Tag: Article Opinion

This story has been adapted from Rachael Petersen’s blog. You can view the original here.

31 January 2013 | Cacoal | Rondí´nia | Brazil | Here are three things you should never leave home without in the Amazon: water, insect repellent, sunscreen.

And if you’re Chief Almir Narayamoga of the Surui, make sure to remember your high-tech video recording sunglasses.

New field sites often require weeks of cultivating trust, understanding, and the relationships to yield interesting work. Which is why when I first arrived at the Associacao Metareilí¡ headquarters outside the city of Cacoal in the state of Rondí´nia, Brazil, clad in a long flowing skirt and Chaco sandals, I expected a calm day of office humdrum: researching, talking to my Surui colleagues, reading over their 50-year plan. But when Almir invited me to track down reported illegal logging in the territory, I couldn’t say no.

Hours and kilometers into the jungle, I realize: the Amazon itself is now my office. And I should never leave home unprepared to face it.

Things in the territory are tense. Loggers continue to lodge death threats against Almir, the leader of the indigenous Paiter Surui people, due to his efforts to protect the forest in his territory, La Sete de Setembro. As I write this, one of Almir’s ever-present personal bodyguards from the Brazilian Força Nacional sits to my left polishing his automatic weapon with a pink toothbrush.

How absurd, I thought to myself as we trekked together through the oppressive humidity of the Amazon, that preserving nature has become a matter of life or death, the source of animosity and aggression. The situation speaks to the specific importance of exploiting natural resources to the local economy as well as to the general human tendency to overvalue immediate gains and underestimate long-term costs.

“People think the forest will never end, like they think water will never end,” Almir says. “But one day, the forest could end. We need to have that vision.”

At a distance- from planes and satellites imaging-the Sete de Setembro territory looks like an island of trees amid a sea of historical deforestation. So for many local loggers, the Surui sit on a pot of gold to be exploited at all costs. But for Almir, the forest- of priceless importance to the Surui life and culture- can be protected by stimulating economic alternatives to logging. This vision’s supported by countless partners like USAID and Google and strengthened by the use of digital tools-has earned the Surui international attention. Their visionary 50-year life plan calls for an end to the unsustainable logging that serves as the historical financial lifeline in the territory and proposes economic alternatives such as commercialization of agricultural and artisanal goods and payment for ecosystem services. The Surui hope that others will pay them for preserving the forest in the form of carbon credits for avoided deforestation. This money will enter a locally administrated fund that will support an environmentally and socially-sustainable future in the territory.

It is a high-stakes game of indigenous peoples, governments, international NGOs and investors. It is a game that requires extensive monitoring of the forest to document illegal incursions that compromise this sustainable vision. Traditional knowledge of their territory must be writ digital through photographs and gmapping to render public forest conservation progress. So when the Metareilí¡ office received an anonymous tip last week that someone cut down trees in the territory, Almir and team had to conduct the due diligence that puts such incidents on the literal and figurative map.

Our trip from the Metareilí¡ office to the territory’s border lasted a grueling hour and a half. The Força Nacional truck shook as it passed over pocked dirt roads. A cocktail of antibiotics, antimalarial medication, and coffee stirred in my stomach; I was sure I would vomit. “Don’t do it don’t don’t do it,” I chanted to myself, acutely aware that such a sign of fragility could mark me as a woman incapable of tolerating Amazonian conditions. Surprisingly, I deep-breathed my way through the journey and we reached the village of chief Almir’s family, Lapetanha. After a short conversation, we were on our way again, off to search out the loggers.

We ran into trouble when our two trucks reached a bridge, or really, two deteriorating logs aligned with the wheels of the truck. Almir’s truck crossed first, but the front left wheel quickly fell between the logs. Using a cable mounted on the front of the Força Nacional truck, we towed the fallen truck from out between the logs. Deciding we could not cross, we-Almir, two guards, myself, and four other Surui-continued on foot.

Which is how I found myself ankle-deep in reddish clay mud last Friday with Chief Almir and other Paiter-Surui colleagues, hiking fifteen kilometers on the tails of illegal loggers. The sun beamed threats at my fair skin, made even more sensitive by a daily dose of antimalarials. The humidity rivaled a Houston summer. Almir joked about my sweat-soaked hair; others would later express surprise that a young American girl made it through the exhausting hike.

The path we traced through the territory was fresh, recently trampled by loggers. Two hours into the walk, we encounter freshly-cut logs, their shameless tan nakedness a startling interruption in the surrounding deep-green abyss. I waited behind talking with a colleague while others followed a small path to find a patch of stumps. Having found the evidence we sought, we returned to our abandoned trucks a few hours later, exhausted, having gone without food or water for hours. We stop in Almir’s aldea for water, chica, and bananas before making the long return to Cacoal.

The next evening, Almir invited me to his house for roasted wild boar. On the way, we also picked up Steve Zwick, an American journalist and the managing editor for Ecosystem Marketplace, who had arrived to work on his biography of Almir, to be published this year.

Steve asked if Almir video recorded our mission the previous day. “Yes,” he responded. But I was certain I saw no video cameras on our trek.

“Uh, he didn’t record anything in my presence,” I interjected.

“I recorded it all with my eyes, with my glasses,” Almir insisted. He must be joking, I thought, speaking metaphorically, or perhaps making light of his lapse.

But after dinner, he retrieved a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses from his living room. “I recorded everything with these,” he stated, indicating a small, unmistakable camera lens in the middle of the nose bridge. He had bought them during a trip to Switzerland, he confessed, aware they could aid in documenting the forest.

I launched into laughter. “You had no idea I was filming?” Almir asked me. “No!” I said, half afraid he caught embarrassing footage of my mud-covered huffing and puffing from the previous day. He modeled the sunglasses for us and began recording,joking that he was creating an informational video about Americans.

He removed a small memory card from the sunglasses and inserted it into his computer. The video from our trek-of surprisingly high quality- revealed the destruction of the forest we witnessed, including the roads, freshly cut wood, and stumps bespeaking invasion. Indeed, Almir had captured our jungle trek through his eyes, branded in memory but packaged in MegaBytes.

“This shows that indigenous peoples are doing their job,” Steve admired, “they’re doing the work.”

Almir has witnessed tremendous turmoil within his tribe, which was first contacted in 1969. He now hopes to witness a brighter future- one in which his peoples financial riches do not depend on depleting their remaining natural riches. And with the help of technology, the Surui will not witness this change alone. Their traditional knowledge and surveillance of their lands can be transmitted to the world via videos and maps. But Steve is right: it is not the technology or fancy camera-sunglasses that do the work in the territory, it is the people. And despite being the subject of flashy headlines ( Tribe saves the forest using internet), the Surui have a lot of work ahead of them. I certainly have the sunburn, insect bites, and muscle aches to prove it.

20 December 2012 | REDD has the potential to slow climate change and improve the livelihoods of indigenous people around the world, but only if projects follow recognized procedures for measuring carbon and respecting the rights of indigenous people, particularly the rights to their traditional territories and customary practices.

Legitimate projects do both – and with good reason. If they didn’t, their credits would never be recognized under any existing carbon standard.

Illegitimate “projects”, however, do neither – and for reasons that are not always clear. Some appear to be pretending to develop REDD projects so they can dupe investors into paying high prices for hot air, while others are simply aggressive marketing firms with slick web sites and little understanding of REDD.

To date, only a handful of illegitimate projects have come to light, compared to several legitimate ones. Even if fake projects never generate a credit, however, they can sabotage legitimate credits by tarnishing the reputation of REDD among a public that is hard-pressed to understand the complexities of carbon offsetting in general – let alone of projects that generate credits by saving endangered rainforest.

The carbon world should, therefore, welcome the Brazilian Attorney General Office’s decision to file suit against Celestial Green Ventures LLC, an Irish company that signed a questionable deal with the Awo Xo Hwara indigenous community to develop REDD projects. The lawsuit, according to Reuters, seeks to have that deal declared null and void — as it should if it turns out that Celestial Green didn’t follow the rules of free, prior, and informed consent that binds all REDD projects.

Federal attorney Oberdan Rabelo de Santana characterized the Celestial Green deal as “a new, dangerous and informal carbon credits market, fully speculative, lacking previously stipulated rules,” according to Reuters.

This comes just two months after a Peruvian court issued an arrest warrant for accused fraudster David Nilsson, who also engaged in questionable practices in the name of REDD.

It will be up to the courts to decide whether Celestial Green violated the law, and up to the market to decide if the company is presenting a viable business model that delivers real reductions. Peruvian courts, meanwhile, will determine whether Nilsson is the bad actor that Peruvian authorities believe him to be. Whatever the outcome of these two cases, it’s clear that both deserve the bright light of public scrutiny, and in an arena that is legitimate and fair.

The REDD community should, therefore, welcome and fully engage investigations into alleged bad actors while at the same time working hard to make sure the courts and the public understand the nuances of REDD. After all, legitimate REDD projects and all those who may benefit from them, including local communities, may be their biggest victims of projects done poorly.

Additional resources

COP 18 may have laid the groundwork for further discussions about an integrated approach to landscapes that would connect the different sectors, like forests and agriculture, for the well-being of both people and the planet, but the way forward is hardly clear.

This article was originally published on the CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) website. Click here to read the original.

Note: The views are those of CIFOR and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

13 December 2012 | Forests have been front-and-centre at climate negotiations for several years. This year, at the COP18 meeting in Doha, Qatar, Forest Day 6 raised their profile even further, by focusing on the broader role of forests in landscapes as a whole and by connecting with the agriculture sector to deliver a more integrated approach to landscapes at COP19 next year.

From a scientific perspective, Forest Day 6 thus offered an excellent opportunity to explore the role of landscapes in the functioning of the Earth System, and to discuss why resilient, well-functioning landscapes are so important, not just for the global environment, but also for livelihoods and a whole range of other benefits.

From Carbon to Ecosystem Services

The importance of forests themselves was certainly not forgotten in the transition to landscapes as a major theme at Forest Day 6, as forested landscapes remain one of the most critical in providing ecosystem services to support human societies and in contributing to the functioning of the Earth System as a whole.

Forests obviously supply products like timber and paper that have long been valued by human societies, and more recently they have become valuable – and increasingly commoditised – for their ability to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

But a landscape approach reminds us of many other ecosystem services that forests provide. In addition to their role in the carbon cycle, forests are important for other element cycles, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, by storing, modifying and transporting these substances through landscapes.

Much of the water that we need for drinking and cleaning, manufacturing and irrigation comes from forested catchments, which play a crucial role in natural water purification. In fact, the city of New York opted to pay landowners in their upstate catchments for improved management of their landscapes instead of building an expensive water treatment plant. The result was cheaper, cleaner drinking water for New York City residents as well as a new income stream and more resilient landscapes for upstate inhabitants.

Forests have long been a source of inspiration and recreation for many people around the world, and many societies have protected and maintained this ecosystem service in a number of ways, from national parks to sacred forests.

Planetary Boundaries

Recently the global change research community has proposed the concept of “planetary boundaries” as a way to recognize the intrinsic characteristics of the Earth System that define a safe operating space for humanity. In other words, there are hard-wired thresholds in many global environmental processes that, if transgressed, would cause changes damaging to human well-being.

The research identified nine such planetary boundaries, with climate change being the most well-known of them. But land system change is also one of the nine, with the conversion of forests to cropland being perhaps the most prominent land system change of concern. Thus, the forests-agriculture connection pops up also in Earth System science.

The planetary boundaries are sometimes criticized as another attempt by wealthy countries to retard the further development of less developing countries – that is, observing environmental limits will put a cap on development and keep developing countries in poverty.

A careful analysis of the planetary boundaries concept and social equity concerns shows that this presumed conflict is not so. It is much more common that respecting planetary boundaries and meeting development and social equity imperatives do not need to be traded off; in fact, they are synergistic. Here are a few examples:

• The redistribution of phosphorus, an essential component of fertilizers, from areas where it is in excess (and transgressing the planetary boundary) to areas where it is scarce would both help humanity to observe the planetary boundary while contributing to the reduction of food insecurity through enhanced production.
• Reducing air pollution over South Asia from wood burning for cooking and heating by the transfer of technologies to reduce aerosol emissions would also improve health and lead to new industries and development in the region.
• If the globalized economy paid fully for biodiversity conservation as an essential global ecosystem service, it would generate livelihoods, income streams and new industries built around tourism and conservation in developing countries, where most of the biodiverse regions are found. And many of these regions are primarily forested landscapes.

In short, meeting global environmental objectives through a framework like the planetary boundaries could actually work towards improving livelihoods at local and regional levels, not work against them.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The SDGs, a new challenge arising from the Rio+20 Conference, aim to provide a broad global framework, encompassing the developing and wealthy countries alike, that will integrate development with environmental concerns at the global level.

The three pillars of sustainability – economy, society, environment – are often invoked as the appropriate framework within which to develop SDGs, with the implicit assumption that these three pillars can be traded off against one another.

A more appropriate framework, however, does not treat these three components of sustainability as an equally weighted set of three pillars that can be traded off, but rather as a nested hierarchy. Environment is the all-encompassing, most important component as without a well-functioning environment at the global level, humanity cannot thrive. To be convinced that this is so, instead of “environment”, think “life support system”.

Within a well-functioning environment, societies can develop and thrive, building effective institutions and governance systems. Only within such well-functioning societies can robust and resilient economies develop.

The planetary boundaries framework can offer a simple but powerful approach to the environmental (life support system) component of the SDGs. But nine boundaries are perhaps too many if a succinct set of SDGs, also encompassing and enhancing the MDGs, are desired.

Here we propose that two of the planetary boundaries – climate and biodiversity – may provide a minimum set that, if implemented, many entrain many of the other boundaries with them.

The climate system reflects the fundamental energy balance at the Earth’s surface. A rapidly changing climate, with much less predictability, more extreme weather events, and possible abrupt changes to major climatic features, will make sustainability virtually impossible to achieve, and, in a worst case scenario, could lead to a collapse of contemporary civilization.

Biodiversity, with all of the genetic richness embodied in it, reflects the “control panel” that ultimately orchestrates all of the biological processes that deliver the rich array of ecosystem services on which humanity depends. Sufficient loss of biodiversity will erode this capability, undermining the provision of ecosystem services.

Synergies and Stewardship

In terms of sustainability, it’s clear from an analysis of the challenges ahead at local, national and global levels that we need to change our approach in two important ways. Using landscapes an organizing concept for land systems reinforces this imperative.

First, we need to look for synergies in simultaneously meeting social, environmental and economic goals, and, so far as possible, avoid trade-offs with winner and losers.

Second, we need to abandon viewing landscapes, and the Earth as a whole, as a set of resources to be “used” or “developed”, and instead become active stewards of living landscapes and a living planet so that we can maintain a well-functioning life support system and the many services that it provides for our well-being.

Additional resources

COP 18 may have laid the groundwork for further discussions about an integrated approach to landscapes that would connect the different sectors, like forests and agriculture, for the well-being of both people and the planet, but the way forward is hardly clear.

This article was originally published on the CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) website. Click here to read the original.

Note: The views are those of CIFOR and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

13 December 2012 | Forests have been front-and-centre at climate negotiations for several years. This year, at the COP18 meeting in Doha, Qatar, Forest Day 6 raised their profile even further, by focusing on the broader role of forests in landscapes as a whole and by connecting with the agriculture sector to deliver a more integrated approach to landscapes at COP19 next year.

From a scientific perspective, Forest Day 6 thus offered an excellent opportunity to explore the role of landscapes in the functioning of the Earth System, and to discuss why resilient, well-functioning landscapes are so important, not just for the global environment, but also for livelihoods and a whole range of other benefits.

From Carbon to Ecosystem Services

The importance of forests themselves was certainly not forgotten in the transition to landscapes as a major theme at Forest Day 6, as forested landscapes remain one of the most critical in providing ecosystem services to support human societies and in contributing to the functioning of the Earth System as a whole.

Forests obviously supply products like timber and paper that have long been valued by human societies, and more recently they have become valuable – and increasingly commoditised – for their ability to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

But a landscape approach reminds us of many other ecosystem services that forests provide. In addition to their role in the carbon cycle, forests are important for other element cycles, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, by storing, modifying and transporting these substances through landscapes.

Much of the water that we need for drinking and cleaning, manufacturing and irrigation comes from forested catchments, which play a crucial role in natural water purification. In fact, the city of New York opted to pay landowners in their upstate catchments for improved management of their landscapes instead of building an expensive water treatment plant. The result was cheaper, cleaner drinking water for New York City residents as well as a new income stream and more resilient landscapes for upstate inhabitants.

Forests have long been a source of inspiration and recreation for many people around the world, and many societies have protected and maintained this ecosystem service in a number of ways, from national parks to sacred forests.

Planetary Boundaries

Recently the global change research community has proposed the concept of “planetary boundaries” as a way to recognize the intrinsic characteristics of the Earth System that define a safe operating space for humanity. In other words, there are hard-wired thresholds in many global environmental processes that, if transgressed, would cause changes damaging to human well-being.

The research identified nine such planetary boundaries, with climate change being the most well-known of them. But land system change is also one of the nine, with the conversion of forests to cropland being perhaps the most prominent land system change of concern. Thus, the forests-agriculture connection pops up also in Earth System science.

The planetary boundaries are sometimes criticized as another attempt by wealthy countries to retard the further development of less developing countries – that is, observing environmental limits will put a cap on development and keep developing countries in poverty.

A careful analysis of the planetary boundaries concept and social equity concerns shows that this presumed conflict is not so. It is much more common that respecting planetary boundaries and meeting development and social equity imperatives do not need to be traded off; in fact, they are synergistic. Here are a few examples:

• The redistribution of phosphorus, an essential component of fertilizers, from areas where it is in excess (and transgressing the planetary boundary) to areas where it is scarce would both help humanity to observe the planetary boundary while contributing to the reduction of food insecurity through enhanced production.
• Reducing air pollution over South Asia from wood burning for cooking and heating by the transfer of technologies to reduce aerosol emissions would also improve health and lead to new industries and development in the region.
• If the globalized economy paid fully for biodiversity conservation as an essential global ecosystem service, it would generate livelihoods, income streams and new industries built around tourism and conservation in developing countries, where most of the biodiverse regions are found. And many of these regions are primarily forested landscapes.

In short, meeting global environmental objectives through a framework like the planetary boundaries could actually work towards improving livelihoods at local and regional levels, not work against them.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The SDGs, a new challenge arising from the Rio+20 Conference, aim to provide a broad global framework, encompassing the developing and wealthy countries alike, that will integrate development with environmental concerns at the global level.

The three pillars of sustainability – economy, society, environment – are often invoked as the appropriate framework within which to develop SDGs, with the implicit assumption that these three pillars can be traded off against one another.

A more appropriate framework, however, does not treat these three components of sustainability as an equally weighted set of three pillars that can be traded off, but rather as a nested hierarchy. Environment is the all-encompassing, most important component as without a well-functioning environment at the global level, humanity cannot thrive. To be convinced that this is so, instead of “environment”, think “life support system”.

Within a well-functioning environment, societies can develop and thrive, building effective institutions and governance systems. Only within such well-functioning societies can robust and resilient economies develop.

The planetary boundaries framework can offer a simple but powerful approach to the environmental (life support system) component of the SDGs. But nine boundaries are perhaps too many if a succinct set of SDGs, also encompassing and enhancing the MDGs, are desired.

Here we propose that two of the planetary boundaries – climate and biodiversity – may provide a minimum set that, if implemented, many entrain many of the other boundaries with them.

The climate system reflects the fundamental energy balance at the Earth’s surface. A rapidly changing climate, with much less predictability, more extreme weather events, and possible abrupt changes to major climatic features, will make sustainability virtually impossible to achieve, and, in a worst case scenario, could lead to a collapse of contemporary civilization.

Biodiversity, with all of the genetic richness embodied in it, reflects the “control panel” that ultimately orchestrates all of the biological processes that deliver the rich array of ecosystem services on which humanity depends. Sufficient loss of biodiversity will erode this capability, undermining the provision of ecosystem services.

Synergies and Stewardship

In terms of sustainability, it’s clear from an analysis of the challenges ahead at local, national and global levels that we need to change our approach in two important ways. Using landscapes an organizing concept for land systems reinforces this imperative.

First, we need to look for synergies in simultaneously meeting social, environmental and economic goals, and, so far as possible, avoid trade-offs with winner and losers.

Second, we need to abandon viewing landscapes, and the Earth as a whole, as a set of resources to be “used” or “developed”, and instead become active stewards of living landscapes and a living planet so that we can maintain a well-functioning life support system and the many services that it provides for our well-being.

Additional resources

The Amazon Working Group, which, represents roughly 600 social movement organizations across the Amazon Basin, has made a rare public denunciation of a recent anti-REDD campaign underway in California. The small group of NGOs who launched that campaign, the coalition says, simply haven’t done their homework.

19 November 2012 |   A recent news report stated that indigenous peoples and Californian environmentalists meeting in San Francisco have spoken out against the possible use of REDD+ credits in the carbon market that is being developed in that state. According to the article, the complaint, with a strong ideological bias, presented the fear that the commercialization of these credits would be equivalent to the sale of the forest peoples’ natural resources, which is not true.

