Brazil's Amazon forest in mitigating global warming: unresolved controversies

Abstract

Brazil's Amazon rainforest provides an important environmental service with its storage of carbon, thereby reducing global warming. A growing number of projects and proposals intend to reward carbon storage services. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is currently a key issue for negotiations on an international agreement that is to take effect in 2013. Various issues require decisions that will have substantial impacts on both the effectiveness of mitigation and the scale of Amazonia's potential role. These decisions include the effects that money generated from payments can have, the spatial scale of mitigation (e.g. projects or countries and sub-national political units), whether to have voluntary or mandatory markets, and whether these reductions will generate carbon credits to offset emissions elsewhere. It is argued that national-level programmes, combined with a national target under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are the best solution for Brazil in terms of both capturing international funding and stimulating the major cuts in global emissions that are needed to minimize climate risk to the Amazon rainforest. The high likelihood of passing a tipping point for maintaining the Amazon rainforest implies the need for urgency in altering current negotiating positions.La forêt tropicale amazonienne du Brésil fournit un service environnemental important en vertu du stockage de carbone, de ce fait réduisant l'impact le réchauffement planétaire. Un nombre croissant de projets et de propositions visent à récompenser les services de stockage de carbone. La Réduction des émissions de la déforestation et la dégradation des forêts (REDD) est un enjeu actuel clé pour les négociations sur un accord international devant entrer en vigueur en 2013. Diverses questions exigent des décisions qui auront un impact considérable sur l'efficacité des mesures d'atténuation ainsi que l'ampleur du rôle potentiel de l'Amazonie. Ces décisions portent sur les questions suivantes: quelle peut être la portée des fonds générés par les paiements; quelle est l'échelle spatiale des actions d'atténuation (par exemple projets, pays ou unités politiques sous-nationales); avoir des marchés volontaires ou obligatoires; et si ces réductions généreraient des crédits de carbone pour compenser les émissions ailleurs. Il est soutenu que des programmes nationaux, unis à une cible nationale sous l'égide de la Convention Cadre des Nations Unies sur les Changements Climatiques, est la meilleure solution pour le Brésil en vue de capturer un financement international tout en stimulant des réductions importantes des émissions mondiales requises pour minimiser les risques climatiques pour la forêt amazonienne. La forte probabilité de passage à un point de basculement pour le maintien de la forêt amazonienne implique la nécessité d'urgence à modifier les positions actuelles de négociation.

Advocacy coalitions, REDD+, and forest governance in Papua New Guinea: how likely is transformational change?

“…The role of tropical forests in global climate change mitigation has received increasing international attention over the past decade (Fearnside 2000, Soares-Filho et al 2010, Fearnside 2012. Proposals to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks (REDD+) have gained momentum in international climate change negotiations (Angelsen et al 2009), and many developing countries are currently in the process of formulating national REDD+ policies and strategies (see, e.g., UN-REDD Programme 2009).…”

New Allometric Equations to Support Sustainable Plantation Management of Rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora Ducke) in the Central Amazon

“…In addition, it is important to point out that the allometric equations developed contribute to carbon stock assessment [55], introducing rosewood cultivation among land-use change options that generate revenues from the conservation of forest carbon stocks [56]. Plantation forestry is among the options for mitigation of deforestation and carbon emissions proposed for the Amazon [46,[57][58][59]. The carbon outflows are associated with deforestation by agriculture, timber commercial exploitation, and soil oxidation, while the entrance is related to reforestation and recovery of forest vegetation [20].…”

Avoided deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia: Simulating the effect of the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve

“…For this reason, financial mechanisms have been promoted to obtain resources for conservation of the tropical forests, such as Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) projects (Nepstad et al, 2007;Stickler et al, 2009). REDD mechanisms are the subject of considerable controversy concerning their effectiveness, their social and economic impacts and their proper place in global-warming mitigation (see reviews by Angelsen (2008), Moutinho et al (2011) and Fearnside (2011Fearnside ( , 2012). Brazilian federal and state governments consider REDD to be an important instrument for combating deforestation and valuing tropical forests for one of their environmental services, thereby mitigating climatic change (SDS, 2008).…”

“…''Additionality,'' or the reduction of emissions as compared to what would have occurred without the project, is established by comparing monitored results with a hypothetical baseline representing the projection of deforestation and greenhouse-gas emissions in a no-project scenario. Depending on the approach and the assumptions considered in the simulation model, modeled baselines can be either higher or lower than baselines that simply extrapolate historical deforestation (Fearnside, 2011;Parker et al, 2009). There is concern that REDD projects could only displace deforestation to locations outside the limits of the project, that is, they result in ''leakage'' .…”