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New way for individuals to save rainforests

Guy Shrubsole

Saving the rainforests is an effective and cheap way of cutting carbon emissions - but is buying trees to stop deforestation the answer?

Gold first lured outsiders to claim the rainforests. Later, medicines became the prize, then land for ranching cattle, soya and, more recently, biofuels. Now a different part of the Amazon is ours to buy: its massive stocks of carbon. A new scheme launched this month aims to exploit the surge in interest in saving trees to save the planet, and offers individuals the chance to pay to protect swaths of rainforest.

Called Cool Earth, and set up by entrepreneur Johan Eliasch and British Labour MP Frank Field, the scheme says it will “price deforestation out of the market” by securing forest in local trusts, and watching it “around the clock to keep the carbon where it belongs.”

It might sound familiar — schemes to buy up and protect the rainforests have been around since campaigns to highlight their plight peaked in the 1980s. But climate change has brought those concerns into new focus, and the organisers of Cool Earth hope to capitalise on the recent boom in ethical consumerism, carbon labels and offsetting services.

The problem is clear. Deforestation releases massive amounts of carbon. The recent Stern review into the economics of climate change said greenhouse gas released from the 150,000 sq km of tropical forest destroyed each year now accounts for 18 per cent of global emissions — more than from any single nation.

Conversely, this makes tackling deforestation a cheap way of fighting global warming. A recent report from international consultancy firm McKinsey identified forest conservation as the “single largest opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions of carbon.”

And the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that “forest-related mitigation activities can considerably reduce emissions from sources, and increase CO2 removals by sinks, at low costs.”

Each hectare of Amazon rainforest absorbs and stores up some 640 tonnes of CO2. To protect it, Cool Earth will charge £170 per hectare, which works out as £0.27 a tonne. As far as saving carbon goes, that is at the very cheap end of the scale. Offset companies such as Climate Care will typically charge £7.50 a tonne of CO2.

Cool Earth operates as a charity and denies it is in the offset business (although its website offers companies the chance to go “carbon neutral”). “We are not offering an offset or any guilt alleviation mechanism,” says Matthew Owen, a spokesman for Cool Earth.

So who is buying? So far, Tony Blair, editor Ian Hislop, rock star Jarvis Cocker, and Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides series of travel books, number among supporters. Donors are almost entirely individuals, with donations ranging from £5 to £5,000, says Mr. Owen.

Others have tried before to sell the British public shares in the rainforest. The World Land Trust has bought 142,000 hectares of endangered habitats with individual donations since 1989. RainforestForever.org sells “tree kits,” the deluxe editions complete with a framed certificate of ownership. But certificates are seldom guarantees against chainsaws. WWF’s figures for land ownership in the Brazilian Amazon show 35 per cent to be “public or private lands in dispute,” which, they say, shows “why any initiatives to encour age land purchase as a strategy for conservation are likely to be limited.” Cool Earth says it will place microchips in protected trees and display the location of preserved areas on the internet.

Mr. Field says Cool Earth’s policy aim is to “disadvantage the west,” forcing polluting nations to compensate rainforest states for the ecological services they perform. The resultant source of income has “huge potential” which, he says, “will begin to make overseas aid redundant.”

Whether or not Cool Earth succeeds in its ambition to price deforestation out of the market, the idea of paying countries such as Brazil not to chop down their forests is gaining momentum. Negotiations continue on how rainforest nations could be compensated for such “avoided deforestation” in a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, and deforestation will be a key issue on the agenda at the U.N. climate talks in Bali in December. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited London 2007

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