Hal Clifford, journalist

On the tropical, volcanic slopes of Subing Mountain, half a world away from the United States, a man is standing in a forest with an ax in his hand. The fate of the world’s climate rests substantially on what he decides to do next, and why.

Of course, the future of the climate isn’t in the hands of just one man on a mountainside in Indonesia. It’s 1.6 billion men, women and children who depend on the world’s forests for their income, their food, their fuel. They live lives in which, for many people, feeding your family means taking something from the forest—something to burn, something to sell, some place to grow crops. Leaving the forest alone usually isn’t a logical way to put food on the table. But it is going to have to become one.

People have been actively conserving forests for more than a century for timber, recreation, scenic beauty, and species protection. Their tools have included laws, conservation easements, and outright purchases. Today, the reality of climate change and the need to fight are fundamentally remaking the forest conservation toolkit. Climate change has placed within our grasp the biggest tool ever available to protect forests—and “we” in this instance are both the developed North and the developing South. Now, conservationists, policy makers, activists, and indigenous peoples are shaping different parts of this tool; if they get it right, their work will redefine the traditionally adversarial relationship between tropical forest conservation and the world’s economy.

THE LINK BETWEEN DEFORESTATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Buy a Prius. Change your light bulbs. Put on a sweater. These are the sorts of things Americans presently think about doing when they consider taking action for the climate. After all, this is largely what the media tells us to do. At the national level, policy efforts are focused on alternative energy and smart electrical grids. But as for the idea of collaborating with foreign people in distant forests, well, that’s not even on the public’s radar. This, it turns out, is a huge blind spot. If America and the rest of the developed world do not quickly come to grips with the need to protect tropical forests, and then help do so with vigor, whatever else we do to slow runaway climate won’t matter much.

The math behind this conclusion is ineluctable, and a brief bit of it is necessary here. The science is well established: stabilizing the climate requires drastic reductions in how much carbon dioxide (or CO2-equivalent in other gases, such as methane) flows into the atmosphere. The commonly accepted goal in the United States is that we need to make an 80 percent reduction from current emission levels by 2050. Doing this will require a massive change in our economy and society. But even that heroic achievement won’t amount to a solution, because the rest of the world has to act, too. In many of the world’s less-developed places, the decisions about what to do will be more acute and more wrenching. And in some of the places where these decisions matter most, people are the least prepared and least able to change what they are doing.

By 2050, an estimated 9 billion people will live on this planet—about 40 percent more than today. Eight billion of them likely will live in what we are presently calling developing countries, and most of those countries are located in the tropics, where the most important, and most threatened, forests are found.

These places still have forests in part because their citizens have not yet cut them down, as Europeans and Americans did to build their economies in centuries past. But they are cutting them now. The remaining tropical forests are being leveled at a fearsome pace, and as the total forested area on the globe shrinks, each remaining acre grows more precious. At present rates, about 13 million hectares of forest are being destroyed every year, and millions more degraded by incursions of one sort or another.  To use the calculus popular in these sorts of discussions, that freshly cleared land equals half the area of the United Kingdom. Forests are leveled for agriculture, for timber, for cooking fuel, for building materials.  In many cases—especially where the culprit is illegal logging, which has become a massive problem in the tropics—the results are devastating for the people who depend on those forests. “The original communities are completely destabilized,” says Mark Ashton, a forestry professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Their standard of living quickly lowers from subsistence to poverty.”

Clearing forests has all kinds of negative effects familiar to anyone who has opened a mailing from The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, or Conservation International: endangered species grow more endangered; others go extinct; rivers fill with silt; water supplies are diminished or dry up; fires spread; poverty worsens; climate changes.

And the climate does change from deforestation, which accounts for almost 18 percent of all carbon emitted into the atmosphere each year. To put that into perspective, people who are cutting down trees—illegal loggers in Borneo, soy growers in Brazil, subsistence farmers in Laos—together send as much carbon into the atmosphere as do all the activities of the entire United States: all the American factories, vehicles, buildings, farming, and power plants put together. As more people are born into tropical countries, the pressure to cut forests will only grow. And the rate of cutting is alarming enough already. “If current cutting rates continue, the economically accessible mature natural forests in Papua New Guinea will be gone in 16 years or less,” declared a 2006 report by the conservation group Forest Trends. “The equivalent figure for Indonesia is 10 years. The situation in Myanmar is no better, and may even be worse, and the Philippines and Thailand have already logged out most of their natural forests.”

