Word: forests
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...Forest of Problems Avoided deforestation seems like a no-brainer - so why wasn't it included in the Kyoto Protocol? Ironically, it was omitted in part due to the work of a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They feared that avoided deforestation schemes could flood the trading market with countless cheap carbon credits; after all, there are an estimated 638 billion tons of carbon locked in the world's forests. If even a fraction of those credits are put on the market, it could let developed countries off the hook when it comes to making the hard changes...
Then there is the problem of compliance. Who can guarantee that a "protected" forest won't go up in flames in a few years, or even be logged, rendering the credits useless? And if a REDD project succeeds in preventing a vulnerable forest from being ruined, won't loggers just move down the road, or to another country - again, with no net benefit for the climate...
...first, skeptics also fretted that countries with high rates of deforestation - Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria - tend to rank high for corruption, making them less-than-reliable partners. "The environmental community developed a distaste for forest offsets, for a lot of valid reasons," says Bill Stanley, director of TNC's Global Climate Change Initiative...
...skeptical of market-based solutions to climate change in general, not just REDD.) That's partly thanks to a better understanding that "if deforestation is 20% of the problem, it should be 20% of the solution," according to Benoit Bosquet, team leader of the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, which helps developing countries prepare for REDD projects. Tree-spotting has improved; Japan's alos satellite uses cloud-penetrating radar to detect deforestation even in the rainy Amazon, making projects cheaper to police...
Most importantly, the tropical nations that stand to benefit most from avoided deforestation began to make their voices heard in international climate talks, thanks to innovative leaders like Papua New Guinea's Kevin Conrad, one of TIME's Heroes of the Environment. That has prompted big rain-forest nations like Indonesia and Brazil, which were initially suspicious of exposing their sovereign forests to an international carbon market, to rethink REDD. Last month, representatives from a handful of Indonesian and Brazilian states signed a memorandum of understanding with several large U.S. states - including California, which has already adopted a carbon...