BONN, Germany — Developing nations should be paid to preserve tropical rain
forests from the Amazon to Africa as part of a drive to slow deforestation and
global warming, a Papua New Guinea delegate said on Tuesday.
Most efforts to rein in global warming, widely blamed on a build-up of
greenhouse gases, have so far focused on curbing emissions of carbon dioxide
from cars, power plants and heavy industries.
"Forests are our assets and should be valued," said Robert Aisi, Papua New
Guinea's representative to a two-day 190-nation climate seminar in Bonn on ways
to widen the U.N. Kyoto protocol on slowing climate change.
The international treaty sets caps on gas emissions from factories, power plants
and cars in developed nations as a step to avert potentially catastrophic
climate changes this century and entered into force on Feb. 16 despite a U.S.
pullout.
Under the extension plan, farmers in the developing world would get a cash
incentive to preserve trees, which soak up greenhouse gases as they grow, rather
than sell them to loggers or cut them down to make way for crops.
"The loggers come in and tell villagers we'll give you $10 for your tree -- then
they cut it down and sell it for $1,000. Who wins? We lose because we get land
degradation. The whole world loses," Aisi told Reuters.
"The commercial value of cutting down our forests is now far higher than
retaining them," he said. He said Papua New Guinea's rainforest was third
biggest in the world after those in the Amazon and Congo.
A new system would hand out credits to farmers for averting deforestation that
could be traded on an international market, mirroring a European Union scheme to
squeeze industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, he said.
Details of how forestry credits would be allocated and policed were yet to be
worked out, Aisi said.
He added that the scientific panel that advises the United Nations estimated
20-25 percent of global greenhouse gases in the 1990s stemmed from land-use
changes, mainly deforestation.
Carbon constitutes about half the weight of a tree, and wood and roots begin to
release carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for warming the planet, as soon as
they begin to rot.
Aisi said a similar idea for forests had been suggested in vain some years ago.
Many countries said it would be impossible to monitor -- trees might simply be
cut from another forest.
But Aisi said satellite measurements were more accurate now and could be used to
measure the size of all tropical forests to avoid cheating.