Forestry Investment Blog

“Green enthusiasts”  worldwide are to be offered the opportunity to play game keeper and monitor satellite images of rainforests and report any illegal logging.

Satellite images will be frequently updated and anyone with internet access will be able to make instant comparisons with older images and identify destruction of rainforest almost immediately.

The green detectives will then be able to report the illegal deforestation to an international agency being created to monitor whether countries are meeting their commitments to reduce deforestation. Any state found to have broken its pledge will lose its share of a new global fund established by rich countries to pay nations for leaving their trees standing.

The forestry fund is entitled Reducing Emissions from Defoestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD for short and is valued at up to $30 billion a year.  REDD is expected to be be approved at the Copenhagen climate change conerence.

Google is helping to create the new online forestry detective tool, which is likely to be launched next year. Philipp Schindler, a spokesperson from from Google  said: “Our engineers are exploring how we might contribute to this effort by developing a global forest platform that would enable anyone in the world, including tropical nations, to monitor deforestation and draw attention to it.”  Mr Schindler recently spoke at a seminar on deforestation held in the U.K and attended by leaders and ministers from many of the largest rainforest countries.

Contributors to the Redd fund will pay about 4 Euros for each tonne of CO2 saved by reducing the rate of deforestation.
Norway just announced that it would show how Redd could work by paying Guyana up to 150 million Euros over five years to keep its trees. Guyana’s forests have been far less logged than in many tropical nations, and under the conditions of the new deal with Norway, Guyana could actually be paid for increasing deforestation. The agreement states that Norway will compensate Guyana if it does not cut down more than 0.45 per cent of its forests per year, but Guyana is currently felling trees at a far slower rate.

The Norwegian Government’s forest protection fund, said payments would only be made when countries could actually prove that they had reduced their annual rate of deforestation by an agreed amount. He said the targets would be raised every five years.

Brazil has significantly cut its deforestation in the past year by around 50 percent the but Brazil’s Forest Service(BFS) warned that the deforesatation could increase again unless Brazil  received substantial sums from REDD . The BFS warned   “People have to have some income and we need a lot of cash for the community to maintain the forest.”

Forestry Invest is sponsored by Greenwood Management. For more information on investing in Forestry please click here

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 9:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.