The US Senate is currently being urged by environmental groups to expand a climate change bill in order to help foreign countries pay for enforcing laws they already have in place for protecting forests.
Last year global warming legislation was passed in the US House of Representatives and will set up financial incentives to encourage new steps in the US and abroad for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However there are doubts that the US would let these financial incentives flow to foreign countries, such as Indonesia and Brazil who have forest protection laws on the books but few resources to enforce them. For these countries it is the enforcement of domestic laws including on the local level that will make the difference in pollution reduction efforts.
“We have been talking to a lot of people about this issue,” said Sarene Marshall, deputy director of the Nature Conservancy’s climate change program. She added that the “vast majority of deforestation in the Amazon is technically illegal because Brazil has one of most far-reaching protection laws on the books. We’re talking about programs that actually help move landowners into compliance.”
Trees soak up carbon dioxide when growing and release it when they rot or are burned. The clearing of large swaths of forests for farming and ranching is estimated to contribute 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas output.
John Kerry a democratic Senator is leading the charge in the Senate for a compromise climate change bill that could be agreed upon this year. Unfortunately talks have been difficult and so far there has been no guarantee that a bill will be enacted soon.
The hope from the environmentalists is that Kerry will include an expanded credit provision within any compromise in the form of ‘offsets’, which US companies will be allowed to undertake as part of their overall carbon reduction efforts. This means that a company could meet some of its federally mandated carbon emissions goals by helping to protect forests and other environmentally sensitive lands abroad from being developed.
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April 11th, 2010 at 12:48 AM
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