Weathervane: A Climate Policy Blog from Resources for the Future

Dec11

Forests and Climate? Just Google it

COPENHAGEN -- Yesterday at the COP, Google was in the air (if you’re wondering, Google in the air smells faintly like mint). First, Copenhagen managed to conquer the most frequently search term list. Tiger Woods is no longer no.1, on the Internet or in our hearts. Second, Google threw delightful side events where they unveiled a new tool that could be a game changer for monitoring the world’s forests and could put Google on the map in the climate change philanthropy world.

Since its inception in 2004, Google.org has been using 1 percent of Google’s total revenues to address issues like global health, but it has concentrated mainly on investing in products to reduce energy usage and commercialize electric vehicles, all the while challenging the world to create renewable energy that costs less than coal.

These seeds have yet to blossom, because as powerful as Google is, its engineers haven’t yet figured out how to completely redesign the world’s energy systems. Google is not an energy company, it is an information company. If they are incredibly innovative in the information business, it stands to reason they might have a better chance of being innovative in information philanthropy than in other things.

But yesterday Google finally accepted what we knew all along: that they’re not an engineering firm, an automaker, a public health center, or a policymaker. They’re facilitators. The business model for the profitable arm of Google is based on a superior ability to facilitate the transfer of information. They’re finally applying this skill set to climate change in the form of a new forest monitoring tool. Utilizing the amazing capability of the “Google cloud,” scientists can use an online platform to take satellite imagery data compiled over time and use it to track changes in forests. This tool is a major step forward in identifying areas of deforestation and reforestation, and may help solve some of the current problems with forest monitoring and measurement. A full rundown of the tool is here. See what happens when Google tries to do something it’s good at?

Thanks to Virginia Kromm for her insights into the inner workings of Google.

Daniel F. Morris is a Research Associate with Resources for the Future and a regular contributor to Common Tragedies.

Published: Dec-11-09 | 0 Comments

Dec11

REDD Dawn

Forest Carbon, COP-15, REDD

COPENHAGEN -- If there is one topic at the COP that gets people excited, it is the issue of international forests. Many people I’ve talked to, from delegate members of developing countries to negotiators for major corporations, see a lot of potential for REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) to have a major impact on the negotiations. For those not in the know, REDD programs basically would pay people to keep the carbon currently locked up in the trees and soil of forests. Truth be told, if had I to make everyone at this event decide on something slightly more scandalous than the statement “chocolate is tasty,” it would be “REDD is a vital part of any climate agreement.”

With that in mind, the RFF team has been scouring many of the REDD-related meetings over the past couple days. Though the side events and presentations have been varied, a couple of consistent themes have cropped up:

Stakeholders – working with people who are on the ground, especially indigenous groups who can benefit from REDD schemes (paying people to protect their forested land), is a critical component of a successful project. The indigenous people here at the COP are very skeptical about the ability of REDD to improve their lives or protect their lands. This was especially evident in one side event that focused on the social and environmental standards necessary for REDD projects hosted by Nepal. After a series of presentations about how best to involve people living in forests and the importance of their rights, a number of indigenous representative stood up and lamented how no one appreciates their rights and they are not being involved. Ensuring indigenous rights (and convincing them they are a part of the process) will be key for any tropical forest carbon program.

Equity – similar to the stakeholder issues, equity among all involved parties in REDD programs is something people here are hammering home. People receiving payments need to be treated fairly for them to maintain standing forests.

National strategies – Coordinated national strategies are important, but no one knows quite how to do them yet. The solution, reiterated in multiple events, is to take lessons learned from small-scale projects and eventually upgrade them to the national scale. While it’s not a perfect strategy, options are currently limited.

Upfront investment – REDD is not a slow-boil proposition, something you can just sit back and let develop slowly. Without robust investment in critical components (capacity building, monitoring, etc) from the beginning, REDD programs will likely fail. National governments are the only entities with the resources to fully deploy everything necessary to make REDD succeed.

