Rallying for REDD

By: Servaas Van den Bosch on September 21st, 2009

By Servaas van den Bosch

A hundred days from the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the future of REDD is still uncertain. Even if the ‘”tree people” get what they want, a significant return from carbon markets is still a long way off for smallholder farmers.

“Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) offers great potential for mitigating climate change,” said Peter Minang, Global Coordinator of the ASB (Alternatives to Slash and Burn) Partnership on the sidelines of the 2nd World Agroforestry Congress held in Nairobi from 23-28 August.

“But when forests are burned instead, greenhouse gases escape, accounting for 20% of total emissions of carbon dioxide, the main problem gas. This number climbs to 34% if you count loss of trees on agricultural land,” he warns. A powerful argument, say scientists, to include all the trees on agricultural land in any REDD climate deal.

A report released on 24 August by the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi said 46% of the world’s farmlands – or one billion hectares – harbouring 500 million people has tree cover of 10% or more. This represents a huge carbon sink and a possible source of income.

“Trees on farms are not only profitable as cash crops and fertilizers, but also mitigate climate change,” explains Dennis Garrity, chief of the World Agroforestry Centre. The trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and so help to slow the pace of climate change. “We foresee an influx of hundreds of billions of dollars from developed countries for mitigation.”

Dr Minang said: “Mitigation projects involving agroforestry have more potential to tap into the global $118 billion carbon market than existing adaptation initiatives.” Currently Africa hosts a negligible 4% of all the world’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. “Of the forty CDM projects related to forests, just four are from Africa and none has gone beyond the registration stage”, he says.

CDM was introduced under the Kyoto Protocol as a way for industrialised countries to offset their emissions by investing in projects in the developing world, which is arguably cheaper than reducing emissions at home.

Dr Minang argues that the proceeds of carbon trading – buying and selling greenhouse gas emission rights earned from trees grown in agroforestry schemes – can be used for helping countries to adapt to climate change. Experts agree that in coming decades Africa is likely to be hard hit by the effects of climate change, while its capacity to counter the effects of global warming is limited.

But there are some drawbacks. “Investors do not like the risks associated with trees because it’s hard to asses the carbon sequestration -the amount of CO2 stored by trees – over time without solid data”, says Jay Samek, researcher with the Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services of Michigan State University who is involved with the university’s Carbon2Markets initiative. “Combined with a lack of strict legislation on cap-and-trade in developed countries this keeps the price of carbon credits low,” observes Samek.

Cap-and-trade refers to a proposed regime where large polluters are forced to reduce their emissions, but are given the option to offset them by buying carbon credits elsewhere. “Carbon trades at 25 cents a metric tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange, with one Carbon Financial Instrument (CFI) – the agreed minimum volume of carbon credits set by the exchange – equalling 100 metric tonnes. A farmer with a one hectare field can maybe offset 10 metric tonnes per year, so would have to work together with nine colleagues to even start trading,” Samek explains.

Yet Carbon2Markets has yielded positive results with pilot projects in Thailand. “Farmers understand the principle of “banking” carbon, even though it’s not yet profitable.” And trees might very well become a carbon cash crop in the future, argues Rodell Lasco, senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre. “Right now financial barriers and governance issues make it seem impractical, but when the countries of the world get their act together and start addressing climate change seriously, agroforestry might very well turn out to be a cheap alternative compared to other options in the West.”