Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...climate change summit in Bali - hosted by Indonesia, home to some of the world's most extensive tropical forests - that's begun to change. Though negotiators still need to work out the details, nations here agreed to put deforestation and forest degradation - the damage of woodlands, which can also release carbon - as a main element of the climate change deal that will eventually succeed the Kyoto Protocol. That will eventually open up a new market that could be worth billions, as industrialized nations that need to reduce carbon emissions could choose to pay tropical nations like Brazil and Indonesia...
...that causes global warming, and you'll likely picture a polluting factory in China; neon lights in Tokyo, an SUV sitting in traffic on the freeways of Santa Monica. But while industry, electricity and transportation all add to the greenhouse effect, there's another villain less well known: our forests. Or, rather, the lack of them. Forests, especially in the lush tropics, suck and store carbon, which is released when trees are cut down or burnt. At the current rate of destruction, deforestation is estimated to account for up to 20% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The amount...
That works by putting a market value on standing forests. A tropical forest stores carbon, recycles moisture, provides a haven for biodiversity - but its only monetary value lies in being cut down. "The main trigger behind deforestation is that there's little or no value for standing forests," says Paulo Moutinho, who studies Brazilian forests for the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). Put a value on forests in the carbon market, and suddenly it makes sense to leave a tree be, rather than clear it for cheap pastureland. The value doesn't even have to be that high...
...vast as the Amazon - where 17 square miles are cut down each day - has long been considered all but impossible. There are also concerns about "leakage," the possibility that if one paid for a project to save trees in one area, logging would simply move to another, unprotected forest - and the saved CO2 would leak. But new space imaging, much of it done by the Japanese Land Observing Satellite (ALOS), can collect precise data on the rate and type of deforestation, even through clouds - pretty important, given that the Amazon alone recycles trillions of tons of moisture every year...
...implications of this, combined with desertification, species extinction and accelerated climate change from the release of carbon stored in forests, are all too clear. Unfortunately, the E.U. and the Kyoto CO2 trading systems effectively exclude forest carbon offsets because regulators and politicians became captives of the anticapitalist NGO community and their own native suspicion of free markets. This is both perverse, as it makes it harder and more expensive to mitigate climate change, and immoral - because it denies the resources required by the poorest to adapt...