At the United Nations climate conference in Bali last year delegates agreed to include forest conservation in future discussions on a new global warming treaty. If adopted, REDD (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation) means that the value of carbon in intact forests can be realized in carbon accounting.
Environmentalists see REDD as a useful vehicle for encouraging conservation of rainforests in the Congo, the Amazon and Asia.
This new resource has been termed “Green carbon” to be distinguished from grey carbon in fossil fuels, blue carbon in the oceans and atmosphere, and brown carbon in industrialized forests. There is of course really no real colour difference and the colour is merely a metaphor. [1]
The Green Carbon agenda received more scientific support last week with a major paper in Nature. Entitled ‘Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks’.[2] The paper reports that in forests between 15 and 800 years of age, net ecosystem productivity (the net carbon balance of the forest including soils) is usually positive and this demonstrates that old-growth forests can continue to accumulate carbon, contrary to the long-standing view that they are carbon neutral.
The Kyoto Protocol (Marrakesh Accord) definition of a forest makes no distinction between a natural forest and a plantation.
Under the Kyoto Protocol definition, a “forest” is: A minimum area of land of 0.05 hectares with tree crown cover (or equivalent stocking level) of more than 10 per cent with trees with the potential to reach a minimum height of 2 metres at maturity in situ. It includes (i) young stands of natural regeneration; (ii) all plantations which have yet to reach a crown density of 10-30 per cent or tree height of 2-5 metres; (iii) areas normally forming part of the forest area which are temporarily unstocked as a result of human intervention such as harvesting or natural causes but which are expected to revert to forest.
International negotiations on REDD are still continuing and were high on the agenda at the Accra climate change meeting . However, is REDD all green? What will happen at Copenhagen in 2009? A number of international environmental groups raised alarm bells at the Accra meeting, claiming that allowing developed countries to purchase REDD credits would absolve them of responsibility for reducing industrial emissions at home. Some groups proposed setting firm targets for industrial emissions reductions, which could not be substituted by REDD credits. Others feared that a REDD mechanism would exclude and threaten indigenous communities and serve as an excuse for land grabbing, or endanger sovereignty in rainforest nations.
And, for Australian pastoralists, a key question is whether savanna woodland thickening be considered in the discussions, and if so – is it REDD or rangeland degradation?
Luke Walker
Brisbane, Australia
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[1] Alan Ashbarry has critiqued the concept of Green Carbon in a piece published at this blog on August 11, 2008, entitled: A Critical Review of ‘Green Carbon: The Role of Natural Forests in Carbon Storage’
[2] Old-growth Forests as Global Carbon Sinks, by Sebastiaan Luyssaert, E. -Detlef Schulze, Annett Börner, Alexander Knohl, Dominik Hessenmöller, Beverly E. Law, Philippe Ciais & John Grace, Nature 455, 213-215 (11 September 2008)
Spot on, WJP. From my experience just about every tree older than 40 years in my forest already has a pipe full of mud, air and termites going right up the middle of it. And that means that the entire length of the trunk has an internal face exposed to the major sources of carbon emission, wood decay and termites.
Remove that wood and place it in a house and it is protected from decay by both a roof and paint, and it is protected from termites by both physical barriers and chemical treatment.
Interestingly, about the only way a forest could be modelled to have the volume of carbon being claimed by the WWF funded shonkademics is if they have wrongly assumed that there are no hollows up the middle of old growth trees. Fat chance.
"They seek it here, they seek it there, those greenies seek it everywhere.
Are they lying, or just alarmin?
About cursed, elusive, Pimpernel Carbon".
Spot on, WJP. From my experience just about every tree older than 40 years in my forest already has a pipe full of mud, air and termites going right up the middle of it. And that means that the entire length of the trunk has an internal face exposed to the major sources of carbon emission, wood decay and termites.
Remove that wood and place it in a house and it is protected from decay by both a roof and paint, and it is protected from termites by both physical barriers and chemical treatment.
Interestingly, about the only way a forest could be modelled to have the volume of carbon being claimed by the WWF funded shonkademics is if they have wrongly assumed that there are no hollows up the middle of old growth trees.
