No forests – no future: Page 2 of 2

Province, Argentine. With a multifaceted approach to environmental conservation, they have decided that it isn’t enough just to plant the trees. Therefore, environmental education is provided to children and youth from all levels of society. At the same time, each year school children are called upon to collect native tree seeds from forests, which are taken to tree nurseries. In 2009, 660 kg of seeds, the equivalent of 15 million trees, was collected.  The forestry agents currently plant an average of 10,000 trees daily and plan to increase its goal to planting 30,000 trees per day.

There are several other positive examples. For example, the before-mentioned the   Appalachian region of the eastern United States has long struggled with poverty. The area is home to some 23 million people, but the exploitation of Appalachia’s coal reserves has left a scarred and damaged landscape. The Appalachian Regional Restoration Initiative (ARRI) was created in an effort to reforest active and abandoned mine lands. Since 2004, some 60 million trees have been planted on about 87,000 acres in Appalachia under ARRI’s guidance. The excitement and energy generated by the project has resulted in the Green Forest Works for  Appalachia, which proposes planting 125 million trees over the next five years, restoring forests on approximately 70,820 hectares of barren mine lands across Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. It will create more than 2000 green jobs while trees will prevent soil erosion, produce a carbon sink to help mitigate the effects of climate change, increase biodiversity, improve water supply in the region and turn this place into a recreational area, perfect for walking, camping and family vacations.

Unfortunately, Russia looks poorly in these terms. It is rich in forests, but little care is provided for them. As a part of the Billion Tree Campaign, only 50,000 trees were planted in Russia.

For the governmental and private investment attraction with the purposes of forest preservation, two mechanisms are considered by UNEP as especially important: PES (Payment for environmental services) and REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).

PES is a mechanism of voluntary transactions which compensate ecosystem service providers (for instance forest landowners) for providing watershed protection, carbon storage, recreation, biodiversity or other ecosystem services.

REDD+ is a mechanism that, recognizing the importance of trees as the means of CO2 storage, allows financial transfers from developed to developing countries in return for verified national-level commitments to reduce deforestation and emissions on the national and regional levels.

The PES mechanism, which exists for several years already, can be implemented only on an international level and did not meet the expectations in full due to the complexity and economic inexpediency of some projects. Now, high hopes set on the REDD+ system. According to Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, “Reducing deforestation is essential. Immediate action on REDD+ is a critical part of the climate change solution”.

The REDD+ was tabled in 2005 by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica. By now more than 30 models of how REDD+ should work have been put forward by countries, groups of countries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In general, the mechanism would involve a massive transfer of money from rich countries to poor as part of their commitment under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The purpose of the process is to reduce carbon emissions, around 20 per cent of which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, caused by tropical deforestation. Specialists think that due to the mechanism forests would no longer be viewed merely as timber waiting to be harvested or land awaiting clearance for agriculture. However, even if all the agreements will be reached in the nearest future, the REDD+ program, which is considered to be the most inexpensive way to reduce the carbon emissions, cannot be launched earlier than in 2013, although several countries are already implementing the projects based on similar principles.

However, skeptics believe that the system that provides opportunities for companies and governments to meet targets for reducing their carbon emissions by paying for carbon reductions elsewhere in the global economy will slow down the process of switching to technologies that reduce carbon emissions in developed countries and will not make the investments in the “environmentally friendly” economy attractive for the countries that can pay for their emissions at others’ expenses.

Anyway, according to UNEP, investments in the forests or, at least, prevention of their uncontrollable cutting can result in significant economic benefits. An additional investment of 30 billion US Dollars (i.e. larger than the current investments by two thirds) fighting deforestation and degradation could provide a return of 2.5 trillion US Dollars in saved products and services. Furthermore, targeted investments in forestry could generate millions of jobs around the world, reduce the level of deforestation by a half by 2030 and increase the trees planting by 140 per cent by 2050. So it is quite logical that the year 2011 is declared the International Year of Forests by the UN – forests really need our attention for the sake of “green” future and sustainable development of the world.