CARE to hazard a guess which country is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China? Chances are you didn鈥檛 think of Indonesia. It is in the big league of global polluters partly because it is destroying its rainforests, but more importantly because it is draining its peat bogs. Newly drained bogs on the island of Sumatra are releasing more carbon dioxide than western cities of a comparable size. Often the bogs are drained to grow palm oil for use as biofuel in Europe. Here鈥檚 the tragedy: draining a hectare of bog emits 30 times as much carbon dioxide as is saved by burning the biofuel produced from it in place of fossil fuels (see 鈥淚ndonesia鈥檚 carbon catastrophe鈥�).
鈥淎 newly drained peat bog releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than a western city of a comparable size鈥�
Clearly this is madness, but we should have seen it coming. It stems from the fact that the Kyoto protocol addresses some of our interventions in the planet鈥檚 carbon cycle yet ignores others. For example, Europe is covered by emissions targets, whereas Indonesia and other developing nations are not. Likewise, the protocol is tough on emissions from burning fossil fuels but takes little account of those from natural ecosystems.
Advertisement
Many scientists argued that this made no sense a decade ago when the protocol was being negotiated. Every source of carbon and every sink should be accounted for, they said, precisely to avoid the kind of situation that has arisen in Indonesia. They were ignored because measuring the movement of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere and natural ecosystems is far harder than counting the tonnes of fossil fuels we burn. But since then the science has improved, and it鈥檚 now clear that carbon sources such as bogs must be accounted for if we鈥檙e to have any chance of keeping global emissions in check.
Next week there will be a chance to put things right, when signatories to the Kyoto protocol meet on another Indonesian island, Bali, to begin negotiations on the protocol鈥檚 successor. The Indonesian government plans to use the 12-day meeting to promote the idea that tropical countries should benefit from protecting their natural carbon stores from deforestation and drainage. They could win carbon credits, just as rich nations do for cutting emissions below their Kyoto targets. The idea has received wide backing from both developed and developing nations.
There is something crucial missing, however. Rich nations face penalties if they don鈥檛 make their targets: they must buy carbon credits to make up any difference. Indonesia鈥檚 proposal is all carrot and no stick: developing countries that carry on deforesting and draining, or fail to keep fossil fuel emissions in check, will face no penalties. One likely consequence is that the market in carbon credits will be swamped with an oversupply of credits and too few purchasers. Prices would crash and there would be few incentives to avoid emissions of any sort.
There is a way out: make each country responsible for all its carbon emissions, so that targets would be based on a country鈥檚 total carbon output, industrial as well as natural. Developing countries with large natural carbon sources will say this is unfair, and they have a point. When you account for Indonesia鈥檚 peat bogs, its per capita carbon emissions are not much below those of European countries, yet most Indonesians are responsible for far less emissions than the average European. Some allowance must be made to ensure that any targets system does not discriminate against poorer countries鈥� development.
Yet for most developing countries, a scheme of credits and penalties based on total per capita emissions would be an incentive, and would help redress a situation in which the world鈥檚 half-billion richest individuals 鈥� just over 7 per cent of the global population 鈥� are responsible for half of all carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, while the 3 billion poorest are responsible for just 7 per cent. It could tie in with the recent proposal from German chancellor Angela Merkel that national emissions quotas should eventually be based strictly on population size, with per capita emissions of rich nations falling until they meet the rising emissions of poor nations.
This is not all going to be resolved in Bali. But delegates should have the central message in mind: that to stabilise the climate we need targets that are both fair and tough, and that account for all emissions, whether from a power station or a peat bog. The atmosphere does not discriminate: a tonne of carbon dioxide is bad news whatever its source.
