Rainforests must be in the front line

There is a growing feeling in the battle against climate change that the world community may have missed the obvious: that rainforests are the low-hanging fruit which can buy time to develop longer term solutions. The Prince of Wales was one of the first to appreciate this and to form an overarching plan to halt tropical rainforest destruction.

On July 2nd last year, The Prince attended a dinner at The Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the annual Awards of his responsible business charity, Business in the Community (BITC). He has been President of BITC for twenty years and has long been a leader and promoter of responsible business.

The dinner was attended by many of the 70 or so FTSE 100 companies which are members of BITC, with the environment as the main focus of the evening. It came at a time when The Prince had been reading a number of papers prepared by NGOs about the impact of rainforest destruction and as he spoke to business leaders during the evening, the thought crystallised in his  mind to create the largest private, public, NGO sector partnership to tackle this issue.

His staff began discussions with business leaders the next day and within a very short period had brought together a group of 12 Companies, a core staff of five people and a panel of advisers including Lord Stern. The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) was subsequently launched that October and now has a steering group of 17 Companies and a staff of 20 people to bring together the parties best able to find solutions to the problem, such as the rainforest governments, NGOs, financial institutions, monitoring organisations and those involved in the supply chain of forest product.

Forests are in the front line of the fight against climate change and must be in the front line of any global agreement to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. As the largest store of carbon on land, rainforests are the most efficient mechanism we have for taking CO2 out of our atmosphere. Meanwhile our destruction of them, accounting as it does for around a fifth of annual global emissions, represents one of the most needlessly profligate ways of adding to the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Different approaches
A comprehensive climate change strategy not only needs to be as broad as possible in terms of global participation, it must also contain immediate strategies to contain the rise in green house gases. That is why rainforests must be in the front line of climate change solutions. 

There have been separate national initiatives, such as the Government of Norway’s decision to allocate $2.5bn to the rainforests over five years, the ‘Amazon Fund’ announced by the Brazilian Government in early 2008 to channel direct investment into capacity-building and other infrastructural measures and the extraordinary gesture from President Jagdeo of Guyana of offering the protection of his rainforests to the global community in 2007. Indeed the Iwokrama Project in Guyana (see p.168) represents an innovative model for the proper valuation of the full range of ecosystem services provided by the rainforests which may well have application elsewhere.

But while there is a momentum gathering behind the task of preserving the world’s remaining rainforests, there is also a more worrying momentum behind the drivers of deforestation such as cattle ranching, soy and palm oil production and timber extraction. Our experience with our Africa Task Force and other rainforest nations leads us to believe that the pressure on the rainforest is greater than ever before.

So what will the PRP do to help? At half-time in the Project, we’ve come up with a range of draft proposals which were first announced by The Prince of Wales in the Presidential Lecture in Jakarta on November 3rd and, following
further consultation, will be presented in a final report due in March 2009.

At the heart of these proposals lies one simple idea: that each rainforest nation should be paid for the ecosystem services they provide to the world via a valuation based on the costs of developing its economy without further deforestation as well as assurances that the correct mechanisms are in place for measurement, verification and the proper transfer of funds.

Emergency package
Funds to support this will eventually come through international carbon or broader ecosystem markets but this will take time. Therefore the PRP proposes an emergency funding package, not unlike the US Marshall Plan post-World War II, to enable rainforest nations to take action from 2010. It proposes the establishment of a global negotiating and purchasing entity which will raise funds from developed nations. It will then make payments due under multi-year deals with rainforest countries for the provision of ecosystem services. It would also monitor, using agreed verification procedures and standards, the activities of the rainforest countries against the performance criteria of their agreements.

Methods by which developed nations provide or guarantee the funds deployed are detailed in the draft report, available on our website.

Any annual payment system will require global forest monitoring. The PRP is therefore actively involved in acting as a catalyst in the development of such a system.

Deforestation is driven in the large part by demand from the developed world for food, timber and palm oil. There are a number of important initiatives building on the demand for sustainably produced products which the PRP is using its unique position to accelerate. We have commissioned important pieces of research which will inform the process and lead, we hope, to practical examples of sustainable supply chain management. Without addressing this challenge, it will be very difficult to make the trees worth more alive than dead.

But above all, we have to create the global will needed to bring all this about. To this end, the PRP will launch a bold media campaign, which seeks to mobilise public support for the inclusion of forests in a future comprehensive climate change deal so that negotiators at key conferences feel they have a mandate to act.

As I write this article in mid-October 2008, there are plenty of grounds for pessimism about rainforest destruction. A global recession may divert attention from climate change, yet won’t do more than delay the relentless drivers of rainforest destruction engendered by the industrialisation of eastern economies.

However, there are also reasons for hope. The global financial crisis has brought about greater international cooperation than has been seen for decades and it may be that this, together with a new preparedness to look at challenges in new ways, provides exactly the catalyst needed to bring about something as bold as our plan. Certainly we know that to underestimate a risk when it is seen leads to greater risk of expensive bail-outs later on.

It really comes down to whether we are able to show the same level of concern for the world inhabited by the next generation as we have been to show for financial instability in our own.

As James Lovelock puts it: “Mankind is, by its intelligence and communication, the planetary equivalent of a nervous system. We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady.”