by Tropical forest landscapes are home to millions of indigenous people and small farmers. Almost every square meter of land is being talked about, even if governments do not formally recognize the claims.
These local landowners hold the key to a valuable solution as the world tries to curb climate change: restoring deforested tropical landscapes for a healthier future.
Rainforests are vital to the Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but today an area of mature rainforest the size of a football field is burned or cut down about every five seconds to make way for crops and livestock.
While those trees may have been lost, the land still has potential. Rainforests’ combination of year-round sunshine and high rainfall can lead to high growth rates, suggesting that areas where rainforests once grew could be valuable sites for reforestation. In fact, a series of international agreements and declarations provide for precisely this.
However, for reforestation projects to make a dent in climate change, they have to work with and for the people who live there.
As forest ecologists involved in tropical forest restoration, we have been studying effective ways to compensate people for the ecosystem services that flow from their lands. In a new study, we show how compensation that also allows landowners to harvest and sell some of the trees could provide powerful incentives and ultimately benefit everyone.
The extraordinary value of ecosystem services
Tropical forests are renowned for their extraordinary biodiversity, and their preservation is considered essential to protecting life on Earth. They are reservoirs of vast carbon reserves, which slows down climate change. However, when tropical forests are cut down and burned, they release large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.
Programs that offer payments for ecosystem services are designed to help keep those forests and other ecosystems healthy by compensating landowners for goods and services produced by nature that are often taken for granted. For example, forests moderate stream flows and reduce flood risks, support bees and other pollinators that benefit neighboring farmlands, and help regulate climate.
In recent years, a cottage industry has emerged of paying people to reforest land for the carbon it may contain. It has been driven in part by corporations and other institutions looking for ways to meet their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by paying for projects to reduce or prevent emissions elsewhere.
Early versions of projects that pay landowners for ecosystem services have been criticized for focusing too much on economic efficiency, sometimes at the expense of social and environmental concerns.
Win-win solutions, where environmental and social concerns are taken into account, may not be the most economically efficient in the short term, but can lead to long-term sustainability as participants feel proud and responsible for success. of the project.
That long-term sustainability is essential for trees’ carbon storage, because it takes many decades of growth to build up the stored carbon and combat climate change.
Why wood can be a triple win
In the study, we look at ways to maximize the three priorities (environmental, economic and social benefits) in forest restoration, focusing on infertile lands.
It may be surprising, but most soils in the tropics are extraordinarily infertile, with concentrations of phosphorus and other essential nutrients an order of magnitude or lower than in crop-producing areas of the Northern Hemisphere. This makes restoring rainforests through reforestation more complex than simply planting trees: these areas also require maintenance.
In our study we used about 1.4 million tree measurements taken over 15 years at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Agua Salud site in Panama to project carbon sequestration and potential timber revenues. We look at naturally regrowing forests, plantations of native tree species, and an effort to rehabilitate a failed teak plantation by planting high-value native trees known to grow in low-fertility soils to test routes to profitability.
One set of solutions stood out: We found that providing landowners with payments for carbon storage and the ability to generate income through timber production on the land could generate vibrant forests and financial gains for landowners.
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest logging when the goal is to restore forests, but allowing landowners to generate revenue from timber can give them an incentive to protect and manage planted forests over time.
Regrowing trees in a deforested landscape, whether through natural regrowth or planting, is a net win for climate change, as trees remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. New forests selectively logged or plantations harvested in 30 to 80 years can help slow climate change as the world reduces emissions and scales up carbon capture technologies.
Reliable payments are important
The structure of payments is also important. We found that reliable annual carbon payments to rural landowners to re-cultivate forests could equal or exceed the income they could otherwise earn from clearing land for livestock, thus making the transition to tree planting possible.
When cash payments are based on measurements of tree growth, they can vary widely from year to year and between planting strategies. With the costs involved, that can hinder effective land management to combat climate change.
Instead, using fixed annual payments ensures a stable income and will help encourage more homeowners to sign up. Now we are using that method in the Ngäbe-Buglé Indigenous Region of Panama. The project pays residents to plant and care for native trees for 20 years.
Transfer risk to carbon offset buyers
From a practical perspective, fixed annual carbon payments and other cost-sharing strategies for planting trees shift the burden of risk from participants to carbon buyers, often companies in rich countries.
Landowners receive payment even if actual tree growth is insufficient, and everyone benefits from the ecosystem services provided.
While win-win solutions may not initially appear economically efficient, our work helps illustrate a viable path forward, where environmental, social and economic objectives can be achieved.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization bringing you trusted data and analysis to help you understand our complex world. If you found it interesting, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
It was written by: Jefferson S. Hall, Smithsonian Institution; Katherine Sinacore, Smithsonian Institutionand Michiel van Breugel, National University of Singapore.
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Jefferson S. Hall receives funding from the U.S. government through the Smithsonian Institution, Stanly Motta, Frank and Kristin Levinson, the Hoch family, U-Trust, and the Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation.
Katherine Sinacore receives funding from the Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation, Stanly Motta, Frank and Kristin Levinson, the Hoch family, and the Smithsonian.
Michiel van Breugel receives funding from the Singapore Ministry of Education and the ETH-Singapore Centre’s Global Future Cities Lab Programme, which is funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore.
