Global fund 'could pay owners to keep rainforests safe'

• Relatively cheap way to cut CO2 says report to PM • Plan could reduce poverty in developing countries

John Vidal and Juliette Jowit
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 14 2008

A revolutionary multibillion-pound fund should be set up to pay the owners of the world's rainforests not to cut them down, a report to the prime minister will say today. The report by special adviser John Eliasch says the scheme would be a comparatively cheap way to reduce climate change emissions and would also inject vital funds into developing countries to help alleviate poverty.
The report says that a global carbon market could pay the tropical rainforests' owners, or people living in, them to save and maintain the trees, which store carbon dioxide - the main contributor to climate change. In addition, saving the rainforests would help to control global rainfall patterns. They are also home to more than half the world's species.
The World Bank has estimated the cost of reducing deforestation by one fifth at $2bn-$20bn (£1.15bn-£11.5bn) a year, leading campaigners to calculate that halting the problem would cost up to $100bn a year.
But the Eliasch review claims countries without forests could also benefit from a global forest emission trading system, which would be relatively cheap compared with saving emissions at home.
"Integrating forests within a global cap and trade system would create opportunities to tackle a large part of current CO2 emissions while at the same time delivering substantial finance to forest conservation and sustainable forest management," says the report. "Forest carbon finance could also make a significant impact on reducing poverty through increased financial flows to developing countries."
The report marks a significant shift in the debate about saving rainforests, which has until now been dominated by charities and rich individuals - including Eliasch and the Cool Earth group he helped to set up - raising funds to buy forests, provoking outrage from some governments and local communities.
The new model has been supported by some environmental campaigners and by the government of Guyana, which last year offered to save its rainforests in return for payments from Britain. But others warn that it would allow developed countries to avoid tackling their own emissions.
"These proposals offer countries the chance to buy their way out of reducing emissions through forest protection," said Greenpeace's head of biodiversity, Andy Tait.
"If relatively cheap forest credits were easily traded with other carbon units, they could 'flood' or otherwise destabilise the markets. This is likely to bring the price of carbon crashing down, reducing incentives to invest in clean and renewable energy technologies in donor countries."
The Eliasch review says new research forecasts that without action to stop deforestation the problem would, by itself, generate enough carbon dioxide emissions to tip the planet over the level considered crucial to avoid more than 2C of warming. "Consequently ... forests will need to form a central part of any global climate change deal," it says.
Deforestation contributes about 17% of global carbon emissions, the third biggest source behind power generation and industry, and bigger than either China or the United States, says the report. It forecasts the pressure on forests will increase as world population grows by more than 2.5 billion people in the next 40 years.
"Rainforests [are] like a giant global utility right now, like a water utility or a power station, that's providing a service we're not paying for," said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme. "When you don't pay your electricity bill, you get cut off. We should recognise these countries shouldn't provide us with a service [for] free."
Mitchell added: "We're saying we need to build carbon capture and storage to take the carbon out of the atmosphere and forgetting about the plants taking it out for free. We have to do both."
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 14 2008 to include comments by Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme.