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May
15, 2007
BRAZIL DEMONSTRATING THAT REDUCING
TROPICAL DEFORESTATION IS KEY WIN-WIN
GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTION
Tropical
deforestation is the
source of nearly a fifth of annual, human-induced emissions of
heat-trapping
gases to the atmosphere. Recent studies by Woods Hole Research Center
scientists demonstrate that during years of severe drought, tropical
rainforest
fires can double emissions from tropical forests. Now, an international
team of
forest and climate researchers has found that halving deforestation
rates by
mid-century would account for 12 percent of total emissions reductions
needed
to keep concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere at safe
levels.
This work is profiled in a recent issue of Science.
A policy mechanism
is needed that
rewards those tropical nations that succeed in lowering their emissions
of
heat-trapping gases from deforestation and forest degradation. This is
a
particularly urgent need since most of these emissions are associated
with only
modest economic gains, but provoke high losses of biodiversity. Such a
policy
mechanism is now under discussion in the UN Framework Convention on
Climate
Change. The Compensated Reduction" of greenhouse gas emissions from
tropical forests (CR) would provide payments to those tropical nations
that
succeed in lowering their emissions from deforestation and tropical
degradation, beginning during the second compensation period of the
UNFCCC
(beginning 2013). This proposal has now been endorsed by the Coalition
for
Rainforest Nations, which currently represents 29 tropical countries
who
support the CR proposal, and which formally advanced the CR proposal
during the
Conference of the Parties in Montreal,
2005, and will be voted on by the UNFCCC delegation in Bali Conference
of the
Parties in December.
"More than any other
country,
Brazil
has demonstrated that
it is feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tropical
deforestation", says co-author Daniel Nepstad, Senior Scientist at the Woods
Hole Research Center.
He, along with colleague Marina Campos, showed that since the beginning
of
2004, Brazil
has created more than 20 million hectares of parks, extractive reserve,
and
national forests in the Amazon region, and many of these protected
areas are
located in the agricultural frontier. These protected areas, if fully
enforced,
will prevent one billion tons of carbon from being transferred to the
atmosphere through deforestation by the year 2015. Brazil's
deforestation rates have
been cut nearly in half in recent years through a combination of
government
intervention and economic trends.
"We are encouraging
the
Brazilian government to fully endorse the Compensated Reduction
proposal",
states Paulo Moutinho, Scientist and Coordinator of the Climate Change
Program
of the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), a
non-governmental
research institute in Brazil. CR would help Brazil
offset the costs of slowing
deforestation rates. In Brazil, the cost of reducing deforestation
emissions by
half will be less than $5 per ton of carbon dioxide, as estimated in an
unpublished
study of IPAM and the Woods Hole Research Center.
The CR proposal may
be far more
urgent than the Science paper would suggest, since tropical
deforestation rates
will probably increase in the coming years as worldwide demand for
biofuel and
grain pushes agriculture deeper into tropical forests.
"Slowing tropical
deforestation won’t, by itself, solve the climate problem,"
said Dr. Peter
Frumhoff, co-author and organizer of the study and Director of Science
and
Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But for many developing
countries, it is their largest source of emissions. Climate
policymakers have a
historic opportunity to help developing countries find economically
viable
alternatives to deforestation and participate in the global effort to
address
climate change."
##
Contact:
Elizabeth
Braun
Woods Hole
Research Center
508-540-9900
ebraun@whrc.org
This text derived from:
http://www.whrc.org/
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