Forestry issues are one of the least contentious issues being negotiated here, but there are still a lot of important considerations and problems to be solved. Don’t count on them being solved in the next ten days.

Daniel F. Morris is a Research Associate with Resources for the Future and is a regular contributor to Common Tragedies.

Published: Dec-11-09 | 0 Comments

Dec03

RFF and Climate Advisers Unveil Forest Carbon Index

Forest Carbon, Forests, International

From RFF Press Release:

Brazil, Indonesia, and nations in the Amazon-Andes and Central America are poised to be key players in an emerging market for forest carbon that could reach $20 billion annually through 2020 according to a detailed analysis released today by Resources for the Future and Climate Advisers.

The Forest Carbon Index provides governments, development agencies, NGOs, and private investors with geospatial data on global, national, and local forest carbon supply, explicitly taking into account country-specific economic, biological, and risk factors—such as governance and ease of doing business.

Deforestation and forest degradation, mostly in tropical areas, account for up to 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the world’s transport sector. Using the Index, policymakers and businesses can estimate each nation’s potential to contribute to climate solutions through its forest carbon assets. The data are essential to understand the likely supply of international offsets, almost 90 percent of which are expected to come from tropical forests. For land managers and project developers, the Index illustrates which locations can most cost-effectively participate in forest carbon programs and global carbon markets. The Index also demonstrates the need for public financing, illustrating the areas with large standing forests and low deforestation rates, which would not be able to participate in a carbon market but need to build capacity to protect existing forests and avoid future deforestation.

Head over to www.forestcarbonindex.org to see the index in action, complete with interactive maps and this Summary for Policymakers (PDF) that boils down the data into nine easy-to-digest recommendations.

Published: Dec-03-09 | 0 Comments

Oct08

Curbing Deforestation Emissions: A REDD Primer

REDD, Forests, Forest Carbon, International, Congress

Forest image courtesy Certified Su via Flickr A bipartisan group of government, business, and NGO leaders—boasting D.C. star power like John Podesta and Lincoln Chafee—is urging Congress to make tropical forest conservation a key facet of its climate and energy legislation.

According to The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests’ Protecting the Climate Forests, the deforestation and degradation of tropical forests accounts for some 17 percent of annual global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Halting deforestation could be a cost-effective way to quickly slow the growth of emissions rates.

The commission says the United States should lead a global partnership to halve GHG emissions from tropical deforestation by 2020 and reach zero net emissions from deforestation by 2030. The authors suggest investing at least $1 billion in public funding prior to 2012 and mobilizing roughly $9 billion annually by 2020 from the private sector to reduce tropical forest emissions.

REDD

Investment from developed nations for tropical forest conservation in developing countries is the basic framework of a United Nations program known as REDD. REDD is expected to play a key role in upcoming international climate treaty negotiations.

Below, RFF Program Fellow Erin Myers Madeira answers some questions about what REDD is, who could be involved, and how—with the creation of a compliance market—it could work.

What is REDD and how does it work?

REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. REDD is a mechanism that uses market/financial incentives to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases from deforestation and forest degradation in a measurable and verifiable way.

REDD credits offer the opportunity to utilize funding from developed countries to reduce deforestation in developing countries. REDD puts a value on forests for the services they provide by keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. At relatively low carbon prices, REDD can make standing forests more valuable than the timber or plantation revenues that would result from clearing forests.

REDD can refer to policies and measures—such as strategic road planning, implementing best practices for timber practices or restricting activities that degrade peatlands—that reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation across a landscape. REDD can also refer to pilot projects or demonstration activities that have a clear objective to directly reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in a specific geographic area.

You said that there are market incentives for REDD; who are buying and selling REDD?

Land owners, concession holders, traditional forest people, and governments in developing countries can take actions to prevent forest loss or forest degradation. By proving that their actions measurably reduced the rate of deforestation and degradation compared to a reference scenario (where no action would be taken), they can generate REDD credits.

