CLIMATE CHANGE: We Need Trees And More

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

COLOGNE, May 7 2007 (IPS) - Reforestation, new energy sources and technologies, and a substantial improvement in energy efficiency can be crucial elements in a worldwide campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stall global warming, environment experts say.

“At present annual rates, deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia alone would equal 80 percent of the emissions reductions gained by implementing the Kyoto Protocol in its first commitment period (until 2012),” Federica Bietta, director of finance and administration at the Coalition of Rainforest Nations told IPS.

Brazil and Indonesia were the two countries with the largest annual loss in forest area 2000-2005. Africa is the continent with the largest loss – almost 5.3 million hectares of forest lost per year since 1990.

The Coalition of Rainforest Nations is an alliance of 40 countries who take on collaborative programmes for environmental sustainability in tropical forests. The coalition functions as an intergovernmental organisation with a secretariat at Columbia University in New York City.

Bietta, who was in Cologne for the fourth Carbon Expo last week, said greenhouse gases emissions caused by degradation of tropical forests represented up to a quarter of global emissions during the 1990s – in all some five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon Expo is the international global carbon market fair and conference organised jointly by the World Bank and the International Emissions Trading Association.

Bietta says the main causes of deforestation are logging, development projects such as construction of roads, energy, mining and power lines, the growing demand for food and grains, and urbanisation.

To counter these trends, Bietta said sustainable development policies of catalysing “gains towards climate stability, poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation and rural development” must be implemented in regions rich in rainforests.

“Funding for these policies can be available,” she said. “For instance, through profits from the emissions trade, which could provide yearly revenues of between 5 and 30 billion dollars.”

Forests capture carbon from the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. Although the global rates of photosynthesis cannot be measured well enough to determine annual changes in carbon storage, environmentalists say it is possible to establish how human use of land, for example clearing of forests for croplands, provokes changes in the storage of carbon.

Conversely, it is possible to recapture carbon by reforesting cleared land. The new forests take carbon from the atmosphere and store it again in trees and the soil.

Besides reforestation, increased use of renewable and low-carbon energy resources, as well as improving efficiency in the use of energy are necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise climate change, experts say.

David Hopkins, an expert with Carbon International, a consultancy on environmental and public relations, told IPS that without new environmental policy, concentration of carbon in the atmosphere would double by the year 2054 from 2000 levels.

“To maintain present levels of carbon in the atmosphere, we have to avoid some seven billion metric tonnes of carbon, which we would produce if we do not change our energy generation and consumption patterns,” Hopkins said.

To that end, multiple technologies must be applied, he added. These new technologies and instruments include reforestation, carbon emissions rights trading, renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power, electricity generation through biomass, carbon capture and storage, waste composting, landfill gas, and especially improving efficiency in energy use.

“But there is no silver bullet against climate change,” Hopkins said. All these technologies and instruments have their own flaws, he said. For instance, carbon capture and storage “can be very expensive and there is scientific disagreement over whether aquifers and/or geology can hold emissions.”

Similarly, the present installed capacity in solar energy, of some 2.9 gigawatts, would have to be multiplied by 700 in order to avoid a further concentration of one billion metric tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere. For reasons of space, such multiplication of solar panels is all but impossible.

Energy efficiency by improving isolation in buildings and homes, reducing electricity consumption by replacing traditional light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones, and reducing automobile use could reduce more than three billion tonnes of carbon emissions.