Last week we reported that countries such as Indonesia and Brazil are asking industrialized countries to pay for the preservation of their rainforests. (see Rainforest-Rich Countries Say Ante Up! http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/news/sbnews.cfm?id=14410)
The World Bank is testing a fund, The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, to do exactly that. It will pay developing countries to protect and replant tropical forests.
The fund will initially use US$300 million to test practical methods to protect and monitor tropical forests in nations like Brazil, Indonesia, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guyana and Suriname.
With a $30 billion carbon market in 2006, the fund could potentially provide a lot of money. It would generate revenue to reduce poverty in developing countries, while maintaining forest resources like clean water and indigenous medicines.
The new facility is seen as a R&D tool to develop practical ways to stop deforestation. Methods will need to be developed, for example, for governments to measure the current state of their forests and then prove how much deforestation is being reduced.
Deforestation contributes 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars, trucks, trains and airplanes combined.
Pressure for this is likely to increase, if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, due to be released in November, states that greenhouse gases passed the threshold of 455 parts per million of CO2 equivalent in 2005.
That threshold has been dubbed the point of no return by scientists who predict dangerous climate changes as a result of global warming. Planting new forests to capture CO2 from the atmosphere is perhaps the only way to bring greenhouse gas levels back below 455 parts per million.
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