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The Forum > Article Comments > Not ready for REDD? > Comments

Not ready for REDD? : Comments

By Esteve Corbera and Manuel Estrada, published 4/11/2009

Practicalities of carbon trading and protecting forests make it hard to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

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Frequent fliers who buy tree planting offsets may think all is well. However they may not grasp the shortcomings in both theory and practice. Those trees may simply not be enough, pristine forest may have been razed to create the plantation which earns credits, the trees may have been 'sold' to others and hence double counted, they may be later decimated by drought fire and disease and they will eventually rot to release greenhouse gases anyway. The whole industry is a recipe for fraud. Just once I would like to hear of authorities forcing the sellers to replant a few million trees because they failed to grow as promised. It works as a business model because the polluters get off the hook cheaply and the tree growers get money for jam. Most likely they chop down the trees anyway well before they have matured.

Unfortunately carbon offsets along with free permits are making a mockery of emissions trading schemes. Perhaps it should be Emissions Trading Scam. Instead of credits for tree growing the focus should be on debits for tree killing. Even before that the priority must be burning less coal. If we burn as much coal as ever anything else is an almost irrelevant sideshow.
Posted by Taswegian, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 10:04:25 AM
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The potential size and complexity of proposed greenhouse gas accounting programmes makes me fear that massive corruption is inevitable if we go down that road. Steep increases in the price of oil in the near future might save us from this outcome by making an ETS or carbon tax redundant.
Posted by David W, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 1:54:37 PM
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I agree with the comments above. To me paying someone to keep trees in the groud seems like very bad policy. How do you police it, and ensure they stay in the ground once you have paid for them up front? Particularly when it is in a foreign country. Paying someone to plant trees is worse, for the same reasons. If you want to ensure virgin forest stays in the ground charge a carbon fee for digging it up.
Posted by rstuart, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 2:48:05 PM
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Being very old, I remember being taught that carbon dioxide is an essential gas. You breath it in and you breath it out.
If there is too much, the answer lies in your breathing habits.
To reduce CO2 just stop breathing. In or out.
Am I ever getting fed up with your stupid fads.
Don't drink beer. Don't drink fizzy drinks. Don't eat hyderoponic food because it is grown with a CO2 level of up to 1,000 ppm.
Support Kevin's CPRS because it wont cost you much more than $5,000 a year. Al Gore will love you as well as Malcolm Turnbull and all the other Merchant Bankers that are going to make a fortune on carbon credit trading. Check out The Green Chip Review and see how their customers are making 32% profit per MONTH. Double your money in three months. Who is paying for it?
Posted by phoenix94, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 9:08:17 PM
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This article claims that about a fifth of all emissions results from forestry and land use change.

However before we start panicking and shutting down the timber industry in Australia, the good news is that according to the World Resources Institute, the figures for 2005 is now just 12% see http://www.wri.org/chart/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2005

The opening paragraph of this article is similar to the dramatic opening statement of the Australian National University (ANU) Fenner School/Wildcountry Hub’s paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
“Deforestation currently accounts for ~18% of global carbon emissions and is the third largest source of emissions”.
These out of date figures emanate from the IPCC 4th assessment report and can be found in current literature on Climate change, such as the Australian Climate Change Review by the ANU’s Professor Garnaut and that of green lobby groups.

The Wildcountry paper has been widely reported in the media and has been touted as a reason to cease the harvesting of Australia’s native forests, and the Garnaut’s review forms the basis for the Government’s emission trading scheme legislation.
So why have these academics not revised their reports to include up to date estimates?

In the latest World Resource Institute’s chart deforestation in the tropics accounts for 11.3%, with afforestation and forest harvest 0.9%. This drop to 12.2% for land use change is based on data from research published by Woods Hole Research Center, which was revised in 2008.
Revised rates of deforestation in the underlying Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) data produced significantly lower estimates of CO2 from land use change compared to the previous research. As a result, CO2 from land use change accounts for a significantly lower share of GHGs than in the original chart: 12.2% as compared to 18.2%.

Failure to acknowledge this revision to the previously flawed estimate may mean an unnecessary social and economic burden being placed upon all Australians. Without acknowledging that the problem is restricted to developing countries in the tropics scarce resource can be wasted in arguing over Australia’s sustainable forest management.
Posted by cinders, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 10:53:46 PM
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