Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities

Chapter 1. Climate Change and Forestry: An Introduction

Climate change is one of the most significant global challenges of our time, and addressing it requires the urgent formulation of comprehensive and effective policy responses. A changing climate affects nearly every sector of the world’s economy and is intricately intertwined with other major environmental threats such as population growth, desertification and land degradation, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and deforestation. To date, most of the international attention directed toward combating climate change has been strikingly insufficient and focused primarily on the industrial and energy sectors. The agriculture , forestry, and other land use sector—AFOLU in current climate policy jargon—has so far been treated as an unwelcome distraction from tackling industrial and energy-related emissions, rather than being seen as an integral part of the climate change problem for which we must develop comprehensive solutions.1 The resulting bias has led international climate negotiators to disregard the major role forests and agricultural systems play in climate change. In the context of the Kyoto Protocol, widespread controversies and a lack of knowledge made negotiators agree to too little too late.2 This result is not withstanding the recognition in 1997 that, with the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, any attempt to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations will have to bring land-use-related emissions and removals into the equation. According to a 2006 study led by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, the costs of reducing the effects of climate change can be significantly lowered if reduced Climate Change and Forestry: An Introduction charlotte streck, robert o’sullivan, toby janson-smith, and richard tarasofsky 1 3 deforestation and reforestation options are used effectively: “Curbing deforestation is a highly cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and has the potential to offer significant reductions fairly quickly. It also helps preserve biodiversity and protect soil and water quality. Encouraging new forests and enhancing the potential of soils to store carbon offer further opportunities to reverse emissions from land use change.”3 The idea for this book was triggered by the conviction that an effective postKyoto agreement must include a comprehensive system that allows for the accounting of land-use-related emissions and removals and establishes incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation. With a view to the forthcoming debate, we thought the time was ripe to compile existing knowledge, expertise, and experience and make it available in one volume. At the same time we sought to produce a practical reference manual outlining the history of AFOLU in international climate change negotiations, identifying key lessons learned from implementing the various policy frameworks and from actual forestry project experience to date, and drawing on all this to propose solutions for how best to move forward. This book has benefited from contributions and input by the leading forestry and climate change experts in government, international organizations, academe, civil society, and the private sector. In this chapter we provide a short overview of the role of forestry and agriculture in current climate policies—a recurring theme throughout the book. Like the other contributors, we focus our review on potential approaches to incorporating carbon sequestration and emission avoidance into emerging climate policy frameworks , rather than addressing the scientific debate that has surrounded the topic of climate change and forestry, which has already been written about at length. Forestry and Climate Change Forests are the world’s most important terrestrial storehouses of carbon, and they play an important role in controlling its climate. The world’s remaining forest ecosystems store an estimated 638 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon, 283 Gt of which are in the forest biomass alone.4 This is a significant amount of carbon—approximately 50 percent more than all the carbon in the atmosphere. Forest ecosystems are sensitive to climatic change. Over long periods of time plants have adapted to local climatic, atmospheric, and soil conditions, and this, combined with temperature and rainfall patterns, is what characterizes an ecosystem. A change in these variables can dramatically affect species viability. Stress caused by a change in the conditions of an ecosystem may also increase its vulnerability to pests and fires. Thus, massive areas of forests could be lost from these climate-induced threats, which in turn could further accelerate climate change in a vicious positive feedback loop. 4 c. streck, r. o’sullivan, t. janson-smith, and r. tarasofsky On the other hand...