Word: noel
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Right now in Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, a day's drive over rutted tracks northeast of the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, they're counting the trees. Members of nearby indigenous communities, with help from the Bolivian green group Friends of Nature Foundation (FAN) and the American nonprofit the Nature Conservancy (TNC), have fanned out across the Noel Kempff's 4.2 million acres (1.7 million ha), which range from Amazon rain forest to dry savanna. In the footsteps of howler monkeys and endangered black jaguars, they follow mapped plots in the forest, drive stakes into the ground and measure...
...protected area should be lost. To prevent leakage - the possibility that protecting one place will only move deforestation down the road - TNC in Bolivia measured the baseline rate of deforestation in the country to know just how much difference their efforts would make, and monitors the edges of Noel Kempff for forest loss. Third-party verifiers like the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance and the Voluntary Carbon Standard help assure companies that their credits are worth the carbon and that local forest communities are helped and not harmed by the potential flood of REDD financing...
...spike in demand for avoided deforestation projects, as developed countries angle to meet new carbon caps and tropical nations start to turn their forests into cash. But doing a REDD project right isn't easy, points out Zoe Kant, TNC's carbon markets manager and the brains behind the Noel Kempff project: experts are few, locales are remote and most countries lack the technical capacity to run schemes on their own. Some places will be tempted to take shortcuts. "We have to make sure our standards are credible, and we're not just delivering money that ends...
...that will demand technological innovations we haven't yet thought of. But halting deforestation, while not cheap - Britain's Stern Review in 2006 pegged the price at $5 to $15 billion a year - is doable now, provided we have the political will. If you want to know why, visit Noel Kempff. Its biological value was incalculable, but to the people who lived in the forest, its only financial value lay in dead logs. REDD changes that - and with 29% of the carbon revenue from the project promised to local communities, it can change their lives too. "We finally have...
...dire has the piracy problem become that several international shipping companies have chosen to abandon the shortcut through the Suez Canal that requires their vessels to pass the Somali coast, and instead route them around South Africa. "As long as there is no firm deterrent, attacks will continue," said Noel Choong, chief of the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur. "The risks are low, and the returns are so high." And not only for the pirates, either...