The Amazon Working Group (Grupo de Trabalho Amazí´nico, GTA) shares the concerns raised about the REDD+ mechanism and recognizes the challenges and risks that carbon markets can bring and is committed to the fight to guarantee the rights of forest peoples and communities, above all in regard to land rights and the use and access to forest resources.

To guarantee these rights, GTA participates in various national and international forums, contributing to the dialogue between the different stakeholders and demanding the inclusion of social and environmental safeguards which guarantee and protect the rights of forests peoples.
 

In the interest of forest peoples

However, GTA also recognizes that REDD+ can bring new opportunities and benefits for traditional peoples and populations, as well as forest conservation, ensuring income and keeping the forest standing.

One example of this is how the Suruí­ people in Rondí´nia have organized themselves to benefit from REDD+ resources in ways they have chosen, yet transparently, with monitoring by the National Indian Foundation (Funai).   With the opportunities that have opened to them, the Surui are planning the future of their community for years to come.

The Suruí­ REDD+ Project is directly linked to the 50 year integrated management plan developed by the Suruí­, whose territory extends over 248,000 hectares in the Brazilian Amazon.   To learn the details of the Surui Carbon Project, visit the REDD Observatory.

In Acre, the example comes from the State Government, which created the State System of Incentives for Ecosystem Services (SISA), in which the rights of indigenous peoples were not forgotten.   Created in 2010, SISA was openly debated for nine months, including specific consultations with indigenous leaders and local organizations.
 
Subsequently, the State Commission for Validation and Monitoring of SISA established the Working Group called Indigenous Working Group, with the mission to establish a dialogue between this system, indigenous communities and civil society.
 
Furthermore, during the public consultation process, workshops with representatives of 22 indigenous territories in Acre were held, with participation from GTA, COIAB, FUNAI, Comissí£o Prí³-índio, and other organizations.
 
Thus, the SISA has sought to guarantee the rights of indigenous and local communities, in line with the discussion on the topic within Brazil and with international agreements signed by the federal government.
 
The GTA network believes, first of all, that questions about REDD and the carbon market should not be an obstruction to the social development of traditional communities, but a means to build more just social policies aiming to benefit forest peoples.

Note: The views are those of the Amazon Working Group and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

Legitimate carbon projects have long been wrongfully tarnished by the actions of bad players acting outside the recognized carbon community. Now Reuters reports that the Brazilian government is taking action against one alleged “cowboy” – a move that should be embraced by everyone trying to do REDD right.

20 December 2012 | REDD has the potential to slow climate change and improve the livelihoods of indigenous people around the world, but only if projects follow recognized procedures for measuring carbon and respecting the rights of indigenous people, particularly the rights to their traditional territories and customary practices.

Legitimate projects do both – and with good reason. If they didn’t, their credits would never be recognized under any existing carbon standard.

Illegitimate “projects”, however, do neither – and for reasons that are not always clear. Some appear to be pretending to develop REDD projects so they can dupe investors into paying high prices for hot air, while others are simply aggressive marketing firms with slick web sites and little understanding of REDD.

To date, only a handful of illegitimate projects have come to light, compared to several legitimate ones. Even if fake projects never generate a credit, however, they can sabotage legitimate credits by tarnishing the reputation of REDD among a public that is hard-pressed to understand the complexities of carbon offsetting in general – let alone of projects that generate credits by saving endangered rainforest.

The carbon world should, therefore, welcome the Brazilian Attorney General Office’s decision to file suit against Celestial Green Ventures LLC, an Irish company that signed a questionable deal with the Awo Xo Hwara indigenous community to develop REDD projects. The lawsuit, according to Reuters, seeks to have that deal declared null and void — as it should if it turns out that Celestial Green didn’t follow the rules of free, prior, and informed consent that binds all REDD projects.

Federal attorney Oberdan Rabelo de Santana characterized the Celestial Green deal as “a new, dangerous and informal carbon credits market, fully speculative, lacking previously stipulated rules,” according to Reuters.

This comes just two months after a Peruvian court issued an arrest warrant for accused fraudster David Nilsson, who also engaged in questionable practices in the name of REDD.

It will be up to the courts to decide whether Celestial Green violated the law, and up to the market to decide if the company is presenting a viable business model that delivers real reductions. Peruvian courts, meanwhile, will determine whether Nilsson is the bad actor that Peruvian authorities believe him to be. Whatever the outcome of these two cases, it’s clear that both deserve the bright light of public scrutiny, and in an arena that is legitimate and fair.

The REDD community should, therefore, welcome and fully engage investigations into alleged bad actors while at the same time working hard to make sure the courts and the public understand the nuances of REDD. After all, legitimate REDD projects and all those who may benefit from them, including local communities, may be their biggest victims of projects done poorly.

Additional resources

More and more indigenous groups are contemplating the use of REDD credits to combat deforestation, but a small coalition of NGOs have headed to California this week to argue for leaving the mechanism out of the state’s new carbon-reduction program.   Steve Schwartzman of EDF says the board needs a weigh all sides before making its decison.

This article was originally published on the Environmental Defense Fund’s website. Click here to read the original.

17 October 2012 | This week, some U.S. NGOs are bringing a group of indigenous people from South America to talk with California policy makers about their opposition to REDD+, the idea that countries, states and communities that reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation should be eligible for compensation through carbon markets and public funds.

It’s good for policy makers to hear this perspective, but it’s critically important for these policy makers to hear the great diversity of indigenous voices on the REDD+ issue.

Having worked with indigenous peoples and minorities in the Amazon for over 20 years, in particular on helping indigenous peoples win the struggle for their lands, I’m glad that EDF actively supports indigenous and minority participation in international policy processes, whether or not given organizations or individuals agree with us.

Some NGOs have argued that REDD+ threatens indigenous land rights, that governments and NGOs are inducing indigenous communities to sign carbon contracts, that REDD+ will only benefit rich industrial polluters.

Earlier this year in the Amazon state of Acre, the Catholic Church missionary/indigenous rights organization, CIMI, made these arguments in an affidavit it sent to the Federal Prosecutors’ office, asking for the prosecutor to take legal action against the state System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA), under which Acre is formulating its REDD+ program.

Most of Acre’s indigenous peoples, however, do not agree with CIMI, as evidenced by this letter that leaders of the indigenous movement in the state sent to CIMI in response.

Indigenous leaders were dismayed to hear CIMI claimed that they were being manipulated into accepting carbon projects by the government and international NGOs, and pointed out that no one was forcing the indigenous organizations to do anything.

To the contrary, they noted that they are in the process of informing themselves and their communities so they can decide whether they want to participate in REDD+. The letter makes an interesting contrast between the pros and cons:

“Both those in favor of and those against REDD must be serious and ethical in conveying correct information and establishing continued dialogue. Those in favor of REDD should not promote it as something that can resolve all the problems of our communities; those against it should not terrorize our peoples using western capitalism as a backdrop and creating a climate of distrust and fear based in suppositions and untruths.”

Beyond the borders of Acre, the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon basin (COICA) comprises the Amazon regional indigenous organizations of the nine Amazon nations. COICA has participated in the international climate negotiations since 2008.

The indigenous peoples’ caucus (including COICA) made this statement to the UNFCCC conference in Durban this year, covering a wide variety of issues including REDD+.