Forest loss is disastrous in its own right. Now fit the problem of carbon emissions into this situation. Presently, through all the things an American does at work and play and buying and throwing away, the average U.S. resident emits 20-25 tons of C02 annually. The average Indian emits a little less than 2 tons. Worldwide, the average is about 7 tons. But here’s the rub: by 2050, none of us will be able to emit more than 2 tons apiece, because scientists believe the climate can’t handle more than 18 billion tons of new carbon a year without going haywire. As more people crowd the planet, each of us gets a smaller carbon allowance to stay within budget. So not only do Americans have to make big changes, we also have to help billions of other people figure out how to live lives of dignity and security without ever coming close to the sort of carbon profligacy the West has enjoyed until now. If we don’t, those people will assuredly overshoot that 2-ton target, even if they don’t want to. Just as an honest man will steal a loaf of bread if his children get hungry enough, so will he clear a forest if that will feed them. In a short-term quest for survival, poor people around the world could very well doom everyone to a catastrophic climate.

You can imagine how this scenario plays in developing countries. Why, ask leaders from the South, should we be prevented from lifting our people up because rich countries made a mess of things over the last 200 years? Leaders from the North, for their part, don’t want to make hard decisions about cutting carbon emissions if they believe those across the table are going to get a free ride.  “It’s a classic deadlock in which neither side is willing to make the difficult leap to a low-carbon future,” wrote Tom Athanasiou, director of the think tank EcoEquity, characterizing the state of international climate negotiations for the last several years. “Any climate treaty that does not explicitly protect, and enable, the efforts of the poor and aspiring around the world to escape poverty and achieve a dignified level of material life is doomed to failure. There’s no choice between climate protection and human development; we shall have both, or we shall have neither.”

PUTTING PEOPLE INTO THE CONSERVATION EQUATION
Since Theodore Roosevelt created the first national forest reserves in the United States in the early twentieth century, modern societies have been trying to conserve forests, with varying degrees of success. Like feudal kings before them, early American leaders, and even some early conservation groups, felt that the best way to protect nature was to put a fence around it and keep everyone else out. More recent generations came to recognize what indigenous people around the world have known for millennia: That protecting forests protects people.  And enlightened leaders and conservationists today know that there’s no point in trying to exclude people from protected areas, especially when those areas are their traditional homes. Part of this realization is pragmatic; many people who live in protected areas don’t even know that they do so, and the national governments of poorer nations have few resources to enforce the conservation laws they do have on the books. The bottom line for conservation is that people living in or near protected forest must be brought into a conservation scheme and perceive it as being in their best interest. Indeed, some conservationists are trying to capitalize on opportunities to help people living on the land work as more effective stewards to advance their own interests and larger conservation goals. That means they must be significant players in creating and implementing conservation solutions.

That all sounds well and good, but it grinds up against an enormous problem: most of the world now participates in a global economic system that almost exclusively values forests only when we cut them down. A saw log has a dollar value. But what is the value of a standing tree? Sure, it has some sort of value—everyone who has swung on a tire swing or picnicked in the shade or, for that matter, taken a breath knows that. No one argues against the idea that standing forests provide invaluable social goods: clean air and water, biodiversity, climate regulation. But to date there’s been no way to meaningfully reflect this reality in economic transactions. In their book Natural Capitalism, Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken wrote that capitalism was a brilliant idea that had never actually been practiced, for just this reason. Some of the most important things in the world are “externalities” to capitalism, they noted. Those things don’t show up in prices, which are the tool by which we make decisions about how to live and what to do every day.

Lovins and Hawken’s insight is the key to understanding the central task the world faces as it tries to preserve and even restore the remaining tropical forests of the planet. The task is nothing less ambitious than inverting the traditional economic equation around forests, so that it makes more sense to the hungry man with the ax or chainsaw to leave them standing than it does to cut them down.

The cavalry on the horizon in this story takes the form of the emerging carbon market. Given political trends in the United States and elsewhere, it’s likely that carbon pollution soon will have a worldwide price tag attached to it. The world’s treaty makers will, with a good deal of skill and some luck, create a commodity called “forest carbon” that may be bought and sold. Then the financial markets will be able to perceive a forest as a massive repository of money (in the form of stored carbon), and as a place that will absorb and hold more money in the form of carbon emitted elsewhere.

