Protecting Jungles: One Way to Combat Global Warming

Wild elephants, not loggers, are the rangers' main problem right now. Crops planted by returning farmers are proving irresistible to two local herds. At a farm nearby, elephants have trampled banana and cacao trees, toppled betel-nut palms and left jumbo-size footprints in the fishponds. There, at the forest edge, humans and animals must coexist. Each morning, the calls of gibbons compete with the calls to prayer from nearby village mosques.

Protecting crops from marauding elephants might seem peripheral to the task of preserving Ulu Masen. So might FFI's nursery in Geumpang, where farmers can learn grafting techniques and buy fruit-tree saplings at bargain prices. But both activities are designed to improve the livelihoods of local people, who are key allies in any REDD scheme. "These communities have to benefit," says Linkie. "That's the whole idea. They're getting an incentive not to cut [the forest] down." (See the top 10 green stories of 2008.)

Few incentives are more tangible than cash. Conservationists are considering cash payments to farmers in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to stop them destroying the forest for agriculture. But with 120,000 households around Ulu Masen, even a multimillion-dollar sale of carbon credits might amount to only $100 to $200 a year per family, estimates Linkie. The money might be better pooled to build schools, bridges or other projects that would benefit the entire community. However it is distributed, a very clear message must be sent to the local communities, says Linkie: "You're getting this [money] because you're not cutting down the forest."

That message is being heard across this vast archipelago and beyond. Indonesia alone has a dozen or more REDD projects. "It's this new fad — everyone needs to have one," says Linkie. "It's good that governors from other provinces are [saying], 'Must have a REDD project' rather than 'Let's log it all and convert it into oil palm.'" In partnership with the Australian investment bank Macquarie Group, FFI has six other REDD schemes: three in Indonesia and others in Cambodia, Ecuador and Liberia. Last month, governors Irwandi and Schwarzenegger joined 30 other subnational leaders — including a dozen other U.S. governors and the leaders of forest-rich Brazilian states Amazonas and Mato Grosso — at a climate summit in Los Angeles, where they called upon governments to include REDD within the global framework for combating climate change. Sun of Carbon Conservation hopes one day to see "a global infrastructure of forest factories, producing oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide." (See a graphic of the effects of climate change on the world by 2020.)

But REDD has its risks. The first is so-called leakage: halting deforestation in one area might simply drive loggers into another. "Permanence is a huge problem," says Kessler of Greenpeace, citing another worry. "How do we know these areas are going to stay protected? What happens if a forest burns to the ground?" A third concern is calculating how much carbon is stored in a forest, and what emissions are actually avoided by preserving it. In September a multinational research team led by French landscape ecologist David Gaveau asserted that the Ulu Masen scheme might not significantly reduce deforestation in northern Sumatra because much of the ecosystem is upland, inaccessible and therefore unlikely to be logged anyway.

FFI rebuts this. Ulu Masen borders another protected area called Leuser, also being developed as a REDD scheme, so leakage is not an issue within Aceh province. (The rest of Sumatra is another matter.) As for permanence, FFI has a "reserve pool" of forest to replace any lost to fire or disease, and promises "robust" accounting methods and monitoring by both satellite and field team. It says the calculations in the Gaveau report are incorrect and that Ulu Masen has "substantial lowland forests at risk."

The Politics of Climate Change
Greenpeace wants wealthy industrialized nations to pay into a U.N.-run REDD fund that would protect priority areas of deforestation in Indonesia, Congo and the Amazon. A $40 billion – a-year fund "could get us to zero deforestation by 2020 — globally," says Kessler. But will rich nations cough up that much? The U.S., the E.U. and Japan are all "willing to put money on the table" for REDD, he adds. "Just to put it into perspective, $40 billion is about a quarter of what the U.S. gave in bailout funds to one insurance company, AIG. The money is there. It's just a question of political will."

Already that political will seems to be faltering. A legally binding pact will be impossible to achieve at the climate-change summit in Copenhagen, said U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders at the just-concluded APEC meeting in Singapore. Back in the U.S. — cumulatively still the world's biggest polluter — a bill to cut, by 2020, emissions to 20% below 2005 levels faces a bruising and uncertain journey through the Senate. Washington and Copenhagen: whatever happens in the rain forests, it is in these two distinctly nontropical cities that the fate of our remaining rain forests, and our warming planet, lies.

Read "The Amazon Gets Less and Less Green."

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