Making Carbon Trading a Fair Trade

A recent issue of New Scientist magazine carried an article with this disturbing headline: "Africa Barred From Carbon Trading." Advocates for African farmers were claiming that European Union policies on carbon credits amounted to a carbon trade embargo on Africa.

Louis Verchon of the World Agroforestry Centre said that if the EU would implement a new scheme to credit farmers who capture carbon on their land, "millions of dollars in carbon credits could begin flowing to the world's rural poor."

The World Agroforestry Centre, in conjunction with researchers from Michigan State University, has developed a method using satellite imagery and infrared sensing that measures carbon storage in African farmland. The Centre has completed a pilot program in western Kenya and is ready to encourage poor farmers to plant trees as soon as it can qualify for carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol.

But Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is not willing to recognize the new method of verifying carbon storage in farmland, questioning whether the program will result in additional carbon storage and whether the storage will be permanent. The ETS is the largest multi-country, multi-sector greenhouse gas emission trading scheme in the world.

The issue of carbon storage, or carbon "sinks" as they are known, is very controversial in the world of Kyoto agreement implementation. Non-governmental organizations that advocate for forests and indigenous people have worked hard to exclude the use of forestry credits to offset fossil fuel burning, and with good reason.

To date, most forestry offsets have been for big monoculture plantations of fast-growing eucalyptus or pine trees, some of them genetically modified. Though timber companies and professional foresters say otherwise, such plantations are likely to act as net carbon emitters over their lifetimes and also cause additional environmental and social problems.

Monoculture tree plantations are often established on land recently cleared of primary forest. Larry Lohman of the World Rainforest Movement reports that in the 1980s, 75 percent of new tree plantations in the tropics were planted in places that ten years earlier had been natural forests. A plantation will never be able to store as much carbon as the original biologically diverse forest.

Monoculture tree plantations are ecologically unstable. Plantations are more vulnerable to disease and wildfire, which can release carbon instantly back into the atmosphere. When they are harvested, the wood may go into long-lasting wood products, or it may be chipped and pulped into shorter-lived products like paper. Or it may go into a landfill and be released as a devastating methane burp decades later. Disturbing the soil for planting and harvesting reduces its capacity to store carbon, and tree plantations are thirsty, drinking up scarce water resources.

When tree plantations are established on land that indigenous people have rights to, the damage is compounded. Larry Lohman writes: "Like the enclosure movement of early modern Europe, through which common lands were taken away from the rural poor and broken up, privatized and traded into the hands of the better-off, the movement for carbon 'offset' plantations is in essence a movement to extend and normalize inequality."

The rural poor pay twice, once by suffering the effects of climate change caused by affluent countries, and again by having their land taken to offset the guilt of affluent people.

The World Agroforestry Centre program is very different from a monoculture plantation. It is about helping rural Africans to integrate more trees into their agricultural production systems, with many benefits besides storing carbon. The right kinds of trees can increase the productivity and resilience of the land. Trees provide food, fuel, fertilizer, and medicine. Medicinal trees are the main source of medication for 80 percent of Africa's population.