The potential payoff for bringing forest carbon into the marketplace is huge. “[Forest] carbon projects represent one of the few means by which the world’s poorest people, including most Africans, will be able to meaningfully participate in and benefit from the global carbon market,” wrote the editors of the 2008 anthology Climate Change and Forests. “For the first time these people have the promise of being able to sustainably capture an ecosystem service value associated with their land, instead of being forced to liquidate forest resources just to survive.”

That’s the Big Idea; creating a system in which people don’t have to “liquidate forest resources just to survive.” And for the first time in the history of the forest conservation movement, real money—serious money—may at last be available to do the job. The history of forest conservation is one in which conservationists, unable to put a price on the value of nature, swam upstream against the unceasing and swelling current of economic activity that has flooded the world. The carbon market—that bright, new tool in the conservation tool kit—has the potential to reverse the course of the river, so that (at least in the case of forests) capitalism flows in the same direction as conservation.

The global carbon market will be a $20-$75 billion business by 2020, and potentially $100 billion by 2030, according to the definitive 2008 white paper by Lord Stern and the London School of Economics and Political Science, “Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change.” It won’t take a large slice of this new pie to make a massive difference in forest conservation; as little as $5 billion could substantively address deforestation in the eight tropical countries responsible for 70 percent of the world’s rampant deforestation.  That’s still vastly more than can be brought to bear through the traditional funding of conservation by NGOs, donor nations, and host governments. “Only market instruments can mobilize this level of investment and induce greenhouse gas emissions reduction at a scale adequate for pursuing the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change,” declared one group of climate researchers.

Cue the happy music, right? Not quite yet. The question of how to actually measure and trade forest carbon turns out to be a hellishly complex problem. How do you pay someone not to cut down a forest? What if he wasn’t going to do so in the first place? Or how do you make sure he doesn’t go cut somewhere else, in some other forest—or just put the job off and do it later after he’s been paid to leave it standing? For that matter, all those billions are going to be sloshing around in the carbon market as developed Northern countries and companies try to offset their own carbon emissions be seeking opportunities to pay for reducing carbon emissions in the South (where the most cost-effective opportunities will abound). How do you make sure that some of that money actually gets to the people living in the forest—the ones who have to decide that they are not going to cut down the trees for fuel, or turn a blind eye to illegal logging, or slash out a patch of jungle to plant a field of soy?

“A lot of people, because they’re middle class Americans or middle class Indonesians, they don’t understand what it feels like to be a very, very poor person out there on the frontier with five kids and a wife to feed,” says Nigel Sizer, Rare’s vice president for Asia/Pacific. “You’re clearing some forest, you’re making a bit of a mess but you’re managing to feed the kids and maybe even get them into school and get them to the doctor once in a while. And along comes an NGO that says, ‘Hey guys, we’d like you to try these new agroforestry techniques [planting crops that thrive in standing forest] instead.’ And you say, ‘that looks kind of cool, but what if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t have any money next year? Who’s going to feed the kids?’ These people are undertaking very, very different calculations in their day-to-day lives than you and I are making.”

If there is a pool of forest carbon money coming to the South through the carbon market, that could help sway those calculations. To lay the groundwork for a carbon trading world in which avoided deforestation and reforestation of cleared areas are recognized by the market as legitimate sources of carbon reduction, three international NGOs—Environmental Defense, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife— have joined Rare in a concerted two-year effort. This effort is designed to bear fruit in Copenhagen in late 2009, where the next set of climate action rules will be written to supplant the Kyoto Protocol. Questions have to be settled about how to measure and monitor avoided deforestation, how to establish good governance and land tenure practices so that a foundation is built for a fair distribution of carbon funds, and so on. This policy level is not where Rare works—but Rare’s role in the success of this four-party collaboration is critical. Consider one more metaphor for understanding the complexity of what’s going on here. If a racecar driver is speeding down a track, complex forces are at play in the machine: torque and momentum, force and inertia, all of it manipulated by the driver and his controls. But what the car actually does—whether it makes the turn or skids off the track—depends on the four patches of rubber, each no bigger than your hand, that are actually in contact with the pavement.  As the world prepares to test-drive a market for forest carbon, the policy, treaties, marketplaces, and financial instruments are all up inside the car. The rubber on the road is the people who live in the forest.

