Tag Archives: UN-REDD

By Dr Charles Palmer*

The release of the Stern Review in 2006, which looked at a wide range of evidence to estimate the cost of a changing climate, was an important milestone in our understanding of the economics of climate change. It made a convincing economic case for protecting the climate function of forests, particularly with respect to tropical forests. Until Stern, biomass in such forests, both below and above ground, were long known to store vast quantities of carbon, the release of which was contributing to anthropogenic climate change.  While the term ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ (REDD) had not yet been coined, Stern demonstrated that slowing down deforestation had the potential to be a cost-effective strategy in the fight to mitigate against some of the effects of climate change. Read More »

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 May 2013 Exactly how to 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.

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