It is widely agreed that the REDD payment mechanisms could halve forest destruction in the Amazon. What is not so well publicised is that the majority of the money set aside to conserve the forests would be going to the region’s wealthiest landholders.
These landholders are responsible for 80% of the deforestation still going on in the Brazilian Amazon and through this scheme they would benefit the most financially from the direct payments used to curb climate emissions from forests.
This data was presented in a new study by researchers for CIFOR (Centre for International Forestry Research) and their partners.
‘When four-fifths of a major environmental problem is caused by large landholders, then any solution will have to provide some compensation to this group for their losses,’ says Sven Wunder, CIFOR scientist and co-author of ‘Direct conservation payments in the Brazilian Amazon: scope and equity implications’. ‘And if that achieves the desired emission reductions, perhaps this is a necessary evil.’
According to the authors of the report if the projected US$6 billion is invested in the REDD scheme then forest loss projections between 2008 and 2019 in the Brazilian Amazon would be halved at current per ton carbon prices. In other words this would conserve an estimated 12.5 million hectares or an area approximately half the size of Ghana.
As mentioned previously a large share of the direct payments to landowners would go to already wealthy owners of large holdings of 100 hectares or larger. However, this hasn’t been confirmed and the funds could be put to other uses such as sorting out ambiguous land tenure and enforcing conservation in protected areas.
In the last 30 years an estimated 40% of rainforests worldwide have been destroyed. The Brazilian Amazon is the world’s largest remaining rainforest and it lies in a country that has the world’s largest forest loss each year. During 2000 and 2005 an estimated 13 million hectares of Brazilian Amazon forest was felled, according to the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE). This is significant if the fact that one fifth of annual global carbon emissions comes from land use change such as clearing forests for agriculture is taken into account. By reducing the carbon emissions associated with continued deforestation important co-benefits such as conserving biodiversity, regional climate regulation and cultural values may be secured.
In the future the majority of deforestation will take place in areas that are on unclassified public lands or on private land that has no clear boundaries. The study did note however, that a quarter of future deforestation is expected to take place in strictly protected areas, sustainable use areas, land reform settlements and indigenous territories.
“The way the Brazilian government has devised payment schemes for environmental services, payment cannot be used to stop deforestation on illegally appropriated lands, nor on lands where private tenure is disputed,’ says Jan Börner, CIFOR scientist and a co-author of the study. ‘Land-tenure chaos represents the single largest impediment for using on-the-ground payments to implement REDD in Brazil on a large scale.’ He added.
The authors of the report have suggested that despite the seeming logic of ranking payments according to the scale of deforestation related threat the overall insecurity in the tenure system means that funding small holder related schemes are often safer and act as a more realistic short term solution to pilot carbon reduction payment schemes. This is due to the fact that the large holders only have shaky tenure claims to the forestlands they operate on.
“Among many large landholders, tenure rights are poorly defined, which is why it will take a while to include them in large-scale REDD+ payment schemes”, says Wunder. “Many smallholders live in relatively well-established tenure systems, (and so) may be the first-best entry point for pioneering REDD+ schemes, many of which may also be pro-poor.” He concluded.
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