Is our government helping the logging industry cut holes in the global climate negotiations? - Part 1

We highlight illegal logging in the Amazon. Logging is a notoriously badly regulated industry. But could the logging industry be trying to stitch up the global climate negotiations?

Our Forest for Climate campaigning work is based around a simple premise: From the point of view of controlling climate change, deforestation is bad news.

Each year deforestation is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the global transport sector, or to put it another way, more than either China or the US. Chopping and clearing forests accounts for almost one fifth of global man-made emissions.

But where there's a problem, there's also an opportunity. The sheer, massive scale of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere from chopping trees down means that stopping deforestation could be one of the cheapest and quickest ways to cut man-made emissions. That's why there's a whole track of the UN climate change talks just to do with forestry - called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

REDD is all about money - the countries negotiating it are trying to find a way to pay people to preserve forests, rather than chop them down by making sure that the trees are worth more if they are left standing. And surely this is a good thing, because what we're ultimately talking about is a cheap way to a) cut our carbon emissions massively, and b) stop destroying forests, which usually means killing all of the creatures that live in them and damaging people's homes and livelihoods.

Surely this can only be a win-win situation? You'd think. But it's all a bit more complicated than that, because lots of people have lots of competing ideas about how a deal on REDD should be structured.

The biggest questions are about how money to preserve forests will be raised, exactly what it is for, and how it should be distributed. Greenpeace and other NGOs advocate a relatively simple system for paying people to not cut down forests. How would this work? We suggest that for each forest country you'd establish a baseline for where forests are at right now, and monitor what happens to them using satellite imagery and on-the-ground research. Developing countries who accurately monitor and report on their mitigation actions would receive a higher return for their services, providing a strong incentive for countries to continually improve their forest protection programmes. It's about as straightforward as you can make it and has as its first priority the protection of intact forests - and the carbon they store.

However, there are other approaches. Some advocate a system of so-called net carbon accounting, under which you'd try to work out the amount of carbon stored in trees, assign a numerical value of carbon credits to areas of forest, and allow these credits to be traded against emissions reductions or increases in other parts of the world. Under this scenario, it would be possible to receive REDD money for cutting down intact rainforests and putting in monoculture plantations, so long as you could produce accounts showing that there had been a net increase in carbon stored. this kind of system is also supported by the logging industry - hardly at the forefront of forest protection - which advocates a more complicated system that, believe it or not, would actually allow them access to REDD money for continuing to cut down forests. Others propose REDD funding at a local or project level, which would allow for money to be paid over - but deforestation to just be displaced to another area.

You'd probably assume that any plans to let the loggers get away with this kind of scheme would be laughed out of the UN. You'd probably also assume that the British government would have no truck with such dodgy goings-on. Unfortunately, it looks like you might assume wrong, because it looks like our government might be trying to help cut some chainsaw-sized holes into global forest agreements - and I'll talk more about that in another blog post...