If a tree falls, is the G8 listening?

John O. Niles, International Herald Tribune - Thursday, July 7, 2005 Although tropical deforestation is the second leading cause of global warming, Group of 8 countries have repeatedly turned their back on tropical forests. Despite the enthusiasm of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 for "saving the rainforests," rates of tropical deforestation remain where they have been for decades.

Each year, about 30 million acres of tropical forests are lost. Last year Brazil had its second highest rate of Amazon deforestation. Funding levels for tropical forest conservation are meager and declining. It has been almost 15 years since ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Other agreements, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Millennium Development Goals have failed to help tropical forests.

If G-8 leaders meeting in Scotland this week reinvigorate the discussion of tropical deforestation, they could provide breakthroughs on several environmental and political fronts.

Tropical forests are the world's most biologically rich places, sheltering more species than anywhere else on Earth. They blanket the planet from the sun's most intense solar radiation and play a key role in global weather patterns. Locally, tropical forests sustain communities, clean water, control flooding and maintain soils to grow food.

And these forests have lots and lots of carbon. This carbon, when oxidized by deforestation, dumps 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere each year, second only to fossil fuel combustion.

Of all the treaties that have failed tropical forests, none is more upsetting than the UN climate change convention. The convention calls for measures to save ecosystems rich in carbon, among other actions. The Kyoto Protocol amendment, the muscle for implementing the climate change convention, works principally through carbon markets. It creates incentives for companies and countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without regulating where or how the emission reductions occur.

Sadly, the Kyoto Protocol explicitly forbids the carbon markets from conserving tropical forests. Some countries (notably Brazil, the largest emitter of carbon by deforestation) joined with some environmental groups to oppose using carbon financial incentives to save or rebuild tropical forests.

These groups were successful in arguing that helping tropical forests would detract from efforts to curb the world's addiction to coal, oil and gas. As a result, projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia that would otherwise save or plant trees, are withering on the vine.

Clearly, the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from both sources - the burning of fossil fuel and the burning of tropical forests.

A series of simple unilateral steps could break the G-8's climate change deadlock - and help trans-Atlantic relations. Here's how it would work. Although the Kyoto Protocol doesn't allow saving forests, it does allow planting trees to help take pressure off remaining forests. Kyoto Protocol-friendly countries like the EU members, Canada and Japan would agree to fund forest restoration programs, as is allowed by the protocol but stymied at the funding level.

To reciprocate, the United States would reinvigorate a proposal that President George W. Bush made in 2001. After rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, Bush said his administration would help fight climate change by saving tropical forests, but this plan has sadly languished.
It should be recharged and funding levels seriously increased.

The White House could also ask that the committee to resolve the House and the Senate versions of the energy bill give credits to companies that reduce greenhouse gases by conserving tropical forests. These two steps, which the United States could do outside the Kyoto Protocol, would be politically popular and would help America regain some credibility on climate change.

Such steps would allow the G-8 leaders to leave Scotland with real progress on the second largest source of global warming. And since the Kyoto Protocol ignores tropical deforestation, it would allow the Bush team to save face without engaging in the protocol it has rejected.

Better yet, this money would not be foreign assistance or charity. Instead, the money would come from private deals worked out between host governments, local communities, scientists and investors.

Best of all, the 2005 summit would be a sign of hope for one of our planet's most urgent ecological security problems. This would leave a legacy that Bush and other leaders could be proud of when they leave office.

(John O. Niles is the manager of the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance and was a co-editor of the textbook "Climate Change Policy: A Survey.")