From the Field Museum
New study shows where carbon finance should — and shouldn’t — drive conservation efforts
The world’s forests are crucial to slowing climate change, but they’re often destroyed to make room for farms, mines, and other economic ventures. One possible solution to deforestation is carbon finance: giving companies and countries monetary incentives to reduce their climate change-causing carbon emissions from deforestation. But carbon finance isn’t in place on the large scale yet, and it’s unclear how effective it might be. A new study suggests that potential success for carbon finance varies widely–it can work under the right conditions, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
“Forests are one of the most important tools available to humanity for mitigating global climate change. This study tells us what the viable solutions might be in different areas,” explains the study’s lead author Ashwin Ravikumar, an environmental social scientist at The Field Museum in Chicago. “No one solution will work everywhere–we need to tailor solutions and funding streams to individual situations.”
In a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Ravikumar, along with researchers from the Department of Forest Services in Finland and the Center for International Forestry Research in Peru, explores the potential benefits of carbon finance in various landscapes around the world. The team conducted a series of workshops in Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Tanzania, asking local farmers, politicians, NGO officers, and businesspeople to come up with their best guesses as to how business and farming might affect land use in the coming decades. The scientists then compared these hypothetical land uses to the current ones and determined how much money could be earned by countries working to conserve forests and reduce their carbon output. The results were hugely varied.
“We were shocked by how much income could be generated by carbon finance in some areas and how little it could bring in others,” says Ravikumar. “Conventional wisdom says that if you save a forest, you’ll make a big difference in carbon emissions, which would translate to a lot of money in the carbon market. But that’s not always what we saw. In the forests of southern Mexico and the interior of Tanzania, for example, there wasn’t a huge difference in carbon emissions between aggressive conservation and high deforestation scenarios. On the flip side, we were blown away by how critical the peat forests in Indonesia for reducing carbon emissions.”
One of the reasons behind these differences is carbon storage potential–the amount of potentially harmful carbon that’s safely stored in tree tissues.
“Forests lock carbon into their tissues and keep it out of the environment, but it’s a double-edged sword–when forests are destroyed, that stored carbon escapes into the atmosphere, making climate change worse,” explains Ravikumar.
Different kinds of forests are able to lock in different amounts of carbon–there’s more carbon stored in lush, tropical Amazon rainforests with leafy trees than in a dry Canadian forest populated with pines. Peat forests, whose soils contain lots of complex organic matter that isn’t readily broken down, are especially carbon-dense and important to maintaining the global climate. That means that in many cases, peat forests are great candidates for carbon finance–there’s a huge difference in the amount of carbon emissions in a region with a peat forest and a region without peat. That means that countries with peat forests could stand to reap big carbon finance rewards for conserving their peat forests.
“If you incentivized carbon storage, though, conserving environments like that peat forest could earn 3.5 billion dollars over the course of thirty years,” says Ravikumar. “Meanwhile, the model shows that conserving a dry forest in Zanzibar would net only about 38 million over the same time frame–much less than the peat forest.”
Ravikumar says that being able to accurately estimate the benefits–or lack of benefits–of carbon finance is crucial. “If you’re working with local people and telling them how preserving a forest could benefit them, you need to be able to give them realistic expectations. If you’re wrong, it undoes the legitimacy of the project and breaks down trust.”
And while the study works with models and estimates, Ravikumar stresses the value of this speculative work. “There are limitations to predicting the future,” he says, “but this paper is not the end of the story. It’s not a crystal ball, but if we don’t think about this stuff systematically, we’re flying blind.”
Ravikumar has hopes that this study will help to inform future policy decisions regarding conservation and carbon finance. “My hope is that policy-makers and NGOs will think critically about how carbon finance will work in their area. In places that we want to conserve, we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the carbon finance basket when those eggs might not hatch. But there are cases when carbon finance could have an enormous conservation impact, and studies like this one can help us to determine what those cases are.”
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Does anyone know exactly what de-forestation does to global T?
Yes, but why should I show you my work if you just want to find problems with it?
your work is useless anyway of you wont show it to anyone.
my work shows that deforestation causes a drop in minimum T (e.g. Tandil, ARG) whilst forestation/greening causes an entrapment of heat (e.g. Las Vegas, USA) and hence an increase in minimum T
You’re new here, aren’t you.
