Word: forest
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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...
...recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear, the effects of climate change will be felt most significantly in the developing world. Fortunately, forest carbon storage is most efficient in the tropics and subtropics. Tropical forests also harbor more than half of life on earth, generate rainfall and provide shelter, food, medicine and energy to 1.6 billion of the people most vulnerable to climate change...
...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...
...biodiesel boom has a high environmental cost, however. Critics say it's contributing to global warming. Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting not only eliminates one of the planet's crucial air-filtration systems, the process also releases even more carbon dioxide into the air, in smoke or as gases released during the decomposition of forest waste. Annual clearing of Indonesia's carbon-rich peatlands alone releases some 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases, according to a Greenpeace report. Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter...