REDD - Tackling Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Climate change remains a present and future threat to biodiversity. REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, aims to curb climate change by conserving the world's remaining forests.

REDD aim to ensure that measures to tackle climate change include accounting for the carbon sinks that forests and bogs provide. After lenghty dialogue, both the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol have made provisions to reduce emissions released from forest degradation and deforestation.

December 07 witnessed the unilateral agreement between the conference of the parties to strengthen agreements made at the fourteenth conference. UNEP and WCMC have now produced a paper that outlines opportunities for multiple benefits of forest protection, including increased watershed and coastal protection.

It seems likely that protection of native forests will offer greater resilience to the effects of climate change than new plantations, and this should be taken into consideration in decision-making.

Debate Rages on How Best to Manage Tropical Forests

At the UN climate conference in Bali in December last year, the international community accepted the need to build forest protection into the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. However, how forests will be protected was not decided and is now being hotly contested.

Advocates of the market-approach argue that including forestry credits in carbon-trading schemes is the only way to secure the future of rainforests: "In global markets, forests are worth more dead than alive...You have to look to markets to turn around what is in fact a market failure." The European Commission argues that including deforestation in carbon trading would result in the market becoming flooded, devaluing the system and instead wish to use some of the proceeds from carbon trading to create an international fund to tackle deforestation.

There is no dobut that a well-defined and focussed programme to tackle deforestation will have a marked effect on global emissions. Deforestation accounts for 5-6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide annually, compared with 2 gigatonnes in the entire European trading scheme.

See the original article in Nature