely agreed that the existing definition of “forest”, as agreed under the Marrakesh Accords, and which allows for any areas as small as 0.05 hectare and with as little as 10% tree cover, is woefully inadequate in terms of recognising the wider roles and functions that true forests fulfil. In this piece, Sean Cadman of the Wilderness Society, who has been involved in recent UNFCCC discussions on forest definitions, considers some of the issues. |
 
 
 
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