THE CHALLENGES OF CHANGING THE WAY PEOPLE INTERACT WITH THEIR ENVIRONMENT
Don’t be a litterbug. Drive 55. Only you can prevent forest fires. Reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s easy to see how conservation has always been about changing people’s behavior. For a quarter-century, Rare’s work has revolved around this principle. Its signature work has been to bring the tools of social marketing to bear on conservation problems through its Pride campaigns. In Indonesia, where Sizer works, the goal now is to go beyond what Rare has accomplished in the past. “Rare Pride is very effective at changing people’s understanding and awareness,” says Sizer. “It’s very effective at encouraging them to be inclined to change their behavior, to consider other ways of doing things, to be open to alternatives. But Pride is not so good at then providing those alternatives, ensuring that what we call the barriers to behavior change are removed. Barrier removal is about providing practical alternatives for communities that don’t want to clear the forest but they need the land for agriculture, they need the wood for fuel. This is where Rare and Rare’s partners have fallen short. We are making the greatest effort to address this issue; the opportunity to generate [forest carbon] revenue from a change in behavior is a very, very important opportunity and one we need to look at very carefully.”

If a forest carbon market is going to work, a lot of things have to be figured out, and there is a narrow window in which to do that. The Copenhagen meeting is the chance to bring forest carbon into the marketplace, to rewire part of capitalism so that the marketplace will embed the idea of forest conservation in its workings for the first time. And if forests are preserved and restored for their carbon value, they will also be protected for their biodiversity, their beauty, and all the other things they provide the world.

Figuring out how to reframe the structure of an economic system that has valued saw logs over trees for hundreds of years requires a lot of experimentation. Rare currently has a baker’s dozen projects in Indonesia working on avoided deforestation or other projects related to forest carbon, and TK worldwide. In five years, Sizer would like to see a hundred projects.  These programs, conducted in partnership with NGOs large and small, local and international, will lay the groundwork for the transformation of forest conservation through the forest carbon market. They will also be test beds for the widespread, global adoption of practices that efficiently bring forest carbon to the market. “Demonstrating success early,” wrote the Stern Review, “will be critical to building the confidence of governments and investors in the potential for land use change to be incorporated into an international framework.” And that framework is to be shaped in 2009.

The problems Rare and other NGOs face as they try to create a viable forest carbon market aren’t simply technical. They are, as much as anything, cultural. The developed world will have to learn to pay people to leave things alone, and embrace the idea that security in the North means development in the South—that our fates are truly intertwined. Those who live in the forests face their own cultural challenges, and those are significant. Some indigenous people understand carbon trading, rightly, to be a commodification of a common resource, and they don’t like it. Just ask Shaun Paul, co-founder of Ecologic Development Fund, which is running the 6,200-acre Pico Bonito Forests project in Honduras (one of only ten forest carbon projects worldwide certified under the United Nation Clean Development Mechanism, it aims to generate $400 million in carbon and sustainable forestry credits). For certain indigenous people, says Paul, selling forest carbon “goes against their moral fabric. Even though they understand it, they still say ‘I don’t believe it is our right to commodify and sell nature.’” Others worry that forest protection and carbon trading will be a reason to remove them from the land. In many developing countries, Paul says, history shows that concern isn’t necessarily far-fetched. Given this, Rare’s strategy of supporting local NGOs and campaign leaders in their work by providing tools, financing, and technical support, rather than coming in with a “solution” developed somewhere else is arguably the best path to forest residents’ long-term buy-in to a conservation scheme, and to that scheme’s success.

There are, ultimately, two critical reasons to do forest conservation work in the developing world. First, the North can’t solve climate and biodiversity crises by itself. Second, it’s the South’s world—increasingly so, given demographic trends—and the people who live there have a right and an obligation to be part of the solution. “Rules need to come not just from the scientist and experts,” says Paul. “We need to include the people who live in those places. In my analysis, those people are often the reason we still have the forests, and without their voices and cultures and perspectives we’ll end up with policies that are wanting. We need to make sure the right people are at the table, and that includes forest peoples.”

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