Green Light for Africa’s Forests if REDD is Agreed

By: Harold Williams on September 5th, 2009

One of the buzzwords of the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen is REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation. It’s a simple idea: pay people not to chop down  their forests, as a way of keeping the carbon dioxide in the trees and the soil locked up.

The global strategy to tackle climate change insists that saving greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the world is worthwhile. So at the moment politicians set great store by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, which helps industrialized nations reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by financing projects to reduce emissions in developing countries which themselves produce very little of them.

Africa’s CDM share is less than 4% of the 1,000 projects under way worldwide. These can cost up to US $200,000 to develop, just the amount of money initially given to each African state to develop its national plan for adapting to climate change.

Without private sector financing or donor support to go beyond this national plan, it is unlikely that Africa will obtain more CDM projects and the credits for reducing emissions which they bring.

In future, though, whatever happens to the CDM, the salvation of forests through REDD will be a form of nature conservation that can be rewarded with financial support. Africa will benefit from this by being paid not to reduce forests, not to pollute, and by implementing sustainable agroforestry.

The details of this arrangement should be finalized between the UN Climate Change Convention’s Copenhagen conference  and its Johannesburg conference in 2011. The text agreed in Copenhagen should help to define REDD (when it goes further with a clearly defined Payment for Ecosystem Services, it is called REDD+).

At the World Agroforesty Congress in Nairobi last August, Dr Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, said: “Almost one half of all farmed landscapes in the world have significant-to-dense tree cover”.

Ecosystems such as the Upper Guinea Rainforest and Congo Basin lock down 200+ tonnes of carbon per hectare. If sustainably managed, such forests can be worth more intact as carbon reservoirs than as timber export reserves.

Forests and trees on farms will have to be accurately mapped and their carbon storage potential quantified if REDD is to work. Industries will then be encouraged to pay for the preservation of trees by knowing exactly how much carbon dioxide is being stored in them.

Africa’s equatorial forest belt will benefit from REDD by having more forests declared no-logging reserves, and by smallholder farmers being encouraged to invest more in agroforestry. Under REDD , there is more likelihood of them thinking it worthwhile to improve their land by planting trees instead of removing them.

Having more trees on farmland is a reason for including agroforestry in the REDD section of the Copenhagen negotiations. This does not mean though that the forests should be replaced with palm trees or other plantations. For that, the World Agroforestry Centre says, existing farm land and degraded land can be used.

Dr Peter Minang, of the International Center for Research in Agroforestry, told the Nairobi Congress that REDD will be more realistic if it includes the stewardship of African farmers.

And REDD+ represents a foot through the door “to even more creative carbon payments for improved land management on farms”, agrees the UN Environment Programme  executive director Dr Achim Steiner.