Word: redd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...international carbon cap-and-trade system organized by the Kyoto Protocol only recognizes industrial projects - such as a rich country paying to improve energy efficiency at a power plant - or programs to actively reforest land already cleared. It doesn't recognize avoided deforestation - also known by the acronym REDD, for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. With timber and biofuel plantations so valuable, that means "rain forests are worth more dead than alive," says Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of forestry institutions. But a handful of pilot projects, like the one in Noel Kempff...
Advocates have been busy refining avoided deforestation to answer early criticisms. Because firms investing in carbon credits need to estimate how much deforestation would have happened without a scheme, REDD projects can only work in countries with high rates of deforestation. That alleviates concerns that money will be spent to protect forests under no threat. To address fears that protected forests might be lost through a fire or logging, brokers build in reserves - selling, for example, only 80% of the carbon actually contained within a forest, and tapping the remainder if some part of the protected area should be lost...
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...
More than a decade after Kyoto was signed, however, that opposition has eased. (The holdouts, like Greenpeace, tend to be 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...
...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 cap of its own - to explore avoided deforestation projects. The possibility of tapping into California's rich carbon markets has tropical...