Currently REDD credits can be sold on the voluntary market where individuals, companies, and even towns or counties buy carbon credits to offset their carbon footprint. However, a compliance market for REDD credits could be created by inclusion of REDD in domestic climate change policy or international post-Kyoto climate agreements. In a compliance market, companies and other entities facing an obligation to reduce their emissions could buy REDD credits to offset their emissions and meet their legal emissions requirements.

Who stands to benefit from a compliance market for REDD?

If REDD credits are included in a compliance market, the benefits are widespread. The sellers of REDD credits benefit because they are able to generate value by protecting their forests, making them better off doing that than finding any alternative forest use. The buyers benefit because they are able to reduce the cost of complying to emissions regulations. And greater society benefits from the biodiversity and watershed benefits that forests provide in addition to their carbon storage

What are some of the major concerns in the design and implementation of a compliance market for REDD?

Many of the concerns with REDD have to do with the technical ability to measure and monitor emissions reductions from forests as well as environmental integrity issues about leakage and permanence—meaning that if you sell a credit based on protecting forests in one place at one time, it’s not guaranteed you can be sure that forests are not cut down somewhere else or in the future. The good news is that the technical capabilities for REDD have improved tremendously in recent years, and the attention on environmental integrity has spurred innovative thinking in how to minimize and monitor these risks.

There are also concerns that the developing countries that are expected to generate REDD credits have weak institutional and governance capacities, which would inhibit the success of REDD programs.

It is certainly true that many countries have a poor track record when it comes to governance in the forestry sector. However, REDD has created an incentive to improve governance conditions as they work towards national REDD program. Further, there are a number of activities that can be undertaken in the existing conditions that will result in real, measurable reductions in deforestation and degradation. Find a more in-depth discussion of issues surrounding REDD here.

What is REDD+?

REDD+ expands the scope of REDD beyond avoided deforestation and degradation activities to include forest restoration, rehabilitation, sustainable management and/or af/reforestation. However, it is not yet decided which specific activities will be included in REDD+. Expanding the scope of REDD means that countries that have low rates of deforestation and degradation, or have increasing forests will be able to participate in a REDD+ program where they might not be able to with a narrower definition of REDD.

Erin Myers Madeira is a program fellow at Resources for the Future. She’s written extensively about REDD both in this 2008 RFF report and online at the Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace.

Tiffany Clements is managing editor of Weathervane.

Published: Oct-08-09 | 0 Comments

Sep14

Counting Forests: Not Quite as Easy as 1,2,3

Forests, Forest Carbon, Offsets

If you’ve recently had a conversation about the world’s forests and climate change, then you’ve probably heard the figure "20 percent" thrown around. That number represents the amount of worldwide emissions currently attributed to deforestation and forest degradation.

If tropical rainforests have been a frequent topic of discussion in your social circles, maybe someone told you that more than 10 million hectares of rainforest were permanently logged or destroyed every year from 2000 to 2005. These figures represent important metrics for policymakers to understand the role forests play in environmental policy issues. Their widespread use is partially based on the assumption that scientists have accurate and consistent measurements of forest attributes from which they can derive such figures.

Forest measures and inventories, however, may not be as accurate and precise as scientists and policymakers would like. In his RFF discussion paper, Paul Waggoner highlights such discrepancies and uncertainties embedded in current forest measures. “Without accuracy, appraisals of timber will be discredited, assays of biomass will be deceptive, and claims of sequestered carbon may be fraudulent,” he writes in “Forest Inventories: Discrepancies and Uncertainties.”

His analysis comes at an opportune time as the Senate gears up to consider climate legislation and agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission look to more closely regulate the nation’s carbon markets. As a major component of H.R. 2454, forest offsets will face more scrutiny about their veracity and quality in the coming months.

Waggoner showcases eleven different cases of major discrepancies in forest measures across the globe, including some within IPCC forest carbon accounting guidelines. One of the reasons for such uncertainty, he writes, is related to how forests are defined. The definition Waggoner cites—the Forest Identity—consists of four measures: area, growing stock density, biomass, and carbon. Uncertainties exist in each of these attributes and as they are combined to form the Forest Identity, their uncertainties aggregate and can result in significantly inaccurate final numbers.

