WWF: Saving forests ‘part of challenge’

THE World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) said on 29 September that saving the world’s remaining native forests must be a big part of any new climate deal as around 20% of global carbon emissions are due to deforestation and forest degradation. The WWF’s Forest Carbon Initiative seeks to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and degradation by 2020.
Private investors are willing to buy carbon credits from developing countries to finance preserving their remaining forest cover, the activists said, citing a recent WWF-sponsored survey. According to the 2009 Forest Carbon Investor Survey, investors managing aroundout $7 trillion in assets support an expanded carbon-market mechanism - paying countries to make their forests more valuable by absorbing carbon dioxide, rather than being cleared for agriculture or timber.
However, potential investors are looking for “more certainty from both international agreements and national legislation before private funds can be mobilized”, making it a priority to include the issue in the climate agreement to be hammered out in Copenhagen in December, WWF officials said.
Strong policies to ensure reductions in emissions and benefits to forest communities are key for investors to support REDD, the United Nations programme for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.
REDD was first discussed at environmental meetings in Montreal in 2005, before receiving more serious attention at the Bali talks in 2007. Over subsequent years, the idea of  industrialized countries buying carbon credits to offset fossil-fuel pollution  has emerged as a means  of  meeting carbon-reduction goals.
The carbon credits would pay developing countries to keep their native forest, and the countries that would benefit the most include Brazil and Indonesia, both which still have large swathes of  forest land.
The idea has been criticized in certain quarters, however, with the most common complaint cited being that industrialized countries are likely to  buy carbon credits instead of cutting emissions by replacing fossil-fuel burning plants with renewable energy production, which most people see as the main goal of climate-change initiatives.