Henry, so we don’t leave you hanging. Mark’s comment was sarcasm as it relates to the “climate emails” (aka Climategate). But your response was exactly right “your work is useless”. I cannot explain to you every aspect, it is a big subject but when you have time to read it, check out this analysis and where you will find the “you just might find problems with it” comment.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf
I normally have a degree of sympathy for Griff as he gets such a panning on WUWT and sort of admire his persistence. But he is wrong to say that the political row in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with Green issues in the sense that it is yet another example of the stunning self-serving, useless or corruption practices that seem to be an endemic part of Green energy schemes. Griff could easily find lots of other Green energy schemes, like the UEA failed “boilers” which never worked and wasted a cool million or so. In the wider world we have the outrageous misallocation of now trillions on AGW agenda/green energy which has failed to do any good other than line the pockets of the unscrupulously well off but deprived funds and programmes to tackle humanities real problems like disease, poverty and progress in the parts of the world that need real help. Meanwhile the evidence that the climate is only marginally influenced by CO2 just gets stronger.
Yes.
#(:))
(since your entire quote is just above for context, I went ahead and did that because…. IT WAS FUN! — and accurate)
There’s also the solar power array that was powered at night by flood lights powered by diesel generators.
Spen (above) refers to massive, industrial-scale deforestation (there are vid-clips elsewhere) to create wood pellets as coal-substitute in UK power stations.
Yup!!!! ….. destroying forests to make power!
Yup!!!! ….. Lewis Carrol cdn’t invent this!
In a different context, the people who are not bothered by such a crazy policy would be chaining themselves in front of the bulldozers in order to save the “precious” forest from the “greed” of the logger.
If we must burn hydrocarbons as fuel for power plants, we are better off burning hydrocarbons that we cannot use for other purposes and especially those that also are grown for the human food chain.
Of course all of this falls apart should some type of nuclear power become available that is both safe and inexpensive. I am confident that greens will opposed it, and we will finally be able to demonstrate that greens are far more about suppressing our prosperity than they are about the health of our biosphere.
see: CNN Covers Brilliant Light Power’s SunCell (Video)
http://www.e-catworld.com/2017/01/01/cnn-covers-brilliant-light-powers-suncell-video/
Beware, Brilliant Light Power is a long running scam. (It used to be known as Black Light Power) It is totally at odds with all of known physics.
Let’s Play Science Fiction:
1) The hydrino is real. It is a lower energy form of the normal Hydrogen atom
2) Useful energy can be obtained from the conversion of hydrogen to the hydrino
3) The hydrino is, in fact, the long hypothesized Dark Matter.
Does anybody here believe for an instant that Greenpeace, Friends of Earth, et al, would allow the industrial scale production of Dark Matter on planet Earth? Didn’t think so.
It worries me that trees are regarded as CO2 storage units instead of being regarded as living organisms. And to add insult to injury, it is published in an ecology journal, which is supposed to study the relationships among living organisms and the effects of increasing CO2 levels on living organisms, trees included. A note for them: increasing CO2 levels is beneficial for tree growth and, as an extension, for the biosphere.
“the amount of potentially harmful carbon”
What a totally bizarre point of view to have on a planet where absolutely 100% of all life forms are carbon based. One might idly speculate that the authors are some new breed of “Social Justice Ecologists” who have not the foggiest notion of how Earth borne biochemistry works.
This research is part of CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (www.cifor.org/gcs). The funding partners that have supported this research include the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) with financial support from the donors to the CGIAR Fund. Well that certainly explains a lot… 🙂
Didn’t anyone notice judge Preston Bailey issued a stinging rebuke to EPA and mannish Gina McCarthy on Wednesday 12 January? (Worthy of a WUWT story!)
Gina said EPA needed 2 years to count the job losses caused by EPA coal policy, and dah judge said “No, you don’t. Get moving!” or words to that effect:
Bailey wrote:
“EPA does not get to decide whether compliance with (the law) is good policy, or would lead to too many difficulties for the agency. It is time for the EPA to recognize that Congress makes the law, and EPA must not only enforce the law, it must obey it.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/federal-judge-denounces-epa-as-rogue-agency.php
Er, that’s Judge John Preston Bailey.
The correct approach is quite simple. First you fine them $1,000 and schedule a review for the next day. If they haven’t complied yet, fine them $2,000 and schedule another review for the next day. If compliance hasn’t been achieved yet, fine them $4,000, etc. Doubling each day for non-compliance.
Now, being a government department complicates things because it isn’t their money. So you would need to modify it by jailing them for 1 day (doubling each day of non-compliance). That should get the attention of any public servant.
A gentle reminder that modern mining affects trivial quantities of trees and other vegetation and is not a bogey man.
Miners are people, many of whom innately want to preserve what is good in Nature. One of my past employers was nationally large in both mining and forestry. For mining, we showed our obligations by state of art post-mining rehabilitation so that decades later, now it is near impossible to tell where was mined. Not always, but that was an aim. For forestry, we planted more than we harvested each year, by a big margin – and managed forests gave better yields, a double benefit.
Our motivation was no more complex than this: It was clearly the right way, the least harmful way, to satisfy the clearly expressed needs of society. There was a huge excess of rules and regs laid on us, but this was of little more help than showing who had the biggest dick, an exercise that seems more fun for those who put their foreskins in the game with no attendentvrisk or accountability.
This fantasy of social costs of carbon, money redistributions based on fraud and poor science are not the products of the extractive industries so much as unwise constructs by self-seeking pressure groups and bureaucrats too thick to care or know of reality.
The world will be a better place when the green carpet baggers are recognised for what they are – leeches – then marginalized and ignored. They have no need to exist.
Geoff.
About 5-7 % of soil carbon increased originally by woods, do not recycle back into the atmosphere. This is the only real carbon sink of the forests. The environmentalists say that you should not cut a single tree but you should hug them. If people can cultivate forests in the right way, they can produce more and more wood for sales. This is the situation in Finland. We have been living from forests for 200 centuries. And despite of this, we have more woods in our forests than ever. Now European Union wants to stop cutting our trees, because we are destroying the valuable carbon sink of Europe. Almost all other nations of EU have destroyed their forests and now they say that you have to transform your forests into natural parks.
We need a carbon Tax! And we need it NOW!
Climate changes. Humans can not stop that. Humans do not cause that. As for forests, these same “climate scientists” claim that new growth trees absorb more CO2 than old growth, then spin around and claim we can’t cut down old growth because,,,,,,, CO2blahblahblahblahblah. At this point everything the say is a lie, no one who actually lives out in the world believes any of it.
There is an assumption that CO2 causes climate change or global warming or what ever they want to call it. The assumption is not a fact. It has not been proven. It is at best a hypothesis that needs some solid research to make it a theory. So far the research looking for the proof that the assumption is incorrect seems to be more true than not. Spending large amounts of money (other peoples) is improper if the scientific basis is not there. We will continue going downhill until we begin to show that the assumption is false rather than that it is true.
So, “One possible solution to deforestation is carbon finance: giving companies and countries monetary incentives to reduce their climate change-causing carbon emissions from deforestation.” is a false solution to a non-problem.
Also, we need to quit using normal statistics for these analyses because climate is not a normally distributed random variable.
Ofhand, I’d say there IS a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Learn to live with it.
Nun seit bestehen der Menschheit hat er eingegriffen in seine Umwelt und hat sie verändert zu seinem Schaden. Leider wird er es wohl nie lernen. Doch sehr sehr bedenklich ist sein welweit angesammeltes Kriegsmaterial wie Atom-, Bio-, Chemiewaffenpotencial, sowie
UMWELTVERSCHMUTZUNG DURCH INDUSTRIEABFÄLLE, ATOMMÜLL,VERSCHMUTZUNG DER WELTMEERE DURCH FREMDSTOFFE ÖLVERSCHMUTZUNG ETC. Nun der Mensch bringt sich auf lange Sicht selbst um. Doch dürfen wir die Hoffnung auf Besserung nicht aufgeben. Jeden sei Dank hier sich für unsere gesunde Umwelt einzusetzen!
Brandenburg Gate is nice. I prefer Nuremberg Trials. Apply THAT standard to “climate scientists” and see how fast they change their tune.
“Meanwhile, the model shows that conserving a dry forest in Zanzibar would net only about 38 million over the same time frame–much less than the peat forest.”
I swear what my people swears:
No Tanzanian will pay for the realization of Tanzanian conserving model.
His “hope is that policy-makers and NGOs will think critically about how carbon finance will work in their area. In places that we want to conserve, we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the carbon finance basket when those eggs might not hatch.”
OK – that NGOs won’t pay from their own pockets. / Owls to Athens. /