So what’s the solution? Forest measures will never be perfect, nor will they have 0 percent uncertainty, but that is not why it is worthwhile to point out discrepancies. The point is to push toward acceptable levels of uncertainty in forest measures. As Waggoner points out:

Although perfect accuracy might seem the goal, it is not—at least not in the real world of affairs. Rather, the cost of improving accuracy makes good enough the goal. If the costs of surveying, monitoring, and verification exceed the consequent benefit or profit, regulation will fail and transactions abort in the long run…Thus the discrepancies and uncertainties in forest surveys must next be evaluated against standards of good enough for, say, scientific debates, timber sales, or carbon credits. Then economical methods for meeting those standards must be established.

In the mad rush toward using forest offsets to solve the world’s climate problems, voices of warning like Waggoner’s should not get lost in the din.

Daniel F. Morris is a research assistant at Resources for the Future and regular contributor to Common Tragedies.

Published: Sep-14-09 | 0 Comments

Sep11

Friday's Reads

Waxman-Markey, International, COP-15, Forest Carbon, Morning Reads

NYT: The State Department climate negotiator, Todd Stern, testified Thursday on Capitol Hill, saying its important Congress move on climate and energy legislation to show the rest of the world the U.S. is willing to reduce its emissions.

Time: An in-depth look at where India stands on climate change.

NYT: The battle is heating up over a waiver California received in July to go above and beyond federal standards to regulate its vehicle emissions. The National Automobile Dealers Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have requested an appeals court take a closer look at how and why the EPA granted the waiver.

WSJ: A proposed carbon tax in France draws fire from all around.

Reuters: One Australian firm ekes out territory in forest offsets, telling its investors it has brokered deals for 100 million carbon offsets over five years from projects in Papua New Guinea and 60 million over five years from Indonesia at an average of A$10 ($8.5) each offset, or credit. But can it deliver?

NYT: Thawed Arctic ice allowed ships, for the first time in history, to safely carry cargo from Asia to the west. The German ships departed from South Korea in late July and will arrive in Rotterdam in the Netherlands within the next few weeks. Meanwhile a recent German geothermal experiment is being blamed for an earthquake last month.

Reuters: (Video) Top UN climate official, Yvo DeBoer remains upbeat about the prospect of a deal in Copenhagen.

Economist: No matter how unsavory some of its provisions may be, Waxman-Markey may be the last chance environmentalists have for a while to pass CO₂ regulations.

Did we miss something today? Let us know, leave a comment or email clements@rff.org.

Published: Sep-11-09 | 0 Comments

Jun24

Overseeing Avoided Deforestation: Time for New Regulators?

Forest Carbon, United States, International, Waxman-Markey

After exploring some of the key questions in Waxman-Markey’s tropical conservation provisions here, Andrew teamed with RFF’s Nigel Purvis and Ray Kopp to write this issue brief proposing the creation of a new U.S. regulatory entity to the administration of international forest carbon offset program.

According to authors, “Existing federal agencies are ill‐equipped to manage new programs in ways that produce genuine climate change benefits, reduce the cost of climate action for the United States, and advance other foreign policy objectives, including poverty alleviation and economic development.”

The authors recommend the creation of a new entity— International Forest Conservation Corporation—to take on the following functions:

Negotiate and monitor bilateral agreements with developing nations

Build capacity and market-readiness in developing nations to prepare countries to participate in global carbon markets

Verify benefits for local people and environmental integrity

Serve as financial intermediary to negotiate prices and purchase verified emissions reductions

Monitor volume of offsets to lessen price volatility and maintain market price signals that drive innovation

Read Purvis, Kopp, and Stevenson’s Managing Climate-Related International Forest Programs.

