Saving the planet from global warming is easy: just start paying countries not to slash and burn their tropical rainforest. That鈥檚 faster and cheaper than new technology to trap or block the carbon dioxide we produce by burning fossil fuels, according to a report published on Monday by the Global Canopy Programme in Oxford, UK.
鈥淚n the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much carbon dioxide as would be produced by aircraft carrying 8 million people from London to New York,鈥� says Andrew Mitchell of the Global Canopy Programme. So instead of limiting air travel, for example, just pay for forests to be left alone.
The potential to prevent CO2 emissions is huge, as deforestation accounts for 18 per cent of all emissions, second only to the 24 per cent from power stations. Forests also have other 鈥渇ree鈥� effects that are useful to commerce and agriculture, such as generating rain and stabilising temperatures, so it might be possible to find ways of charging for these 鈥渟ervices鈥� as well, Mitchell says.
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Yet existing forests are excluded from today鈥檚 schemes for trading carbon credits. The Kyoto protocol, for example, only allows credit payments for newly planted forests; so farmers can get more money by cutting down virgin forest and growing trees anew than if they spared the original forest.
Mitchell hopes this will change in December when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convenes in Bali, Indonesia. For anti-deforestation schemes to work, there must be pay-offs larger than those available for clearing forest, he says. Brazil, for example, has proposed a scheme to generate rainforest credits.
