Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities

Edited by:
  • Charlotte Streck,
  • Robert O'Sullivan,
  • Toby Janson-Smith &
  • Richard G. Tarasofsky
Chatham House: 2008. 360 pp. £39.99 9780815781929 | ISBN: 978-0-8157-8192-9

Planting, conserving and managing forests are key for attaining long-term mitigation of greenhouse gases, yet the land-use and forestry sector barely features in the Kyoto Protocol. In Climate Change and Forests, some 50 experts analyse the forestry-based discussions within climate-change negotiations, and offer technical and political reasons for why the Kyoto Protocol handles forestry in such a cumbersome way.

Each year, forests release 30% more carbon than is emitted by fossil-fuel burning. Credit: G. LUDWIG/PANOS

The authors argue that in the run-up to the 1997 Kyoto conference, the forestry sector's complexities were ignored in negotiations because knowledge about using forests as carbon sinks was limited at the time. This failure to resolve the contributions of forests has meant that rules formulated since then are not conducive to improving the ability of forests to sequester large amounts of additional carbon. The book provides an excellent historical background and describes the process and logic of negotiations, past and present. The multiple analyses of technical problems associated with carbon sequestration and forests make it valuable to both newcomers and veterans in the field.

Case studies demonstrate that the right incentives or policies to change land usage must vary between countries. In developing nations, for example, legal owners of land where carbon sinks could be enhanced are often absent or difficult to identify. Without knowing which people and actions are genuine candidates for carbon-incentive payments, the market-based instruments that help administer these incentives risk losing their efficiency. Experimentation is necessary and may involve many failures before success is achieved.

Although this collection includes many voices, most belong to a single camp that favours market-based instruments for encouraging changes in land use towards carbon storage. This fails to reflect the diversity of opinion in global discussions, and the book would have benefited from the inclusion of some critics. Also missing is evidence for why market-based instruments are superior to other policy interventions. The authors mention the preconditions for markets to work — property rights, legal and regulatory frameworks — but give only vague arguments for how policies could be engineered to support the use of forests in storing more carbon on meaningful scales.

The greatest opportunities for forest-based mitigation of carbon emissions are in the developing world, and the most efficient window in which to stop deforestation is between now and 2030. However, the book fails to address how carbon markets in developing countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, could be made to operate on a large scale in an institutional vacuum. It is unclear which sources will generate the tens of billions of dollars per year that are needed, for example, to reduce deforestation by half in the coming decades. The funding issue is exacerbated by the current financial crisis that emerged after the book was written.

Climate Change and Forests emphasizes the difficulty of sequestering carbon in forests, given their vulnerability to disturbances that re-emit carbon, such as forest fires. But the book neglects issues of climate adaptation. Forests will take centuries to adapt to the disruptive processes that accompany climate change, making forest carbon stores vulnerable in the long term.

More carbon is locked in forests than in the atmosphere, and the yearly carbon flux attributed to natural disturbances is 30% higher than current emissions of fossil fuels. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a multibillion-dollar fund to support climate-adaptation measures is being set up. I hope the authors are planning a new book to analyse how the mechanisms around this fund will interact with and strengthen forest-mitigation instruments in the post-Kyoto era. Like Climate Change and Forests, this second volume would be a crucial reference for academics, negotiators and policy-makers, and for the forest business community.