Published: Jun-24-09 | 0 Comments

Jun09

Tropical Forest Conservation in Waxman-Markey

Forest Carbon, International, Waxman-Markey, Mitigation

For many environmental advocates, the generous forest conservation provisions in the Waxman-Markey energy bill (summary here) are a no-brainer. They target one of the world’s largest—20 percent of the global total—and most cost-effective—about half the world’s deforestation at under $10 per-ton—sources of greenhouse gas emissions reductions while protecting some of the world’s most treasured natural places.

It seems these provisions provide something for everyone, as they have found support from a broad coalition of stakeholders. U.S.-regulated entities like the potential cost-containment benefits from offsetting up to 1.5 billion tons of their emissions by paying for cheaper reductions in developing nations, and that forest conservation does not create competitiveness concerns. The global development community likes the possible poverty reduction benefits of channeling an additional $10 billion per year by 2015 in what could be seen as U.S. foreign aid to tropical forest nations. Climate policy wonks like that this forest financing will strengthen U.S. participation in ongoing global negotiations.

Is it possible, therefore, that these provisions could survive attacks from equally-strong skeptics of offsets, foreign aid, and climate action during House and Senate debates?

As the debate unfolds, expect three key issues to come into play:

1) Whether the uncertainties in Waxman-Markey’s forest “set-aside” provisions can be clarified.

Currently the bill allocates 5 percent of allowance values (Section 753(b)(1)) for the purchase of “supplemental emissions reductions”—not offsets—solely from international forest conservation. This “set-aside” must be used to purchase 720 million tons of emissions reductions per year from 2020 to 2025 and 6 billion tons overall from 2012 to 2025, and the EPA administrator is required to increase the allowance allocation if necessary to meet this target.

Based on reasonable assumptions about the size of the cap-and-trade program and cost of forest tons, including analysis done by EPA, the U.S. will be lucky to purchase half that amount (about 300 million) with the current 5 percent set-aside. Meeting the required amount may require saving up money in the initial years to spend later, but even this approach cuts it close, and will take away funds from needed capacity building in early years. Does the EPA have the authority or the will to actually follow-through with this requirement? Where will these allowances come from (they’re certainly not going to come without a fight)?

2) Whether the U.S. can demonstrate a plausible pathway to delivering offset tons from forests when cap-and-trade kicks off in 2012.

Forest carbon transactions in voluntary carbon markets accounted for about 7.5 million tons in 2007. With the relatively stringent requirements in the bill for developing countries’ participation in U.S. carbon markets—and the current low levels of market-readiness in many of these countries—how will they be ready to potentially deliver 1 billion or even 100 million tons in 2012? One answer is that they need funding for policy-planning and capacity building, on the order of several billion dollars per year between 2010 and 2012.

The good news is that these needs are being addressed by international negotiators in Bonn as we speak—including a strong U.S. forest team—and through other initiatives. The question is, will it be enough? Should the U.S. allocate substantial additional funds in its FY10, FY11 and FY12 foreign aid budgets to specifically target this issue? Or is there another innovative solution out there?

3) Whether the institutional structure that manages these forest programs can be strengthened.

Currently, the bill places authority to manage the forest set-aside and offsets programs with the EPA, in consultation with the State Department and several other departments. This is not ideal for several reasons. First, although the EPA has expertise in environmental markets, these forest programs will require much greater on-the-ground international development and conservation experience, and international environmental negotiation experience than it possesses. With the amount of funding on the table—about $10 billion per year, as stated before—and the need to get the most bang for the buck, it may make sense to create a specialized agency with expertise in all of these key areas. What should this agency look like? How should it be structured to most effectively manage these new funds and programs?

These are some of the key questions that academics and environmental organizations—including RFF’s climate and forest carbon policy teams—will be seeking to answer over the next several months. If policymakers are going to continue to support strong forest conservation provisions in U.S. climate policy, which many stakeholders would argue are absolutely essential from a scientific and economic perspective, these salient questions will need good, robust answers.

Andrew Stevenson is a research assistant at Resources for the Future and regular contributor to Common Tragedies.

Published: Jun-09-09 | 3 Comments