The refusal of the Indonesian government to allow Rainbow Warrior, dubbed by some as Greenpeace’s environmental warship, to dock in Indonesia recently, reveals a growing impatience in Southeast Asia toward the attitudes and methods of Western environmentalists.

There are two sources of disaffection. The first is disregard of the poor and economic growth.

The second is distortion of science to make a political case.

The declared aim of Greenpeace and WWF is to see an end to all conversion of forest to any other purpose everywhere. There is no scientific case for this and a powerful economic argument against.

World Growth joined the global debate to argue for solutions that respected action to reduce poverty, not displace it. This has drawn criticism, as we expected, and we welcome it.

At last the impact of green strategies on poverty is now on the table.

To those who argue that biodiversity is threatened unless all conversion of forest land ceases, we ask the questions: “What biodiversity is expressly protected by global cessation of conversion of forest land to other purposes and how is that biodiversity scientifically measured?”

To World Growth’s knowledge, no scientific analysis supporting this position has so far been produced.

However, one political effort has been made to set how much forest should be preserved globally to be able to protect current biodiversity. 

Signatories to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity proposed at one point that 10 percent of the world’s forests needed to be set aside to protect biodiversity.

WWF has reported that that target has been met. The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 21 percent of forest land in South and Southeast Asia has been set aside for biodiversity conservation (considerably more than the CBD’s proposed 10 percent).

The United Nations Environment Program has reported that 21 percent of tropical forests are in protected areas. In temperate forests the percentage is less than 13 percent, but even then we cannot be too precise.

For example, the FAO recently revised its deforestation figures for 2000-2005 downwards by more than 12 million hectares — half the area of Britain.

Two points to underline here are that plenty of forest land remains for productive activity and that globally the rate of deforestation is modest and declining.

The FAO reports the global deforestation rate has declined from 0.20 percent of forest land per annum to around 0.14 percent per annum over the past two decades.

This reflects historical and current empirical research on forests and economic development — that as societies become wealthier, deforestation slows, stops and eventually gives way to forest expansion.

That said, this is all educated guesswork. The technical basis of the measurement of global measure of forest cover could be significantly improved, and the FAO has been pressing for this to be done.

This would evidently be useful information. Instead of agitation for this from biodiversity activists and environmentalists, there is silence.

This is not surprising. Science is adduced to support a political case when it suits, not to establish facts.

Greenpeace and WWF have a long record between them of producing supposedly scientific reports where claims are not supported, even false and facts are misrepresented or distorted.

Greenpeace has been caught out twice in the last few months, producing heavily distorted reports about the pulp and palm oil industries. 

WWF’s record is little better. It has made claims about the rate of burning down Indonesian forests which have been publicly demonstrated as wrong.

The London Telegraph dubbed as “Amazongate” revelations that WWF had produced supposedly science-based reports on the adverse impacts of forestry in Brazil which could not  be supported.

There is a political campaign at work here. The aim is to brand the largest plantation operators in Indonesia as responsible for the bulk of the country’s deforestation.

The group of mostly biodiversity scientists who here challenge World Growth share that sentiment. It is not true.

The FAO routinely states that worldwide around two-thirds of forest land clearance is by the poor — to acquire fuel wood, to practice low-return agriculture or to acquire shelter.

The other third is converted to highly productive use — commercial agriculture (including palm oil) and forest plantations.

These activities are important contributors to economic growth. A large share of it is undertaken by large companies.

Most land clearing by the poor in most developing countries already flaunts local land use rules. It’s hard to see how a ban on deforestation driven by Western campaigners is going to make any difference. 

The answer to this problem, as we have noted before, is the postulation by Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Price laureate, Wangari Maathai: End poverty.

It is the large corporations and the plantation industries which create the jobs which remove the incentive for the poor to clear land. Stopping corporations converting forest land to more productive uses removes the best tool (employment — and therefore food security) to stop wasteful conversion.

There has been a response to World Growth’s call to address poverty, but it borders on the disingenuous.

It was advanced by WWF and echoed by the biodiversity scientists that protection of the forest preserves the subsistence lifestyles of indigenous forest peoples.