Fat chance.
Ahem Ian Mott:
An awful lot of old growth forest tree thingys I've encountered seem to attract termites. You know methane belching bludgers who wouldn't recognise an ETS if you shoved one up their cloacae.
Just how good is an old growth forest as a carbon sink when every tree is potentially on the menu!
And for the record, summer wildfires also have the habit of ignoring proposed ETS guidelines!
Another example of the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the IPCC and their CSIRO running dogs is the systematic abuse of the definition of "forest".
This definition outlines a minimum threshhold of 10% canopy etc but fails to adjust for the actual condition of natural forests in particular rainfall bands.
So we get farmers in 2000mm rainfall zones, where natural canopy cover was 90%+, having their cleared grazing paddocks with 10% shade trees being wrongly defined as a forest.
And once it is defined as a forest, and deemed to have existed prior to 1990, then any expansion of that forest, to 20%, 60% or right back to the original 90%, is deemed to be "natural" and part of a process "already in train" and therefore unable to attract carbon credits.
To their credit, the Queensland DNRM recognised this issue by listing a "normal extent" for each regional ecosystem and then defined the vegetation as "remnant" if the canopy achieved 50% of this extent.
But to their eternal damnation, they then completely abused this process by listing these "normal extents" at substantially lower levels than are currently exhibited by that same vegetation on those very sites.
So we now have a situation where regrowth vegetation is listed as "remnant" when the canopy is more than double the officially designated "normal extent". And partial clearing activities that merely reduce the canopy cover back to or just below the official "normal extent" are detected by satellite scan and reported as remnant destruction.
Farmers who have maintained widely spaced shade trees in lawfully cleared paddocks are having their paddocks classed as remnant when a good season of seedling growth increases the apparent canopy over the falsely understated "normal extent" level.
They do this by applying a definition of "normal height" that is not based on the height normally achieved by the original forest but by an average of the trees on the site itself, regardless of their growth stage. They compound this criminal conspiracy by falsely excluding the original paddock trees on the basis that they are "emergent", a type only found in rainforests, not eucalypt woodlands.
To apply a single, 10% canopy test to every forest type from closed forest to 10% open woodland is a gross and inexcusable abuse of power by way of its total unreasonableness.
And to use that test in a way that assumes that any subsequent increase in canopy is "natural" and without any human input or intent is an abuse of power.
And to use that test in a way that assumes that any reduction in canopy is environmentally adverse, human induced destruction of a natural habitat is an equal abuse of power.
Gavin off on a tangent again. Sounds coherent to the gullible but fails the test of reality. How deep was the Elizabethan warship "Mary Rose" and how much of the carbon was still intact after 400 years? A damned $hitload of it, in fact.
Meanwhile back at the key issue. Old growth might just be barely carbon positive if left alone but this does not negate the fact that this forest involves very large emissions which can be postponed and even prevented.
And it does not negate the fact that the growth rate of these forests, while sufficient to off-set the emissions from decay, are still only a fraction of their potential. The overwhelming majority of the trees are senescent and therefore grow at a very slow pace.
The proper management of forests, and the logical option if there really was an urgent need to capture carbon, would be to intercept the wood before it begins to decay and place it in a form and location that limits further decay and stores carbon for the long term.
This interception will also capture the carbon before the growth rate of the tree has declined thereby maintaining a high rate of carbon capture by the forest in perpetuity.
It is a physical and mathematical absurdity to suggest that maintaining decay rates and maintaining slow growth rates constitutes the best method of storing carbon in perpetuity.
The storage of harvested wood carbon in house and other human forms is far superior to so called "natural" processes that provide no quarantine from decay at all.
And the sequential accumulation of more rapidly grown carbon will take only one or two cycles to exceed the total accumulation over many centuries under so called "natural' conditions.
The greens have a simple choice. If we really do have a carbon crisis then there is no excuse for not managing forests for maximum carbon sequestration over the whole value chain.
If there is no such thing as a carbon crisis then they are free to indulge their highly carbon inefficient whimsies for decaying forests full of slowly growing, slowly dying trees.
They can't have both.