Feature articles

Stopping deforestation and degradation of forests
IIASA foresters advise the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Today, the concept of reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation of forest is central to the debate over how best to limit the global temperature rise to under 2°C. Moreover, partly thanks to IIASA scientists’ efforts in pushing their research in successive fora and publishing their studies, the reduction of emissions from deforestation and the degradation of forests (REDD) has become firmly linked to other important environmental benefits that offer more environmental “bang” for an emissions reduction “buck.” It is now recognized that not only can a well-constructed REDD mechanism offer enhanced ecosystems value such as biodiversity and water-security (forests are the source of three-quarters of the world’s fresh water supply), but it can help sustain the mostly impoverished, indigenous peoples who inhabit the forests by preserving cultural and social values and developing fresh sources of income for them.

However, the REDD process has not always been seen this way. The critical path from research to policy and eventually on to practice can be tortuous and requires more than scientific expertise. It also demands persistence, energy and a willingness to spend sleepless hours on overnight flights to remote conference locations. Most of the early efforts at halting climate change under the Kyoto Protocol were aimed at cutting CO2 emissions in the developed (or, in UNFCCC-speak, “Annex I”) countries. The principal carbon abatement measures targeted the two largest single sources, transport and industry. At that stage, forestry in developing (non-Annex I) countries was only peripherally involved within the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Under this, developed countries might cooperate with developing countries on voluntary measures in the framework of the “clean development mechanism.” However, even this effort was limited to afforestation and reforestation rather than REDD.

SAVING FORESTS AND ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AT THE SAME TIME The black areas show the forests that will have been protected from deforestation by 2035 through introducing a tax on deforestation of US$ 12 per ha and year (top map) or of US$ 16 per ha and year (bottom map). Such policy protects simultaneously some of the areas in the world with the highest ecosystem services values (green area). Source: See www.iiasa.ac.at/Options/sources

It was only in December 2005 that the phrase, “Reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries and approaches to stimulate action,” first appeared as an agenda item in the UNFCCC process, at the 11th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 11) in Montreal. However, the key event that moved the REDD process up the global agenda was actually COP 13, held in Bali in December 2007. Several IIASA forest experts were invited to attend that enormous 12-day international get-together of politicians and scientists, which not only produced an Action Plan that gave new prominence to the REDD approach, but also a Road Map calling forth various ideas on stimulating action.

Partly in response to the challenge thrown down in Bali, in July 2008, a team of scientists, including Georg Kindermann, Michael Obersteiner, and Ewald Rametsteiner, together with co-authors from Brazil and the US, published a study that showed how paying to reduce tropical deforestation might be a more cost effective way to slash greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than other methods under consideration. According to their calculations, even a modest program of cutting deforestation by 10 percent over a period from 2005 to 2030 could save 0.3–0.6 billion tonnes of CO2 at an annual cost of US$ 0.4–1.7 billion. To achieve the same result by another method under serious review, carbon capture and sequestration from a fossil-fuel power plant, would cost up to US$ 30 billion at then-prevalent rates.

The transparency of such studies, and the peer review to which they are subjected, is one important way that IIASA is able to push its research into policy channels. But another more direct way is through important subsidiary bodies that feed into the main UNFCCC process. For the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) meeting held in Accra, Ghana, in August last year, another IIASA Forestry team traveled down to trail new research linking REDD and global climate change.

By making this effort, they were rewarded with an invitation to hold an event at COP 14, held in Poznan, Poland last December. There, they presented a proposal to create an International Emission Reference Scenario Co-ordination Centre (IERSCC), a body to ensure that planned cuts in emissions from avoided deforestation in developing countries would be globally consistent, and thus qualify to take part in a new process that would attract credits in return for storing carbon. The distribution of such credits would be made under another IIASA proposal, adapting an innovative Dutch auction mechanism used in the LULUCF sector of the UNFCCC. Combining the two ideas would avoid creating REDD “hot air”, or wasting funds on cuts that were not “real:” i.e. measurable, reportable, and verifiable.

Currently, IIASA scientists continue to refine and support this and other research plans, presenting them in different fora as well as peer-reviewed publications. One especially significant event was held in Copenhagen in mid-March, from which research conclusions will be collated and later fed into the main UN climate change conference which convenes in the city on 7 December. Two IIASA Forestry Program teams presented papers there, one describing a quantitative analysis of GHG mitigation through bio-energy production versus carbon sinks enhancement, and the other a collaborative modeling initiative on the economics of REDD.

Since the mid-March event, Dr. Obersteiner has provided expert input to the SBSTA meeting at the invitation of the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, and described the outcomes of IIASA Forestry Program’s work. Those discussions, which focused on methodological issues relating to reference emission levels specifically related to deforestation and degradation, were scheduled to feed into the 30th SBSTA session.

IIASA’s work is based on research and analytical tools such as those developed in the Integrated Sink Enhancement Assessment (INSEA) project. This work, led by IIASA’s Forestry Program, assessed the economic and environmental effects of enhancing carbon sink and GHG abatement measures on agricultural and forest lands by combining and integrating the models and data from 14 international partners into three major blocks: bio-physical modeling, forest modeling, and economic modeling. The integrated modeling capacity has been further applied and developed in the European Commission funded projects, GEO-BENE and CC-TAME.

Now IIASA’s Forestry Program is applying its research tools to a real world situation in a group of countries that make up the Congo Basin, an important rainforest region of Central Africa. There, for a project sponsored by the World Bank, existing models developed by the IIASA Forestry team (such as GLOBIOM and G4M) will be adapted in order to develop forward-looking REDD scenarios for the Congo Basin in a fully integrated manner. The same group at IIASA is also developing an online tool (see page 6 and www.geo-wiki.org) using Google Earth maps, so that a global network of local volunteers, who wish to help improve the quality of existing land cover maps, can report on deforestation and degradation in their own areas.

Further information

IIASA’s Forestry Program and a list of references. Mr. Florian Kraxner, Dr. Michael Obersteiner, and Dr. Steffen Fritz are research scholars in IIASA’s Forestry Program.

See full issue of this Options (Summer 2009)

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Last updated: 08 Jul 2010