But in fact, all this preserves is high rates of infant mortality, illiteracy and short life spans.

The forest dwellers might as well be in an open-range zoo established for the pleasure of environmental campaigners.

And how does that help the 40 million people in Indonesia still living below the poverty line?

Here, we arrive at the nub of World Growth’s position.

Apart from the fact that deforestation rates have been overstated, and that the leading cause has been misrepresented, humanitarianism dictates that we devise solutions to protect the environment without restricting our capacity to lift people out of poverty.

No reasonable person would object  to that.

A reasonable person would, however, object if solutions to environmental problems exacerbated rather than improved the condition of the world’s poor, unless they elected to subscribe to sort of morally unacceptable strategies to reduce population, which has been entertained by one of our critics, biology professor Paul Ehrlich. 

Alan Oxley is chairman of the Washington-based World Growth Institute and a managing consultant at International Trade Strategies in Melbourne. (By Alan Oxley)

Source: Jakarta Globe

Two separate studies have thrown doubt over forests’ ability to help offset global warming. Because trees rely on carbon dioxide to grow, it has been predicted that as CO2 levels rise in a warming world, trees would thrive on the increase, grow faster, and thus help soak up excess atmospheric carbon.

As a result of their findings, the authors of both studies have called into question the growth models for worldwide vegetation being used in official climate change forecasting for this century. The results of the studies may also have implications for some types of forest carbon projects such as reforestation and improved forest management, depending on the growth models they use. Ex ante, or upfront, crediting under some standards may see too many credits issued on forecast carbon sequestration with issuances having to be revised after later verification events during a project’s lifetime.

A study led by Dr Richard Norby of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that while increased CO2 levels engender higher growth for the first five to six years, after that time the growth rate tails off.

The study team, including US and Australian scientists, found the limiting factor was the fixed level of nitrogen in the soil. After five or six years, the extra soil nitrogen being used to fuel the growth of the trees starts to run out, preventing the trees from being continuing to make the most of the elevated CO2 levels.

Researchers exposed forest stands to CO2 levels 25 per cent higher than the current global concentration, a level expected to be reached by the second half of this century.

“The implication of that for the broader landscapes is that, particularly in nutrient poor soils, the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is probably not going to be as beneficial to plants as we've been hoping,” Dr Belinda Medlyn a biologist at Macquarie University, Sydney, said. She said the models used in the IPCC 4th assessment report are likely to overstate CO2 sequestration on land by “a fair bit”.

A second study, from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, looked at 86 types of trees at more than 2,300 sites on six continents. It found that 80 per cent failed to respond to higher CO2 levels regardless of their species or geographical location. The researchers drew their results from examining tree rings, the distinctive marks left on trees allowing researchers to see how much growth takes place from year to year.

“There might be a very slight increase in the total rate of growth in trees, but they’re not going to be these vacuum cleaners that will magically suck up the CO2 that we’re emitting,” said Ze’ev Gedalof, study co-author and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Guelph.

Other experts examining the study questioned whether growth rates observed in tree rings give an accurate measure of overall carbon uptake.

ABC Online, Canadian Press.

Source: carbonpositive

Some rights for the image is reserved under Creative Commons license

(Reuters) - Indonesia could match Brazil's success in slowing  deforestation but needs far more aid from rich nations such as the United States, Japan and the European Union, Norway's environment minister said on Monday.

Norway has signed a $1 billion climate deal with Indonesia, under which Jakarta has agreed to impose a two-year ban on new permits to clear natural forests.

Norway has already released $30 million of the funds, with the bulk to be paid out later after Indonesia proves greenhouse gas emissions have gone down and an independent audit is done.

But more aid is needed to save Indonesia's forests, said Norwegian environment minister Erik Solheim.

"$1 billion is a huge amount of money but Indonesia needs quite substantially more to be able to conserve and sustainably manage its forests," Solheim told Reuters in an interview in Jakarta, where he is meeting Indonesian officials.

"The United States should come in, Japan, other European nations could come into this scheme to make it robust enough."

So far, Norway has been the biggest donor to protect tropical forests. At last year's Copenhagen climate summit, the United States, Australia, France, Japan, Britain and Norway agreed to provide a combined $3.5 billion from 2010-12 to help save forests.

