Just 7 percent of the Brazil’s Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth’s richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon’s. On the way here, our group—led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.
But our journey is not focused on the rare creatures in the forest. It’s about the forest itself—the trees that are our partners in respiration, inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing the carbon in their trunks and leaves. That simple process makes them one of Earth’s most potent bulwarks against climate change (a.k.a. a “carbon sink”); but when they are cut and burned, all that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Already, some 32 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed each year, an amount of land equivalent to the state of Mississippi’s; deforestation, according to the United Nations, is responsible for roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Between 2000 and 2002, the US-based Nature Conservancy struck an alliance with three of the planet’s leading carbon emitters: General Motors, Chevron, and American Electric Power. Together the corporations gave the environmental group $18 million to purchase 50,000 acres of Brazilian Atlantic forest, much of which had been degraded by grazing. Three reserves were created: Serra do Itaqui, financed with $5 million from AEP; Morro da Mina, paid for with $3 million from Chevron; and Cachoeira, underwritten by $10 million from GM. (GM’s role in the project survived the company’s bankruptcy, which means that the tries now partially owned by you and me.) SVPS was brought in to manage the reserves, which together form one contiguous forest known as the Guaraqueçaba Environmental Protection Area. You’ll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy’s website as an example of corporate partnerships that make “an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity.” What you won’t see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.
The trees in the Cachoeira reserve could never offset even a fraction of GM’s total carbon footprint—a single Hummer H2 (which the company started producing the same year it signed on to the Guaraqueçaba project) would require about 50 trees to offset. But the Nature Conservancy and its partners aimed to use the Brazilian reserves as a test case for preserving forests via corporate carbon credits. “The investors wanted to be pioneers in the carbon-sink field,” de Britez explains. “They had in mind to start working on this before other companies.”
All three companies, as it happens, had aggressively lobbied the Clinton administration against signing the 1997 Kyoto climate accord and stayed mum when President Bush withdrew from it. But they hedged their bets, figuring that the Brazilian forests could be turned into offsets to sell in places (like Europe) where Kyoto’s emission limits did apply, or could be held in reserve in case the US ever established its own limits.
By the time the companies were ready to begin preparing their credits for sale, however, the UN had refused to allow “avoided deforestation” projects—those that buy forestland and then promise not to cut the trees—as an offset for industries seeking to buy their way out of emission limits. Credits generated from projects like Guaraqueçaba were excluded from the international carbon market launched by Kyoto, a market that now accounts for more than $126 billion in offset transactions. The offsets could be sold, however, in the United States, where the $700 million domestic carbon offset market is unregulated (and where prices are generally half those of Kyoto-regulated offsets).
Manyu Chang, a forest scientist who is the coordinator for climate policy for the state of Paraná, explained the problem with avoided-deforestation credits to me at her office in the state capital of Curitiba. For starters, she said, trees—living beings, after all—are far less predictable than, say, windmills. They are subject to the vagaries of fires and disease, both of which are increasing due to climate change. Each species absorbs carbon at different rates depending on factors like the altitude, soil, and weather. Then there’s the problem of “leakage”—when deforestation simply shifts from protected zones to unprotected ones, creating no overall emissions reduction. And finally, the UN did not want to open the door to a perverse sort of extortion: A country could threaten to open its lands to logging unless it was paid to not do so.
More fundamentally, Chang notes, when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: “Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?” José Miguez, one of Brazil’s top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. “The forest is there,” he said. “You can’t guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change.”
THERE IS ANOTHER vexing question inherent in preserving forests: What happens to the people who use the land? Efforts to protect biodiversity in the dwindling wildlands of the world have increasingly run into a discomfiting tension between the impulse toward absolute preservation and the needs of people—many of them indigenous—who have lived sustainably in forestlands for decades or centuries. Such tensions are playing out in the new economics of carbon offsets.
For many generations, the Guaraqueçaba forest was home to the Guarani Indians, but their dominion waned as the Brazilian government encouraged subsistence farmers to settle and clear the land. Today the two populations coexist, living alongside the reserves or in communities nearby and relying on what remains of the forest for everything from food to building materials. There are more than a dozen villages around the three reserves, linked by dirt roads and river tributaries traveled by canoe. Most are home to just a few dozen people living in structures of wood and reeds. Jonas de Souza is a 33-year-old farmer who grew up a quarter of a mile from the forest that is now part of the GM-funded Cachoeira reserve. His family grows bananas, cocoa, and coffee on a small plot. He remembers hunting for small prey—roast paca, a large rodent, is a local delicacy—and collecting seeds and hearts of palm. But now, signs have gone up at the edge of the forest: No hunting, fishing, or removal of vegetation. A state police force, the Força Verde, or Green Police, patrols the three reserves, as well as a larger state-sanctioned preservation area, to enforce the restrictions.
“We have been here, and still the forests haven’t disappeared. Still the rivers aren’t contaminated. Still the biodiversity isn’t extinct.” de Souza said.
One of the goals of the Green Police is to prevent large-scale poaching, particularly of the endangered and highly valuable hearts of palm, as well as exotic primates and birds.
By excluding villagers from the forests, says Jutta Kill, a researcher with the Forests and the European Union Resource Network who has spent months interviewing locals about the project, the reserves are pulling out the communities’ lifeline. “In this area,” she says, “everyone is cash poor but no one goes hungry. If you take the forest away, you take away everything. The preservation projects here are designed to generate offsets for the largest polluters, and they’re doing it by cutting off people from the land.” Few of the people here have motors on their boats, she notes; even fewer own cars. People with some of the smallest carbon footprints on Earth are being displaced by companies with some of the biggest.
The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is, potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon in Brazil’s forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that carbon where it is. The question now being debated in Washington and Copenhagen is whether the fate of the forests—and their people—will rest on the ability of industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions closer to home.
– from motherjones.com By Mark Schapiro