Stop burning trees and coal

Many things need urgent attention if we want to protect the biosphere, but two stand out: trees and coal. Both are part of the natural cycle which we all sketched at school: trees use sunlight to take carbon out of the air, and return that carbon to the Earth partly as coal as they decay. But the rate at which we are now burning the trees and the coal is pushing us towards unnatural disaster. Forests, particularly tropical ones, are the worlds last, best and cheapest insurance policy against climate change and species extinction. They are ancient, complex ecosystems which store water and regulate rainfall and are home to perhaps half the worlds plant and animal species. We are destroying them at an alarming rate, however: deforestation and new land cultivation accounts for almost 20 per cent of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions each year. Thats more than is produced by every car, ship, lorry and aircraft on the planet. Its more than is produced by either the US or China. We cannot combat climate change if we keep destroying forests. If trees are an insurance policy, coal is the fuel which could really burn the house down. Coal is the dirtiest and most plentiful of the fossil fuels. It is also the cheapest a dirty trick played on us by Nature which is why it is the fastest growing fuel in the world. It provides almost 30 per cent of the worlds energy and half of Americas electricity-generating capacity. The world is set to use a great deal of coal in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency; about half of it in China and India but if we burn all the coal in the ground, without trapping the carbon dioxide, we could face runaway climate change. It is the potential irreversibility of the process that is most alarming. At some level, most of us understand that the complex ecosystems we have taken for granted are fundamental to our survival. In the past 18 months, debates about whether the climate is warming have given way to the realisation that change is happening faster than most scientists had expected. As the white, reflective Arctic sea ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs more sunlight, accelerating the melting. If the permafrost on land thaws it will release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, which would in turn cause more warming. Tipping points such as these could turn global warming into mankinds biggest mistake, with consequences visible from the moon. We find it hard to contemplate the enormity of these changes, to comprehend our place in the natural cycle, to act on problems that are so much bigger than we are. In our daily lives we continue to make choices that move the dial another fraction in the wrong direction. We write cheques to save cute monkeys from extinction, but buy soap made from palm oil, the production of which has devastated the forests where the monkeys lived. We show off the cloth bags we bought to reduce waste, then fill them with plastic bottles containing water we could have drunk free from the tap, knowing that the bottles will be shipped to China and burnt. This cognitive dissonance so terribly human is exacerbated because climate change is an international problem, which must be solved globally. So we are always looking to someone else to solve it. Were going to have to stop waiting for someone else to act. The solutions must come from the West; not just because the bulk of the man-made greenhouse gases still in the atmosphere were put there by the British, American and German industrial revolutions, but also because we have the most money and know-how. Indonesia is going to keep clearing forests to make way for agricultural land until it becomes more profitable to preserve the trees. China and India will build more dirty coal plants until

cleaner ones become financially viable. The big questions are how the industrialised West is going to find the money to get the industrialising nations to do the right thing, and how to ensure that the money actually achieves the objective. ENDING DEFORESTATION There is currently no value attached to a live tree, standing on peat-rich soil, in a tropical rainforest. A pile of dead timber is profitable and so is a patch of cultivatable land. So how do we change things so that trees are worth more alive than they are dead? First, forests need to be part of any new climate change regime. Second, countries need to be paid for them. Various proposals are under discussion, mostly variations on the theme of letting countries claim carbon credits for valuable trees, which they could then trade. The Prince of Wales has suggested issuing rainforest bonds that could attract private sector capital, particularly from pension funds. Those bonds would be guaranteed by developed nations. Satellite monitoring means that it is easier than it might seem to check whether a country has fulfilled its promises to preserve trees. The Brazilian space agency already publishes regular, detailed pictures of the Amazon, and it has offered to make its technology available to other rainforest nations. The biggest problems lie elsewhere. First, it is questionable to what extent many governments actually control their forests. Most will have to build partnerships involving federal, state and municipal authorities, plus local people and business interests. That is a challenge. Second, there is a real danger that issuing vast numbers of cheap credits for forests will kill the global carbon price.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6382124.ece