Total pledges by rich donor nations rose to $4 billion in May, when members of a forest partnership met in Oslo.

Indonesia's vast tropical forests soak up enormous amounts of greenhouse gases but are threatened by agriculture and biofuel cultivation. Worldwide, deforestation is responsible for up to a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions from human sources, according to U.N. data.

"The logic in the past was that you can make money from destroying the forest, you cannot make money from protecting the forest. That logic must be changed," said Solheim.

Oil-rich Norway has also allocated $250 million and $1 billion to forest conservation projects in Guyana and Brazil respectively.

"Brazil has reduced its deforestation rate by 80 percent from 2003 until 2010. That's a fantastic result. I think the prospects for Indonesia are of the same magnitude," he said.

Solheim said it was up to Indonesia, not Norway, to define which forests would be saved under the moratorium or whether existing permits to clear valuable forest would be honored.

"If Indonesia came to Norway to tell us how to do our oil and gas production, Norwegians would laugh," he said.

Palm oil firms such as Wilmar, SMART and Indofood Agri Resources have big expansion plans and vast land banks in Indonesia, the world's biggest producer of the oil used in cosmetics, ice cream and other products.

While Indonesian officials have said they would prefer for the $1 billion to be handled by an internationally reputable Indonesian institution, Solheim said Norway preferred an international institution such as the World Bank.

"This is a matter we have to discuss with the government of Indonesia," he said.

MARKET-BASED OFFSETS DISTANT

Part of Norway's donation will be used to set aside forests for pilot projects under a planned U.N-backed forest carbon offset scheme, called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).

So far, most REDD pilot projects are funded by governments. A market-based REDD scheme -- under which rich polluters could offset their emissions by paying poor countries not to chop down their trees -- was a distant prospect, Solheim said.

"That may come in 10 years time or so. It's much more likely we will get a market-based system in other areas such as energy," he said. "Some who are arguing that it should not be market-based can sleep peacefully because we are very far from a market-based system. Every single cent will come from taxpayers." (By Sunanda Creagh; Editing by Alister Doyle and Andrew Marshall)

Source: Reuters

Setting one global standard for monitoring should give investors certainty beyond 2012, says JISC

The UN body tasked with expanding carbon emission reduction projects around the world has agreed to streamline the process for approving such projects, potentially providing a major boost to the global carbon market.

Under the Joint Implementation (JI) process established by the Kyoto Protocol, countries signed up to the treaty can participate in emission reduction schemes in other countries and put the savings towards their own carbon reduction targets.

Currently, JI projects take one of two tracks: Track 1 in which countries vet the projects for eligibility themselves and Track 2 in which the projects are overseen internationally by the Joint Implementation Supervisory Committee (JISC), part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat.

But on Friday, at the culmination of week-long talks in Bonn, Germany, the JISC said that the current model was unsustainable and agreed a proposal to combine or harmonise the two tracks, potentially creating a universal system for approving carbon offset projects.

The committee said a universal system would provide greater transparency and consistency for projects, which have been subject to different regimes in different countries.

It added that fears some countries would prove unable to meet the international standards demanded by Track 2, the original reason for establishing a dual system, had proved unfounded.

JISC chair Benoît Leguet said the proposal would provide stability for the JI carbon market beyond the end of the Kyoto commitment period in 2012.

"This is a landmark moment for the market-based approach to combating climate change," he said. "We're putting forward ambitious but extremely practical proposals that would draw on the best features of national and international approaches to incentivising emission reduction projects."

The JISC has received 234 proposals under the Track 2 process, including a number from Russia, which had its first project approved earlier this month.

Leguet urged countries to rubber-stamp the proposal at the UN's Cancun summit in December, arguing that approval for the plan would lay to rest fears about the JI's continuation after 2012.

"The private sector has embraced JI. Countries have done the same by approving and promoting projects," he said. "Now what we need, if the JISC is to continue its work, is for parties to come together and confirm what they have already shown individually, that they want to build on what they've started." (By Will Nichols)

Source: businessGreen.com

Some rights for the image is reserved under Creative Commons license