Arguing that the rest of the world is benefiting from their natural wealth without shouldering the cost, a bloc of developing countries led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica plans to make a novel proposition in Montreal this week at the UN conference on climate change, “Pay us, and we will preserve our rain forests,” reports the World Bank press review Wednesday.
The proposal is preliminary, and some experts predict it will be bedeviled by the challenge of finding a fair-market value for nature, as well as international skepticism over whether nations such as Papua New Guinea can shield their forests from illegal logging.
But the idea, which has begun to garner backing from prominent economists, could expand the number of countries interested in joining a new worldwide pact to combat global warming once the current UN treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012.
– Right now, these rain forest nations are providing enormous environmental services to the rest of the world – biodiversity, reduced greenhouse gas emissions – and they are not being compensated, said Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, part of a group of academics at Columbia University championing the proposal.
– From the viewpoint of global economic efficiency, the best use for rain forests is to maintain them as rain forests, added he.
As an incentive to make reductions under the Kyoto pact, countries that slash greenhouse gas emissions can profit by selling “pollution credits” to countries that do not cut emissions enough. Such credits currently are valued at 25 US dollar (155 DKR) per ton of carbon in Europe and are in high demand.
But there is no similar incentive to reward rain forest preservation, despite the elementary scientific understanding that trees consume carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and release sizable quantities of the gas when they burn or decompose.
The group of 10 rain forest nations, which also includes Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala and the DR Congo, is asking the UN to consider expanding the carbon trading market to reward land conservation.
Using existing carbon trading prices as a reference point, some economists have estimated that the rain forest nations over time stand to gain billions of dollars if they are allowed into the market.
Past proposals to compensate countries for preserving rain forests sharply divided environmentalists. Some continue to be concerned that market-based schemes to solve global warming will allow rich nations to effectively buy their way out of reducing greenhouse gases.
– It is sort of the moral equivalent of hiring a domestic. We will pay you to clean our mess, said Daniel Becker, Director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program adding: – For a long time here in America we have believed in the polluter pays principle. This could become a pay to pollute principle.
Environmental groups in Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, question whether the government could stop the rapacious illegal logging that has plagued the Pacific countrys rain forests in recent years.
But many environmental organizations have begun embracing the idea of paying for the preservation of rain forests, arguing that the threat of global warming has become too grave to wait for perfect remedies.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
