Nigeria To Gain From UNEP Carbon Project

By: Michael Simire on September 6th, 2009

By Michael Simire

Communities in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa and Asia are the first beneficiaries of a scheme to provide payments for measuring how land and vegetation can absorb carbon, one of the key factors causing climate change.

The Carbon Benefits Project has been devised by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It is a test-bed for calculating how much carbon can be stored in trees and soils when the land is managed in sustainable, climate-friendly ways.

The pilot scheme began several months ago with a focus on settlements in Nigeria and Niger in West Africa, Kenya in East Africa, and China.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, announcing the scheme on 24 August at the opening of the 2nd World Agroforestry Congress in Nairobi, Kenya, said the initiative was still being fine-tuned.

He said: “The missing link is a standardised way of assessing how much carbon is actually locked away in vegetation and in soils under different land management regimes.”

Describing this as the project’s goal, Dr Steiner said preliminary findings would emerge within 18 months. UNEP would also explore why afforestation and reafforestation schemes constituted less than one percent of existing Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects.

This allows industrialised countries to invest in greenhouse gas reduction schemes in developing nations as a cheaper alternative to reducing their own emissions.

The Carbon Benefits Project reinforces the UN’s Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) initiative, which the UNEP head believes should be a key plank of the final agreement at COP-15, the UN climate change conference scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

“Simply locking away forests to secure their carbon…. is almost certainly folly and almost a recipe for disaster,” he said. Dr Steiner said REDD “should and must reflect the genuine needs of the surrounding communities, including indigenous peoples.”

UNEP and other UN agencies, including the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), are spearheading the REDD programme in nine pilot countries, thanks to funding from Norway.

Apart from combating climate change and accelerating adaptation, Dr Steiner said, an effective REDD could also ensure new global revenue flows.

A G8+5 initiative, the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), estimates that a $45 billion investment in protected areas can secure nature-based services worth about $5 trillion yearly. The TEEB is a global study which seeks to evaluate the costs of the loss of wildlife and other features of the natural world, and compare them with the cost of effective conservation and sustainable use. It is planning to develop “a valuation toolkit”.

The relatively modest expenditure on protecting features like forests and wetlands would, according to TEEB (whose secretariat UNEP hosts), pay vastly greater dividends in ensuring that they could continue to play their part in maintaining a healthy environment.

While trees store carbon, wetlands can help to purify water and to provide protection against floods and droughts.

Agroforestry, Dr Steiner predicted, might play numerous roles “in this new landscape of rewarding countries for their natural or nature-based services.”

He stressed that, as well as maximising sustainable food production and offering opportunities for timber production and alternative livelihoods, agroforestry could, through the Carbon Benefits Project, secure flows from carbon finance.

But he wants the area of insurance to be tidied up. “The insurance industry manages risk reasonably well in timber plantations, but seems less well geared to natural forests or farmland ones”, he said.