There are some 385 indigenous peoples, speaking about 300 languages, living in 2,344 territories that cover about 2.1 million km² – an area four times the size of California – in the Amazon, as well as some 71 isolated groups. These peoples have maintained their distinct cultures and identities for thousands of years in the face of enormous, often violent, pressures – their difference unites them. Even the level of awareness of the idea of REDD+ varies enormously amongst them.

The NGOs and indigenous peoples visiting California this week offer one set of perspectives on REDD+, but their views should be considered in the context of the spectrum of indigenous organizations currently engaged on these issues, many of whom view REDD+ quite differently.

The views are those of the CONTRIBUTOR and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

The REDD financing mechanism aims to leverage private-sector funding for the conservation and sustainable management of tropical rainforests, but it won’t achieve meaningful scale unless it becomes simpler and more reliable.   Technological advancements in remote sensing and geographic information systems are now advanced enough to help.

This article has been adapted from the In Focus report Engaging Private Sector Finance for REDD+, which was published by CINCS LLC and is available for download here.

10 October 2012 | Governments around the world have committed to reducing the 17 % of greenhouse gas emissions which arise from land use change and forestry. The result so far has been the creation of the REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) financing mechanism, which is designed to funnel private-sector money to projects that save endangered rainforests.

But the private sector has been slow to follow suit. In the 2012 State of Voluntary Carbon Markets report, for example, Ecosystem Marketplace identified just $87 million per year in transacted REDD projects in 2010 and 2011 – and not all of that came from private-sector buyers.

This pales in comparison to the $4.5 billion that governments have pledged for 2010 through the end of this year – an average of roughly $1.5 billion per year.

More importantly, it’s nowhere near the $17 to $28 billion per year that many economists say is needed if we’re to cut deforestation rates in half by the year 2030.

Complexity and Risk

This notable lack of private capital is due to the complexity and heterogeneity of forest carbon offsets, creating both supply side and demand side problems and hindering the development of a liquid, standardized market. Private investors need clarity on the probabilities of potential payoffs and an established return on investment before putting their capital at risk. In order for this to take place, there must develop much greater standardization surrounding the definition of a forest carbon offset, as well as accounting principles to handle this novel asset class. Though much effort has gone into shaping REDD+ to date, many are pessimistic due to the current disparity among different project financial structures and valuations, which remain opaque and inefficient.

We believe that the main factor hampering such development is the opaque nature of most projects developed to-date. If the market can move towards a consistent process that determines a value for forest carbon by aggregating projects and crediting data into a unified system, this can be used to cross-reference future projects at each phase of the project cycle.

Such a system needs to be geo-referenced and capable of tracking and monitoring land use change at different scales, as well as estimating and refining carbon stock estimates. In addition it must be open, transparent, auditable and accessible to all project participants, validators and governments. It should be a flexible framework at first so it can include diverse activities, crediting standards and accounting regimes, but the end goal should be the unification of existing accounting efforts into a more standardized process.

The Technological Solution

At the heart of land use carbon offsets is land itself; this necessitates using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to track ownership and all project activities in detail. GIS can support the harmonization of baselines and leakage accounting across regions as it is able to stack data in easily-comparable layers for a given geographic area.

For a centrally-used GIS where similar information is needed by adjacent projects or activities, this data can often be adapted and re-used, making it more economical. Centering the definition of a credit around the land from which it derives also solves a host of other problems. By providing a common platform to contrast baselines and leakage scenarios with potential regional and national RELs as they develop, it can facilitate collaboration on the decisions necessary to harmonize these standards.

Further, GIS can compare different carbon accounting approaches and their implications on credit generation. This could be accomplished both by incorporating broad global data sets such as Wood’s Hole’s Global Pan-Tropic Biomass data, and by incorporating existing “best practice”, such as the new LEAF Standard Operating Procedure for Measuring Terrestrial Carbon. GIS can be used to clarify land tenure rights by providing a central repository for ownership data and a public forum for dispute settlement, though the impetus for this will inevitably fall on local policy makers. Finally, linking credits to explicit parcels of land can prevent possible emission double-counting.

If forest carbon credits will eventually be transacted in a similar way to other commodities, it is necessary to move towards a central database to account for the different valuations of different types of carbon. This does not mean that there can only be one type of credit in an end-game scenario — on the contrary, all that is required is that each different type of credit has a series of stringent standards applied to its production.

These could include the different standards as they exist now (VCS, ACR, CAR, Gold Standard, CDM), as well as additional certifications (for example CCBA and FSC) to capture non-carbon characteristics of the project. In addition such a platform needs to be able to distinguish among credits of different vintage, and must be linked back to the originating project, to account for reversals or invalidation of credits. Developing a framework capable of accounting for all the different standards will help market participants and regulators narrow in on common facets shared by these standards and will hence facilitate the development of linkages between standards.

In addition to providing a central clearinghouse for data on land use, carbon stocks, and project crediting, such a platform can also be immensely helpful to investors by providing data on comparables for investment due diligence, and providing more transparency regarding a typical project cycle, including timing of costs and revenues.

The main effect of this would be to radically democratize the REDD market from its current state, where consultants dominate due to the technical, opaque and bespoke nature of registering a project. If a large database of validated projects exists, potential investors, landowners and policy makers can quickly evaluate the feasibility of developing such a project based on analyzing comparables. Further, it would quickly follow from aggregating project data and modeling into a central location that many aspects of project development could be standardized to a great degree. While one baseline methodology may not be suitable globally due to political considerations, such a system could incorporate a narrow range of different baseline models and the data that drive them, vastly reducing the cost of project validation.

Another advantage of such a project database would be to facilitate the development of an insurance market for projects, since the most important requirements of insurance instruments are good data on comparable projects and a large and diversified project pool. The ultimate result of both of these developments would be to reduce administrative and consultative expenses and better channel investment to the activities actually taking place on the ground.

The political and regulatory aspects that are hampering demand for forest carbon credits can only be solved by governments taking decisive and coordinated action. In the meantime, the market must bootstrap using limited funding from CSR buyers and government grant programs to focus in upon a series of best practices learned from developing pilot projects. The construction of a centralized and open technology framework can facilitate the development of such best practice through knowledge sharing, and will start to standardize the financing of such projects. Only when a sufficient pool of past experiences are collected and collated in a comparable way will investors gain confidence in the market, and will standards and regulatory bodies be able to narrow in on a successful structure for the optimum mechanism for REDD+.

Additional resources

This is a response from Greenpeace to Dr. Daniel Nepstad’s critique of Greenpeace’s report, Outsourcing Hot Air, that criticized a carbon finance program initiated by California and involving other subnational entities. Read Dr. Nepstad’s critique here.              

2 October 2012   | Greenpeace is dedicated to ending deforestation and preventing catastrophic climate change. We are often recognized for putting our lives and freedoms on the line to accomplish these goals. In the U.S. alone, Greenpeace is campaigning to save ancient forests, speaking out against the coal industry; mobilizing millions to save the arctic from new oil drilling; and pushing key industries to commit to renewable energy. We are willing to forgo corporate and government funding to do our work, believing that speaking truth to power is only possible if we maintain financial independence. This is particularly true for issues like REDD, which are laden with conflicts of interest due to the large amounts of potential money involved and the long-standing opposition of large emitters to science-based emissions reductions.

