Can reducing deforestation really save the planet?

One of the climate protection initiatives being discussed in Copenhagen is "reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries" ("REDD"). In fact, Obama endorsed the concept in Oslo last week, according to this report from Climate Progress:

President Barack Obama "made his first public intervention in the Copenhagen climate summit" by supporting the Norway-Brazil plan to allow rich countries to fund the protection of rainforests. "I am very impressed," Obama said after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, "with the model that has been built between Norway and Brazil that allows for effective monitoring and ensures that we are making progress in avoiding deforestation of the Amazon."

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a very helpful discussion of important REDD concepts such as stocks vs. flows of CO2, additionality, leakage, carbon market offsets, and national baselines. It concludes by saying that, as a practical matter, REDD can only work if operated at a national level, with a national emissions baseline, effective monitoring, and demonstrated reduction of emissions at the national level. Not only are those requirements likely to overwhelm the institutional competence and integrity of developing nations, but it doesn't deal with the problem that deforestation effectively controlled in one participating nation may "leak" into a non-participating nation.

The same Climate Progress post goes on to report some possible progress in monitoring technology:

International approval for the Norway-Brazil proposal for a Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism still has a ways to go, especially as targets for reductions of deforestation have not yet been determined. In a possible breakthrough for the integrity of such programs, Google presented tools for the accurate monitoring of the rates of deforestation via climate satellite data.

But today's news on the institutional side is not good:

In Copenhagen, officials from China and India have vowed to reduce carbon intensity, while other fast-developing countries like Brazil and South Africa also have taken pledges to reduce carbon. But they are fiercely protecting the right to make those goals voluntary -- or at least not subject to any penalties if they do go under review.

REDD is of great interest in industrialized nations because of the prospect that emitters there can defer or avoid emissions reductions by buying REDD "offsets," and financial institutions are very eager to participate in those transactions. I see a big risk that the US and Europe will eventually agree to a program that serves these business interests and does not actually protect the climate.

Update on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 10:21AM by Skeptic

From Robert Stavins favorable assessment of the results of the COP-15 conference that ended last week in Copenhagen:

9.      The developed countries commit to a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion annually by 2020 from sources both public and private.

Assessment: It is important that the Accord notes that the funds can come from either public or private sources.  Governments can — through the right domestic and international policy arrangements — provide key incentives for the private sector to provide the needed finance through foreign direct investments for emissions mitigation (clearly a role exists for government assistance for adaptation).  For example, if the cap-and-trade systems which are emerging throughout the industrialized world as the favored domestic approach to reducing CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions are linked together through the existing, common emission-reduction-credit system, namely the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), then powerful incentives can be created for carbon-friendly private investment in the developing world.

Clearly the CDM, as it currently stands, cannot live up to this promise, but with appropriate reforms there is significant potential.  Of course, problems of limited additionality will inevitably remain.  Therefore, what is needed is for the key emerging economies to take on meaningful emission targets themselves (even if equivalent to business as usual in the short term), and then participate directly in international cap-and-trade, not government-government trading as envisioned in Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol (which will not work), but firm-firm trading through linked national and multi-national cap-and-trade systems.

Such private finance stands a much greater chance than government aid of being efficiently employed, that is, targeted to reducing emissions, rather than spent by poor nations on other (possibly meritorious) purposes.

(Emphasis added.) This well illustrates my concern that US negotiators (with whom Stavins is well connected) are so determined to have a world-wide private trading program that they are willing to overlook the fact that "problems of additionality will inevitably remain."  Down that road lies a program that generates lots of transaction fees, provides developed nation money to elites in developing nations, and let's CO2 emitters in the developed world escape obligations to do things that would actually reduce CO2 emissions.