Seeing REDD

The boat plows on through the brackish green river, taking Jose de Oliveira Quadro on a journey that may have been futile a few years ago.

Strangers have been fishing in his village’s lake and Quadro is on a two-hour ride to recruit help from the nearest police post in Brazil’s vast Amazon forest. He admits he probably wouldn’t have bothered before his river∞side community was made part of a pioneering scheme that pays each family about $30 a month to act as forest guardians.

“I can’t let them take the food off our plates,” said the nearly toothless 35-year-old. Thank God we have more help these days.”

Quadro’s journey is part of a new chapter in the long struggle to save the world’s greatest forest that were central to efforts in Copenhagen to frame a new global effort to curb the planet’s warming.

His tiny settlement is one of 36 communities and 320 families receiving the payment in the Juma reserve, an area the size of the US state of Delaware in Brazil’s Amazonas state that is the first official emissions∞reducing project in the Amazon.

Working schemes for REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and allows the sale of credits to offset carbon pollution elsewhere, are few and far between now. But a climate deal including REDD could be a potent tool to cut deforestation, which globally accounts for up to 20 percent of carbon emissions – more than all the world’s cars, ships and planes combined.

Response needed

“What the world needs to understand is that we have done our housecleaning, valued the forest as much as we can, tested good practice and now we need a response or the people will end up pressuring the forest for survival,” Amazonas state Governor Eduardo Braga told Reuters.

Versed in the minutiae of global climate talks, Braga is the modern face of a state nearly the size of Alaska whose previous government handed out free chainsaws to loggers.

The fresh-faced 48-year-old set up the “Bolsa Floresta” programme that hands out the monthly stipend to about 7,000 forest families, including in Juma. He said a strong accord on REDD could boost the programme to 60,000 families by 2014 or about half the population living in the state’s vast forest.

Concerns
REDD offers a possible way both to cut the destruction that has razed nearly a fifth of the forest and combat poverty that remains at African levels despite Brazil’s economic rise.

Yet hope is mixed with concern over the role of the private sector and whether forest dwellers have enough say in decisions about them sometimes being made thousands of miles away.

Banks, carbon-trading firms, and companies seeking to boost their green credentials are ramping up their interest, with estimates that REDD could bring in $16bn a year for Brazil alone. Coca Cola Co, Brazilian bank Bradesco and the Marriott Hotels chain are helping to fund the Bolsa Floresta project.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace worry that too much reliance on carbon markets for funds could result in speculation or a flood of cheap credits, allowing rich countries to continue polluting at little cost.

Brazilian critics of REDD say it risks making high levels of Amazon deforestation acceptable. Brazil’s government has trumpeted the lowest deforestation rate in two decades, but the 2,700 square miles cleared in the first half of 2009 was still equivalent to nine New York cities.

Brazil’s government, after an initially luke-warm response to REDD, is expected to back it in Copenhagen.

In Amazonas, however, not everyone sees Juma and the private Sustainable Amazon Foundation that manages it in partnership with the state government as a desirable model.

“If this is REDD, we need to fight it,” said Rubens Gomes, coordinator of the Amazon Working Group, an umbrella group for Amazon social and environmental organizations.

Some 49 social groups published an open letter in October rejecting market-based REDD schemes.

Gomes complains civil society groups such as his were excluded from the creation of the foundation, which is headed by Braga’s former environment secretary Virgilio Viana. He worries social handouts will create a culture of dependency.

“Without another source of income, we won’t create opportunities and they will continue to exchange trees for food and for clothes,” Gomes said.

The foundation head Viana told Reuters that many critics of the project were simply ideologically opposed to markets.