Greenpeace has been a strong and vocal advocate for credible REDD deals that would deliver national-level results while benefitting the people on the ground responsible for protecting the forests. At the same time, we have publicly rejected false solutions to REDD, such as the GCF’s push to include subnational forest offsets in California’s carbon market.

The commentary by Dr. Nepstad criticizes our report, but fails to point out that the subnational REDD offsets the GCF advocates for would by definition, result in no additional climate mitigation since they would merely allow industrial emitters to continue polluting in California. And that is the best case scenario. Numerous independent examinations of subnational REDD offset projects (by Greenpeace and others) have shown them to be inefficient and ineffective due to the inherent problems of:

•   leakage (where drivers of deforestation merely shift from one part of the country to another),
•   non-additionality (where finance is provided to protect an area of rainforest that would have been protected anyway)
•   impermanence (areas being subsequently destroyed by fires, infestations or even climate-related impacts).

Therefore subnational REDD offsets could make the climate crisis even worse by allowing industries to continue to pollute without providing real emission reductions in exchange.

For these reasons, the UNFCCC Cancun Agreement on REDD strictly limited subnational REDD activities to “interim” measures and required that all results-based activities occur only within the confines of national monitoring programs. While Dr. Nepstad argues that REDD offsets in California could occur at the jurisdictional level, it is not clear that will be the case, nor is it clear how the problems noted above would be resolved at the jurisdictional level, or how it is consistent with the Cancun Agreement. Indeed, the Climate Action Reserve’s Draft Mexico Forest Protocol for California would essentially allow for small scale project-based REDD offsets (although it has apparently been momentarily put on hold).

Dr. Nepstad’s remark that this might be years from implementation misses the point. Even if the program were years from implementation this would not solve the inherent problems outlined in the report. Discussions about “proof of concept” and “learning by doing” are fine if a program is still in a research phase, but promoting offsets that would allow companies in California to continue to impact the health and environment of local communities in the absence of significant demonstrated success seems problematic.

The commentators suggest that Greenpeace “misunderstands” the GCF’s work and role, which is about much more than subnational REDD offsets. In our report, we applaud the GCF’s abilities to facilitate experience sharing and learning processes between states and provinces and encourage the GCF “to play an important role in convening and advising subnational governments essential to the effort to halt deforestation.” At the same time it needs to be acknowledged that according to its own website, three of the five reasons ‘Why the GCF Matters” relate to the creation of subnational offset credits for sale in compliance markets.

Relying on subnational offset markets to provide even partial funding for REDD would be at best a distraction, and at worst counterproductive. Research from Stanford University and elsewhere shows that subnational offset projects can do more harm than good by creating a disincentive to national level success and real sustainable development. Furthermore, the push to include REDD in the carbon markets appears to be misdirecting significant existing funding to carbon-focused readiness efforts that are far less likely to succeed than people-centered policies such as the clarification of land tenure, participatory land use planning processes, and independent national monitoring systems. For these reasons, The Munden Project and other independent experts have argued that REDD is structurally unfit for inclusion in compliance markets.

Dr. Nepstad correctly points out that emissions reduction from REDD could provide significant reductions in the near term. That is why Greenpeace and others have campaigned for new and additional sources of financing for REDD and continue to advocate for substantial forest-specific funding to be made available under the global Green Climate Fund and elsewhere. We would also welcome the opportunity to collaboratively pursue non-offset incentives for progressive States and Governors who promote people-centered forest protection programs.

“Outsourcing Hot Air” voices justified concerns with the rush to include subnational REDD offsets into a compliance market, largely to work within – rather than change – a political discourse that has been dominated by the interests of large polluters. Greenpeace is not willing to quietly acquiesce to those interests, knowing full well that catastrophic climate change itself poses an existential threat to the tropical forests so many of us, including Dr. Nepstad, want so badly to protect. As we made clear in our report, Greenpeace would welcome a GCF that eschews false solutions and uses its influence to foster much needed dialogue and action among subnational entities to pursue real solutions to climate change and deforestation.

Roman Paul Czebiniak is Greenpeace Senior Policy Advisor on Climate and Forests.

Please see our Reprint Guidelines for details on republishing our articles.

Additional resources

More and more indigenous groups are contemplating the use of REDD credits to combat deforestation, but a small coalition of NGOs have headed to California this week to argue for leaving the mechanism out of the state’s new carbon-reduction program.   Steve Schwartzman of EDF says the board needs a weigh all sides before making its decison.

This article was originally published on the Environmental Defense Fund’s website. Click here to read the original.

17 October 2012 | This week, some U.S. NGOs are bringing a group of indigenous people from South America to talk with California policy makers about their opposition to REDD+, the idea that countries, states and communities that reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation should be eligible for compensation through carbon markets and public funds.

It’s good for policy makers to hear this perspective, but it’s critically important for these policy makers to hear the great diversity of indigenous voices on the REDD+ issue.

Having worked with indigenous peoples and minorities in the Amazon for over 20 years, in particular on helping indigenous peoples win the struggle for their lands, I’m glad that EDF actively supports indigenous and minority participation in international policy processes, whether or not given organizations or individuals agree with us.

Some NGOs have argued that REDD+ threatens indigenous land rights, that governments and NGOs are inducing indigenous communities to sign carbon contracts, that REDD+ will only benefit rich industrial polluters.

Earlier this year in the Amazon state of Acre, the Catholic Church missionary/indigenous rights organization, CIMI, made these arguments in an affidavit it sent to the Federal Prosecutors’ office, asking for the prosecutor to take legal action against the state System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA), under which Acre is formulating its REDD+ program.

Most of Acre’s indigenous peoples, however, do not agree with CIMI, as evidenced by this letter that leaders of the indigenous movement in the state sent to CIMI in response.

Indigenous leaders were dismayed to hear CIMI claimed that they were being manipulated into accepting carbon projects by the government and international NGOs, and pointed out that no one was forcing the indigenous organizations to do anything.

To the contrary, they noted that they are in the process of informing themselves and their communities so they can decide whether they want to participate in REDD+. The letter makes an interesting contrast between the pros and cons:

“Both those in favor of and those against REDD must be serious and ethical in conveying correct information and establishing continued dialogue. Those in favor of REDD should not promote it as something that can resolve all the problems of our communities; those against it should not terrorize our peoples using western capitalism as a backdrop and creating a climate of distrust and fear based in suppositions and untruths.”

Beyond the borders of Acre, the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon basin (COICA) comprises the Amazon regional indigenous organizations of the nine Amazon nations. COICA has participated in the international climate negotiations since 2008.

The indigenous peoples’ caucus (including COICA) made this statement to the UNFCCC conference in Durban this year, covering a wide variety of issues including REDD+.

There are some 385 indigenous peoples, speaking about 300 languages, living in 2,344 territories that cover about 2.1 million km² – an area four times the size of California – in the Amazon, as well as some 71 isolated groups. These peoples have maintained their distinct cultures and identities for thousands of years in the face of enormous, often violent, pressures – their difference unites them. Even the level of awareness of the idea of REDD+ varies enormously amongst them.

The NGOs and indigenous peoples visiting California this week offer one set of perspectives on REDD+, but their views should be considered in the context of the spectrum of indigenous organizations currently engaged on these issues, many of whom view REDD+ quite differently.

