Hard sell

Hard sell
Guy Shrubsole
June 28, 2007
Saving the rainforests is an effective and cheap way of cutting carbon emissions. But is buying trees to stop deforestation the answer? Guy Shrubsole reports.
"Whether or not Cool Earth succeeds in its ambition to price deforestation out of the market, the idea of paying countries such as Brazil not to chop down their forests is gaining momentum."
Gold first lured outsiders to claim the rainforests. Later, medicines became the prize, then land for ranching cattle, soya and, more recently, biofuels. Now a different part of the Amazon is ours to buy: its massive stocks of carbon. A new scheme launched in the United Kingdom this month aims to exploit the surge in interest in saving trees to save the planet, and offers individuals the chance to pay to protect swaths of rainforest.
Called Cool Earth -- and set up by the Swedish entrepreneur Johan Eliasch and the British member of parliament Frank Field -- the scheme says it will “price deforestation out of the market” by securing forest in local trusts, and watching it “around the clock to keep the carbon where it belongs”.
It might sound familiar; schemes to buy up and protect the rainforests have been around since campaigns to highlight their plight peaked in the 1980s. But climate change has brought those concerns into new focus, and the organisers of Cool Earth hope to capitalise on the recent boom in ethical consumerism, carbon labels and offsetting services.
The problem is clear. Deforestation releases massive amounts of carbon. The recent Stern review (for the UK government) into the economics of climate change said greenhouse gas released from the 150,000 square kilometres of tropical forest destroyed each year now accounts for 18% of global emissions -- more than from any single nation.
Conversely, this makes tackling deforestation a cheap way of fighting global warming. A recent report from the international consultancy firm McKinsey identified forest conservation as the “single largest opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions of carbon”. And the most recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that “forest-related mitigation activities can considerably reduce emissions from sources, and increase CO2 removals by sinks, at low costs.”
Each square acre of Amazon rainforest absorbs and stores up some 260 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). To protect it, Cool Earth will charge