Forests & climate change

By Diana Weinhold

Academic research on land use and deforestation generally tries to uncover the underlying reasons for people’s and companies’ actions on the environment. For example, academics may investigate the impact of road building on agricultural expansion, how property rights change land clearing, or how agricultural labor supply affects cropping patterns.

Simulation exercises like SimPachamama (whether or not in a ‘game’ form), however, essentially work like thought experiments – if the world worked like this, what would happen if we did that.  As such, a simulation cannot answer fundamental questions of causality: what caused what. But what they can do is allow us to consider some possible outcomes of complex interactions between all the factors considered important (see Ben Groom’s piece for more information). In other words, given that academic research has found these causal relationships to be important, how would we expect the economy and environment to evolve over time under different policy choices? The outcomes from such an exercise should thus not be considered a scientific forecast, and presenting the simulation as a game is thus useful for framing the results as what they are – a hypothetical outcome from a hypothetical economy, albeit one based on current academic scholarship. Read More »

Leelo en español AQUÍ 

By Tracey Li*

Much is written about the need to reduce deforestation and replant the forests that have been logged for human use and economic development. This is because trees are needed for fighting climate change and vital to the very survival of the planet. But what is it exactly that makes trees and other plants so special?

Climate change is caused, at least partly, by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases which accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere and trap heat. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, is the leading international body for assessing this phenomenon. Read More »

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By Ioulia Fenton

According to Conservation International‘s 2009 book, The Wealth of Nature, ecosystems support and regulate all natural processes on earth, while contributing to cultural, social, and economic benefits to human communities. These have become known as ecosystem services and, according to the Rainforest Conservation Fund (RCF), they would cost trillions of dollars per year if human beings had to provide them for themselves. Here are just five types of many of the ecosystem services provided to people and planet by the world’s rainforests:

1.      Supporting. The rainforest supports a number of natural cycles and processes. According to RCF, for example, many tropical rainforests live “on the edge”—they receive very few inputs of nutrients from the outside. This means that they have to produce most nutrients themselves. When a rainforest is whole it acts as a closed loop system and recycles the nutrients it has created. Without tree cover, these would be lost and the forest would not survive. Read More »

By Ben Groom

To try to begin to save what’s left of the world’s forests it is important to first ask: Who deforests and why? While this varies considerably in different contexts, some broad patterns exist. Loggers and farmers or cattle ranchers are the ‘actors’ that typically clear forests, but what they do to their land is determined by the political and economic systems that they find themselves in: the prevailing institutions, markets and policies. Chief among the institutional determinants are property rights: that is who owns the rights to the land and timber and how this ownership is regulated and enforced. Of the many economic determinants, the nature of land markets, local labor markets, and migration in and out of the locale are key. Where institutions are weak and markets fail to reflect the full economic value of standing forest cause for concern is warranted. Read More »

Léelo en español AQUÍ  

By Valerie Giesen*

According to a recent study funded by the World Bank and published in Science magazine, tropical land use change was responsible for 7 to 14 percent of gross human-induced carbon emissions between 2000 and 2005. Forests are valuable storage places for large amounts of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming when it enters the earth’s atmosphere. This is because plants absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂) and transform it into energy necessary for growing in a process called photosynthesis (for details, see the Exactly how do trees fight climate change article by Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD) researcher Tracey Li). Land use changes such as clearing forests for agriculture or construction mean that forests are less able to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it. Additionally, burning trees—which, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are made up of around 50 percent carbon—to clear land releases the carbon that was previously stored in the them. Read More »

By: Diana Weinhold*

Policies designed with the intention of making employment more secure tend to make employment less secure. Policies implemented to ensure that the poor can obtain housing often reduce residential options for low income families. Again and again, we observe that policy intentions and consequences are, at best, loosely correlated, and occasionally even completely at odds with each other.

Thus, we must take care to carefully think through the potential consequences of policies designed – with every good intention – to simultaneously reduce deforestation and improve human well-being. For example, two channels through which such policies could lead to unintended consequences are through its impact on the local labour market and its impact on rural-to-urban migration.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

The Bolivian government has taken a strong stance against the international REDD+ mechanism, mainly because it reduces forests to a simple commodity to be traded in international carbon emissions markets. This would not only imply trading an invisible product (CO₂ emissions), but – even more complicated – trading the lack of the invisible product (reduced CO₂ emissions). Keeping track of the lack of this invisible product is so obviously difficult that both transaction costs and corruption associated with an international REDD+ mechanism would likely be enormous, thus leaving few benefits for the forest, the forest communities, and the global climate.

However, as President Evo Morales expressed in his letter of October 2010 (see box), there are many other ways of empowering local communities to protect their forests. Bolivia is currently formulating an alternative proposal for reducing deforestation through a Joint Mechanism of Mitigation and Adaptation for the Integral and Sustainable Management of Forests.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

“Nature is like love: one of the most beautiful things on earth,
but if you put a price on it, it becomes prostitution.”
Nele Marien

Every time somebody converts a hectare of forest into a hectare of agricultural land, they have – implicitly or explicitly – compared the value of standing forest to the value of agricultural land, arriving at the conclusion that agricultural land is more valuable to them.

The calculation they have made is probably quite accurate, because millions of years of evolution have made people quite good at evaluating which of two options is best for the survival of their family.

However, what they do not take into account is that the standing forest is also valuable to other people than their immediate family. To people nearby, to people far away, to people living now and to people living in the future, and even to other species. The benefits that other people derive from your forest are called positive externalities, and even millions of years of evolution have not prepared people to take these into account.

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By: Charles Palmer*

Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+), if implemented and financed on a broad scale in numerous countries across the world, promises to revolutionise forest and conservation policy. Yet, there remains much uncertainty regarding long-term finance and the mechanisms by which it might be delivered. Uncertainty also plagues the precise form of any future REDD+ regime(s). Project-scale activities to manage, protect, and increase terrestrial carbon stocks are, however, likely to be co-ordinated and managed via national-level policy frameworks. Such frameworks have begun to emerge, for example, in Guyana. Thus, future REDD+ regimes may not lean towards the standalone, project-based approach of many NGOs operating in tropical countries nor follow that of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

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By: Juan Carlos Ledezma*

In the year of 1971, the Regional Corporation for Development in La Paz Region (CORDEPAZ) was created. It’s main development proposal, with the name “March towards the North”, put forward three different production strategies: i) the creation of a regional development hotspot centered in the San Buenaventura municipality, ii) the construction of a hydro electrical dam in the Bala region, and iii) exploration for fossil fuels in the area for their further extraction. In order to implement these strategies, the construction of roads and promotion of colonization would be required. The main goals of the CORDEPAZ project were eventually not met. However, the construction of roads and the arrival of colonizers from the highlands did take place (nowadays know as intercultural peoples), leading to the occupation of important terrestrial surfaces that itself led to human settlements and the arrival of logging companies.

As a result of this process, by the year 2012, 124,764 hectares have been deforested in Ixiamas, San Buenaventura, and Rurrenabaque with increasing deforestation rates from 2001. In 2009, this region had 35,000 inhabitants out of which 47% lived in rural areas and earning a living through agriculture, cattle ranching, logging, and fishing. Land titles in the region are distributed among protected areas (Madidi and Pilón Lajas), TCOs (Indigenous territories: Tacana I and II, Araona, Uchipiamona, and Pilón Lajas), communal lands, privately owned lands, and public lands (figure 1).

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