The views are those of the CONTRIBUTOR and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

The REDD financing mechanism aims to leverage private-sector funding for the conservation and sustainable management of tropical rainforests, but it won’t achieve meaningful scale unless it becomes simpler and more reliable.   Technological advancements in remote sensing and geographic information systems are now advanced enough to help.

This article has been adapted from the In Focus report Engaging Private Sector Finance for REDD+, which was published by CINCS LLC and is available for download here.

10 October 2012 | Governments around the world have committed to reducing the 17 % of greenhouse gas emissions which arise from land use change and forestry. The result so far has been the creation of the REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) financing mechanism, which is designed to funnel private-sector money to projects that save endangered rainforests.

But the private sector has been slow to follow suit. In the 2012 State of Voluntary Carbon Markets report, for example, Ecosystem Marketplace identified just $87 million per year in transacted REDD projects in 2010 and 2011 – and not all of that came from private-sector buyers.

This pales in comparison to the $4.5 billion that governments have pledged for 2010 through the end of this year – an average of roughly $1.5 billion per year.

More importantly, it’s nowhere near the $17 to $28 billion per year that many economists say is needed if we’re to cut deforestation rates in half by the year 2030.

Complexity and Risk

This notable lack of private capital is due to the complexity and heterogeneity of forest carbon offsets, creating both supply side and demand side problems and hindering the development of a liquid, standardized market. Private investors need clarity on the probabilities of potential payoffs and an established return on investment before putting their capital at risk. In order for this to take place, there must develop much greater standardization surrounding the definition of a forest carbon offset, as well as accounting principles to handle this novel asset class. Though much effort has gone into shaping REDD+ to date, many are pessimistic due to the current disparity among different project financial structures and valuations, which remain opaque and inefficient.

We believe that the main factor hampering such development is the opaque nature of most projects developed to-date. If the market can move towards a consistent process that determines a value for forest carbon by aggregating projects and crediting data into a unified system, this can be used to cross-reference future projects at each phase of the project cycle.

Such a system needs to be geo-referenced and capable of tracking and monitoring land use change at different scales, as well as estimating and refining carbon stock estimates. In addition it must be open, transparent, auditable and accessible to all project participants, validators and governments. It should be a flexible framework at first so it can include diverse activities, crediting standards and accounting regimes, but the end goal should be the unification of existing accounting efforts into a more standardized process.

The Technological Solution

At the heart of land use carbon offsets is land itself; this necessitates using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to track ownership and all project activities in detail. GIS can support the harmonization of baselines and leakage accounting across regions as it is able to stack data in easily-comparable layers for a given geographic area.

For a centrally-used GIS where similar information is needed by adjacent projects or activities, this data can often be adapted and re-used, making it more economical. Centering the definition of a credit around the land from which it derives also solves a host of other problems. By providing a common platform to contrast baselines and leakage scenarios with potential regional and national RELs as they develop, it can facilitate collaboration on the decisions necessary to harmonize these standards.

Further, GIS can compare different carbon accounting approaches and their implications on credit generation. This could be accomplished both by incorporating broad global data sets such as Wood’s Hole’s Global Pan-Tropic Biomass data, and by incorporating existing “best practice”, such as the new LEAF Standard Operating Procedure for Measuring Terrestrial Carbon. GIS can be used to clarify land tenure rights by providing a central repository for ownership data and a public forum for dispute settlement, though the impetus for this will inevitably fall on local policy makers. Finally, linking credits to explicit parcels of land can prevent possible emission double-counting.

If forest carbon credits will eventually be transacted in a similar way to other commodities, it is necessary to move towards a central database to account for the different valuations of different types of carbon. This does not mean that there can only be one type of credit in an end-game scenario — on the contrary, all that is required is that each different type of credit has a series of stringent standards applied to its production.

These could include the different standards as they exist now (VCS, ACR, CAR, Gold Standard, CDM), as well as additional certifications (for example CCBA and FSC) to capture non-carbon characteristics of the project. In addition such a platform needs to be able to distinguish among credits of different vintage, and must be linked back to the originating project, to account for reversals or invalidation of credits. Developing a framework capable of accounting for all the different standards will help market participants and regulators narrow in on common facets shared by these standards and will hence facilitate the development of linkages between standards.

In addition to providing a central clearinghouse for data on land use, carbon stocks, and project crediting, such a platform can also be immensely helpful to investors by providing data on comparables for investment due diligence, and providing more transparency regarding a typical project cycle, including timing of costs and revenues.

The main effect of this would be to radically democratize the REDD market from its current state, where consultants dominate due to the technical, opaque and bespoke nature of registering a project. If a large database of validated projects exists, potential investors, landowners and policy makers can quickly evaluate the feasibility of developing such a project based on analyzing comparables. Further, it would quickly follow from aggregating project data and modeling into a central location that many aspects of project development could be standardized to a great degree. While one baseline methodology may not be suitable globally due to political considerations, such a system could incorporate a narrow range of different baseline models and the data that drive them, vastly reducing the cost of project validation.

Another advantage of such a project database would be to facilitate the development of an insurance market for projects, since the most important requirements of insurance instruments are good data on comparable projects and a large and diversified project pool. The ultimate result of both of these developments would be to reduce administrative and consultative expenses and better channel investment to the activities actually taking place on the ground.

The political and regulatory aspects that are hampering demand for forest carbon credits can only be solved by governments taking decisive and coordinated action. In the meantime, the market must bootstrap using limited funding from CSR buyers and government grant programs to focus in upon a series of best practices learned from developing pilot projects. The construction of a centralized and open technology framework can facilitate the development of such best practice through knowledge sharing, and will start to standardize the financing of such projects. Only when a sufficient pool of past experiences are collected and collated in a comparable way will investors gain confidence in the market, and will standards and regulatory bodies be able to narrow in on a successful structure for the optimum mechanism for REDD+.

Additional resources

The world has agreed that tropical rainforests need protection, so the multi-billion dollar REDD+ program is on its way. The challenge is its practical implementation. DMCii’s Prof. Jim Lynch explains why satellite surveying could do for the 21st century carbon trading economy what seismic surveys did for 20th century oil and gas.

July 16 2012 |     Carbon projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) can save rainforests and slow climate change by keeping carbon locked in trees, but this mechanism and its sibling, REDD+, can only scale up if investors will know how many trees there are, and how much carbon is stored within them and whether this carbon is staying put, year on year.

Current methodologies being advocated within the United Nations require the use of forest audits based on traditional forestry management methods of the developed world, but these are simply too expensive to work in the developing world. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, has more than 100 million hectares of inaccessible rainforest, and the country doesn’t have the resources to survey this from the ground in a cost-effective manner, let alone quantify the results into a standardised format to be cross-checked against forest stocks elsewhere.

Lessons From The Energy Sector

Perhaps the emerging carbon-trading economy can take a lesson from the oil and gas economy that dominated the previous century. Sinking exploratory wells represented an impossibly costly way to explore. So a standard technological solution emerged to discover and quantify oil and gas stocks: seismic surveys. Low-frequency sound waves are propagated into promising geological sites and the time taken for them to reflect back is employed to build up a picture of oil and gas deposits. The technique began with wildcatters in the 1920s exploding dynamite sticks; today it involves carefully planned networks of seismic sources and geophones to build up a three-dimensional map of reservoir architecture, with raw acoustic results processed via sophisticated algorithm chains and skillfully interpreted. Modern seismic surveys are employed not only to find new wells but also tracking fluid-front movement to trace a reservoir’s depletion over time.

