Putting trees back on the climate change agenda

Forests are re-entering the global warming debate, writes Jennifer Rankin.

The slogan "Save the rainforests" was one of the earliest used by the green movement, adorning a thousand mugs and lapel badges. But oddly enough, forests have not been a big part of efforts to tackle climate change.

The original Kyoto Protocol was sprinkled with a few incentives to plant trees but did nothing to stop people chopping them down (in climate-change jargon, the protocol favoured "afforestation" and "reforestation", rather than "avoided deforestation"). This is set to change. Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) will be a hot topic at Bali and there is a strong consensus that a post-2012 climate change regime must contain provisions to protect the world’s tropical forests.

Tropical deforestation accounts for 18-25% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a contribution to global warming that exceeds emissions from transport. As well as helping to reduce emissions, forests also prevent soil erosion and provide a home for millions of species - scientists estimate that forests are a home to half of all life on earth. But despite the ecological value of trees, people cannot stop chopping them down. According to the UN’s Earthwatch, almost half of the planet’s original forests have been destroyed, mostly in the last three decades. Since 1997, more than 13 million hectares of forest have been lost each year - the equivalent to losing a forest the size of Greece every year.

When the Kyoto Protocol was discussed in the 1990s, there was no consensus on what to do about forests. Technical limitations stood in the way - at that time satellite technology was basic, so negotiators could not be sure that a deal to protect one forest would not simply lead locals to cut down others. Also the focus of the talks was on industrial emissions and people worried that trying to include forests in the deal could have led to the collapse of the fragile talks.

Sébastien Risso, a policy adviser with Greenpeace, says: "Kyoto I focused on emissions from fossil fuels and the technology and the systems to monitor forests didn’t exist at that time. Now we have the technology to monitor the rate and scale of deforestation. And politically it is more feasible to try to negotiate [a deal]."

Policymakers at Bali have three options to chew over. Forests could be designated protected areas under the Convention on Biological Diversity and local people compensated for preserving them. Alternatively, forests could be integrated into existing carbon-trading schemes, or a new plan could be created for forests - the latter would have the advantage of not leaving forests open to volatility in the carbon markets.

Anders Wijkman, a Swedish centre-right MEP, says that he does not yet know which offers the best option, but insists negotiators must be pragmatic and ensure that any deal guarantees that revenue for protecting forests goes to local people and exceeds what they could make from logging or agriculture. Some green groups worry that a framework on deforestation might get rich countries off the hook, by allowing them to pay to protect forests in other countries without making efforts to reduce their own emissions.

Greenpeace warns that a framework on deforestation should "not provide an excuse for rich countries to do nothing at home". But Wijkman says deforestation will not become a substitute for other action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "We are in such an urgent situation with forest capital… it’s not either or, you have to do both," he says.

Forests are re-entering the global warming debate, writes Jennifer Rankin.