BY POLLY MANN
Unless you’re a reader of the The Guardian Weekly, you probably have not heard of REDD+, but eventually you’ll hear about it. The acronym stands for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.” Unless we do something about the increasing warmth of the planet, it will not sustain life on earth. It’s the U.N.’s plan to use forests to counteract climate change: They will measure what forests contribute to a healthy atmosphere, and figure out how to pay for them to remain standing. The following is my attempt to provide a beginning knowledge of REDD+ gleaned from the five-page Guardian article.
Trees take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Annually the world’s forests and bogs are believed to absorb about 1.6 gigatonnes (one gigatonne = one billion tons) of the 10 gigatonnes that humans emit. Practices such as cutting down trees, draining swamps and burning brush produce between 10% to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. Where intact wildernesses remain in developing countries, scientists can determine the amount of carbon that trees, bushes, etc., soak up and store; based on that information, legislation should be enacted to preserve them.
REDD+ was born in 2005 in Papua New Guinea, which has the world’s third-largest rainforest. A student, Kevin Conrad, had read about a trial program in Costa Rica to reward landowners for maintaining healthy waterways and had learned about carbon markets in which companies support pollution-preventing schemes on international exchanges in order to offset their emissions. He then considered the huge amount of carbon stored in Papua New Guinea’s forests, which cover 370,000 square kilometers, an area the size of Italy, and the U.N.’s mammoth climate change negotiating process. With help from Papua New Guinea’s former prime minister, Conrad submitted a proposal to the U.N.’s climate change summit in Montreal, Canada. In 2008 a British review of the future of the world’s forests predicted that a well-designed REDD+ system could cut global deforestation by up to 75% by 2030.
For many years the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change had been unable to achieve a meaningful proposal. The world’s developing nations had accused the industrialized nations of “wrecking the planet and asking for hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation.” The rich countries observed that “almost 2/3 of greenhouse gases now come from the developing world and that they are not going to make any deep cuts, and certainly not part with any money, until everyone agrees to reduce their emissions” . . . “REDD+ ignored this standoff … poor countries such as Papua New Guinea would be happy to curb their emissions by preserving their forests in return for money.”
In 2010 Norway and Indonesia signed the world’s first major REDD+ deal, which was worth $1 billion. Conflict followed with two points of disagreement: 1) The idea that developing countries should be paid for the emissions that would have been caused if they cut down their trees was a hypothetical and 2) REDD+ was, essentially, a glorified carbon offset scheme that would allow rich countries to continue to pollute, as long as they could afford to pay poor people not to cut down their trees.
After 21 years of negotiations, the world’s first universal treaty on climate change was signed in Paris in December 2015. The agreement commits countries to a mutual goal of cutting enough carbon emissions to keep global warming below 2°C, or even 1.5°C if possible. It aims to reach global “net zero emissions” during the second half of this century. It also recommits the rich world to provide $100 billion per year to poor countries to assist them with the transition to a clean economy and to cope with the stresses of existing climate change. It also requires countries to renew their pre-conference pledges in 2023 and every five years thereafter. But the proposal’s major device for holding governments to their word is global peer pressure coupled with transparency mechanisms. Let’s hope the process works.