What is the equivalent technological solution for forest monitoring? Earth observation. The only way REDD+ can be made to work on a global scale in a truly open, transparent way is satellite imaging. That’s why I’m working with satellite imagery and services provider DMCii in the UK to develop standardised information products for forest monitoring, tailored to the requirements of REDD+ as well as comparable international forest monitoring schemes – such as the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, ensuring countries importing timber to Europe are logging on a legal and sustainable basis.

What Satellites Can Deliver

Earth observation can contribute to two aspects of the forest monitoring problem. Firstly, as a means of ascertaining where all the trees are, and how many of them there are. Satellites’ wide area view enables a highly-accurate census to be made. Then comes the stage of processing the imagery to make biomass estimates and gain a measurement of the carbon stocks bound up in them – seeing the carbon for the trees – and then, just as importantly, to estimate carbon fluxes: how that carbon stock is changing over time.

The last half-century of Earth observation has demonstrated that it is not the individual remote sensing image but a sequence of images over time that gives the most added value. When it comes to tropical rainforests this is especially true: one can never have enough data about these vast expanses, possessing their own self-generating climate systems – repeated monitoring is important simply to catch gaps in clouds. Then such gaps can be mosaiced together to build up a complete picture.

We’re not starting from a blank page. The rapid development of satellite-based precision agriculture offers a model to learn from. Satellites are increasingly – and lucratively – being employed to monitor crop growth to guide the most-efficient application of fertiliser and pesticide for optimal yield. Many of the methods and algorithms originally developed for precision agriculture provide a measurement of photosynthetic activity can be also be applied to forest monitoring.This is very exciting – with the right models and algorithms we can analyse carbon pools for different climates around the world.

How We Do It

But won’t monitoring from space be astronomically expensive? Not necessarily. DMCii has built a business in selling imagery from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, a fleet of separately-owned and collectively-managed satellites performing medium-resolution Earth monitoring. As the satellites, built by the UK’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. are affordable, and the data is too.

Of the users around the globe making use of DMCii data products, one of the most notable is Brazil, as one of the few forested developing nations to establish an annual forest audit. Brazil is also one of the inspirations for REDD+, having cut its deforestation by half in the last decade and a half. Both achievements are based on the use of satellite data.

Brazil’s space agency the National Institute for Space Research (known by its Spanish initials as INPE) approached DMCii in 2005 to begin purchasing DMC imagery. Today DMCii’s contribution is core to Brazil’s forest monitoring programme, having moved beyond regular land cover mapping to active guidance of enforcement efforts. The distinctive patterns of deforestation have become familiar sights – ‘fishbone’ lines of clearing extending from a main road as the transportation route, or alternatively a river system.

Early on, in my role with the OECD Sustainability Agency, we could challenge the authorities with this irrefutable evidence, and help guide fact-based policy. In addition to starting to brake deforestation rates, Brazil has also set up new national parks, indigenous reserves and sustainable logging zones. It’s a template for what REDD+ could accomplish on a broader scale– and all down to satellites.

The precise nature of DMCii information products and services for REDD+ and related forest monitoring activities are still to be determined. We envisage two main classes of user: firstly, people mainly interested acquiring auditing information in a quick, digestible format, such as financial investors. Secondly, the national governments themselves, who will want to demonstrate their effective reduction in emissions clearly with a high degree of quality and precision, so they can be rewarded for their efforts. We’d also supply the associated measurement and management systems – based on standard geographic information systems (GIS) –to employ the data.

Theoretically the information products would be data-neutral; in other words we could employ free imagery from government satellites such as the US Landsat for annual forest surveys, which is the minimum frequency that REDD+ certification is likely to require. But, once you consider the billions of dollars set to be pledged for REDD+, then the case is clear to acquire additional paid-for data to step up the frequency and accuracy of satellite observations. In the case of particular regions at risk then the frequency of acquisitions could reach daily revisits using the DMC satellites. Because they operate in a constellation, their acquisition opportunities are not constrained by the fixed orbit of a single satellite, which might take weeks or months to return to a given target.

Last year’s addition to the DMC, the NigeriaSat-2 satellite, offers very high resolution 2.5 m imagery, that is potentially capable of surveying individual REDD+ projects in detail (incidentally giving Nigeria a superior imaging capability to SSTL’s homeland of Great Britain). The UK and SSTL has also announced plans for a new generation of NovaSAR small radar satellites, able to perform observations through clouds or at night, and sensitive to complementary environmental parameters such as leaf area index and soil moisture.

DMCii also acquires additional regional forest monitoring capabilities with third party specialists. So we wouldn’t always perform mapping or ground truthing ourselves, but are active in establishing regional partnerships to do just that. In May, a DMCii led consortium won a place on the UK Department for International Development (DfID) Forest Governance Markets and Climate (FGMC) Framework Agreement meaning that we will be able to bid for projects to monitor forest governance and deforestation globally. The multidisciplinary consortium, known as inFORm, comprises commercial and academic partners with skills such as forest mapping, carbon accounting, timber tracking, policy development and broad ranging Earth Observation technologies, allowing a holistic approach to tackling deforestation.

For me, one of the strengths of satellite products is that for all the data they contain, they can typically be understood by everyone, not just forest specialists – regional politicians to national media to village headmen. If you present people with clear and accurate information about their national resources, they can then make informed decisions about their future exploitation. In the past satellite images have helped motivate Brazilian politicians to take action and helped guide public opinion too.

It is clear that the fruits of past development activities have not always been fairly shared. I was in Ghana in 2010 and I went to villages well away from Accra and asked them what they wanted most. Some electric lights so we’re not in darkness every night was the answer – and running past their village were thick power lines on massive pylons.

REDD+ needs to be fair if it is going to be truly sustainable. Satellite imagery can help establish a level playing field of information, showing where the trees are actually placed in areas of contested land ownership, and serving as a basis for organised action on the ground, such as surveying and enforcement activities.

Through its staff and parent company SSTL, DMCii has a promising record in knowledge transfer; it has worked with customer nations such as Egypt, Turkey and Nigeria to not only deliver satellites but the beginnings of full national space programmes along with them. The same kind of knowledge sharing, to make REDD+ a bottom-up initiative that local populations have a true stake in, will be crucial.

While satellites offer a technical solution to the challenges of implementing a carbon trading economy based on preserving the tropical rainforests – just as seismic surveys proved to be the technical foundation of the expanding oil and gas industry – the political and social factors inherent in making REDD+ a reality will decide whether it succeeds or fails.

About the author

Trained in industrial chemistry and soil microbiology, Professor Jim Lynch OBE has served as Chief Executive of the UK government’s executive agency, Forest Research, Co-ordinator for the OECD Programme on Biological Resource Management and currently sits on the Board of the European Forestry Institute and Africa’s Council for the Frontiers of Knowledge. As Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Surrey, Prof. Lynch has begun work on a new project to develop forest monitoring information products for DMCii, a subsidiary of University of Surrey spin-off company Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL).

Please see our Reprint Guidelines for details on republishing our articles.

Additional resources