UN launches programme to cut deforestation emissions

The UN launched a programme that it hopes could be the foundation for a system in which rich countries would pay poor ones to slow climate change by protecting and planting forests.

The new programme, called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Program, or UN-REDD, will assist nine developing countries, including Bolivia, Indonesia and Zambia, in establishing systems to monitor, assess and report forest cover.

"Forests are worth more alive than dead... and their ecosystem services and benefits are worth billions if not trillions of dollars if only we capture these in economic models," said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

Clearing forests for timber and farmland in developing nations emits nearly 20 per cent of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, according to the UN's climate science panel. Trees store heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they rot or are burned.

Tropical countries are pushing to include UN-REDD in the successor to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Delegates representing countries around the globe are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen at the end of next year in hopes of hammering out a successor to the pact, which expires in 2012.

Under such a plan, the tropical countries would generate tradable carbon credits by saving and planting trees. Indonesia, for example, has the potential to be compensated €682 million a year if its deforestation rate was reduced to one million hectares annually, the UN estimated.

Presumably, rich countries would buy the credits to meet their own emission limits, like the way EU countries have invested in credits representing emissions cuts generated by clean energy projects in poor countries.

Not everyone agrees such a programme would be a good idea. Barry Gardiner, British Prime Minister special envoy for forests, said in an interview earlier this month that the model of avoided deforestation is flawed and risks alienating voters in rich countries.

Mr Gardiner proposed instead that rich countries should simply make payments to tropical nations based on the size of existing forests. If countries continued to log or burn they could be expelled from the scheme.