Can we turn up our nose at avoided deforestation?
Two cheers for AD carbon credits
It is broadly agreed that avoiding deforestation is one of the MOST important things we could be doing to slow climate change. So why are we getting derailed quibbling about the technical additionally of avoided deforestation (AD)? This feels like mowing your lawn when your house is on fire.
Deforestation is a major driver of climate change
Forests are being cleared at a relentless pace. Global Forest Watch reports that about 10% of tree cover has been lost since 2000. Deforestation and climate change are related in a feedback loop that extends well beyond trees. Thus forest loss is a climate disaster coming and going, through the activity of forest clearing and the loss of forests themselves.
The emissions of deforestation
The land sector is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the energy sector, accounting for 25% of global emissions. About half of these emissions (5-10 GtCO2e annually) come from deforestation and forest degradation (International Union for Conservation of Nature).
What we lose through deforestation
Natural forests are not a luxury good. They are a large and persistent carbon sink that collectively store of 861 gigatons of carbon (Pan et al. 2011) upon which our survival depends. As a distinguished international group of forest ecologists and carbon experts said recently: “More carbon is stored in soil (44%) than living biomass (42%), with the rest found in dead wood (8%) and forest litter (5%).”
Forests are amongst the most biodiverse places on the planet, home to the vast majority of all species of land plants and animals (up to 80% of terrestrial biodiversity). Deforestation and the destruction of forest habitat is the leading cause of extinction on the planet (IPBES 2019).
Existing forests help stabilise the climate and provide irreplaceable ecosystem services. They regulate ecosystems, protect biodiversity, play an integral part in the carbon cycle, and support livelihoods. Forests play a key role in the hydrological cycle by intercepting and regulating rainfall and flooding.
To maximise the climate benefits of forests, we must keep more forest landscapes intact, manage them more sustainably, and restore more of those landscapes which we have lost.
Planting trees is not a substitute for avoiding deforestation
The world needs to restore forests to meet both climate and biodiversity goals set out in the UN sustainable development goals. Critics point out that recovering forests store much less carbon and can sometimes take several years before they become effective carbon sinks. This is also true of young forests—the trees capture more carbon, but the forest captures less (see Pugh 2020 for a summary of this debate).
Reforestation and afforestation (i.e. planting trees) have an important role to play in sequestering carbon and developing new carbon sinks (see, e.g. Busch et al. 2019). Unfortunately, one can’t be substituted for the other—deforestation is emits carbon immediately whereas it takes decades for nature to recover and sequester carbon. Planting trees cannot make up for the carbon lost when standing forests are cleared – and cannot replace the lost populations of wildlife, plants and other species, or the damage to people who call the forests home.
Two cheers for AD offets
Avoiding deforestation is the globally agreed (and least bad) answer. Avoiding deforestation is no worse than re-forestation on carbon sequestration, and comes with minimal cost and landscape disruption. Economic analyses have shown conclusively that reducing emissions from deforestation is considerably less expensive than reducing emissions from fossil fuel combustion and other industrial sources (Kinderman et al. 2008).
This is where carbon credits (see Carbon offsetting: what it is and why it matters) have a role to play in providing financial incentives to protect forests. In principle, high quality carbon offset credits should be associated with GHG reductions or removals that are:
Additional (to what would have happened otherwise)
Not overestimated
Permanent
Not claimed by another entity
Not associated with significant social or environmental harms
Unlike, say, building a wind farm, NOT doing something can be difficult to reliably estimate. Carbon credits issued for avoided deforestation or REDD+ (see What is REDD?) projects often come under fire for various administrative and technical issues, in particular, leakage, permanence, and additionality.
Carbon offsets are an imperfect solution that can only ever be a sticking plaster, not a cure. But in the absence of a global system that rewards forested nations for preserving their forests, and monitors their success in doing so, offsetting does provide a source of income and protection to some areas, and at least some form of monitoring and accountability to ensure that companies are sticking to their commitments. While there are there are still gaps on being able to monitor restoration and degradation AD or REDD+ credits are literally the best (and often only) lever we have for incentivising the protection of forest in private hands.