Tag Archives: avoided deforestation

International Day of Forests, 2023

How we treat our forests is a measure of our relationship with nature, with each other, and with common sense. With nature because natural forests are key components in the web of life: rich with biodiversity and evolutionary and biophysical processes that sustain the living world. With each other, because natural forests are lived in by many indigenous peoples and also support vast downstream and nearby populations who rely on them for water, environmental security and essential harvests. And with common sense, because natural forests make landscapes, countries and the world as a whole both habitable and beautiful, so wrecking them is our loss.

We know all this, but the harm still being done to forests shows that we find it hard to regulate our collective treatment of them. This is usually because the bounty that forests offer is most appreciated locally and globally, but less so at intermediate levels where businesses and national governments operate. Here there are incentives with their own logic, which make it profitable in the short term to over-harvest catchment forests for their timber, to replace wetland forests with aquaculture ponds, or inland forests with plantations, mines or planned settlements.

Local and indigenous people are often too weak politically to protect themselves against these forces, yet wherever they are empowered over their forests they prefer to keep them intact. Meanwhile, the global community looks on with rising alarm, conscious that with every hectare of forest lost, another few hundred tonnes of greenhouse gases are released into the air. The days are long gone when a forest could be destroyed in Borneo or the Amazon without anyone caring on the other side of the world. Now we know that we all have to live with the consequences of global heating: floods, droughts, crop failures and high food prices, a list lengthening inexorably towards worldwide suffering, war and total system breakdown.

The story of our efforts to slow and halt forest degradation and loss is dominated by the interplay of these three levels of human society. Local people have strived for recognition and control of their lands and ecosystems. Businesses and governments have strived for short-term wealth. And global actors have strived to moderate short-term demands on forests, while not interfering in national decisions but not able to pay enough to cancel out perverse incentives. Yet this dialogue has yielded victories when different interests aligned around workable solutions.

These usually result from governments and global actors agreeing that local people should take charge of local forests for everyone’s benefit, and should be supported in doing so. Examples include the successes of Danish and Swiss support for indigenous land titling in Bolivia and community forest user groups in Nepal, and Danish support for community forest protection in the Harapan area of Sumatra and the Mbeliling area of Flores in Indonesia. There are many others, and not just in forests. The combination of local empowerment and environmental education works just as well for mangroves, fisheries, grasslands, bush-savannahs and other ecosystems wherever one cares to look, from the equator to the poles.

As well as being good for human rights, traditional lifeways, local well-being, biodiversity and landscape-scale ecosystem services, community forest initiatives are also cheap. Just for carbon, test calculations from Danish investments show that protecting high carbon-density natural ecosystems with community help has far higher climate change mitigation effectiveness per unit cost than renewable energy generation projects ever can. And the co-benefits of these initiatives are abundant, diverse, and full of promise for fair and sustainable wealth creation.

So while we struggle to head off global catastrophe later this century, we should be concentrating on the most cost-effective ways to change outcomes. And that means massively accelerating our investments in nature-based and community-based solutions in natural forests, but learning from past successes and doing it right. Adequate funding for local partnership-based protection over millions of hectares can offer certainty that billions of tonnes of carbon will not be released quickly. As a precaution during a life-or-death gamble with the living world, the need for this assurance should be shaping the regulations and market preferences that control the flow of all climate-relevant investment. With local people as genuine partners, encouraged and enabled by wise governments and advised and financed globally, conserving the world’s remaining natural forests is key to solving the triple crisis of climate, nature and poverty that faces us all. This offers us hope and purpose for the International Day of Forests, 2023.

New paper on biosphere tipping points and climate investment

My new paper ‘Implications of Earth system tipping pathways for climate change mitigation investment’ has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal Discover Sustainability. It can be freely downloaded here. In it, I explore some implications of an anticipated biosphere-wide tipping point (BTP) in the year 2050 ± 10, including:

that all climate change mitigation investments should be designed, chosen and judged against this hard and dated deadline, thus urgently prioritising early delivery of net GHG savings;
that deadline-compliant investments should aim transparently for optimum cost-effectiveness in their biophysical outcomes, especially net GHG emission savings but also biodiversity, ecosystem service and climate change adaptation co-benefits; and
that investors and markets should prefer actions that yield highly cost-effective biophysical returns, especially where valuable co-benefits are expected.

I explain how to do the necessary calculations, and I provide examples from recent mitigation aid portfolios to support a change of focus from financial to biophysical returns on investment. From these cases, key ways to prevent the BTP include protecting and restoring high carbon-density natural ecosystems, and improving choice awareness and building capacity to promote decarbonisation in all economic sectors.

Three urgent research priorities remain: (1) on the consequences of an Arctic Ocean imminently free of summer sea ice, and options for remedial action including the recapture of methane at large scale and high speed; (2) on testing a new dated mitigation value metric in justifying precautionary mitigation investments in multiple sectors and contexts; and (3) on integrating diverse co-benefit values (biodiversity, ecosystem services, adaptation, etc.) into mitigation investment decision making.

Buying time to avoid Earth system breakdown

In this talk at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, Julian Caldecott warns of tipping points driven by global heating in the Arctic and other complex Earth systems. These systems have been under stress for decades, due to the heat-trapping effects of excess greenhouse gases. Using the case of the Arctic sea ice ‘death spiral’ since 1979, Julian explains how complex systems under this kind of stress tend to resist change before suddenly tipping into new forms. He then uses his knowledge of government climate aid programmes to show how being aware of mid-century deadlines can help us make better choices in mitigating climate change. Having a dated reference point would make it easier to calculate the true mitigation value of investments, thus helping to buy us time to build a safer and fairer world, one with peace with nature at its heart. But peace with nature needs ecosystem thinking, and this must quickly become normal if system change is to occur. Julian asks challenging questions about ‘business as usual’ climate aid, and offers new solutions in this most vital area of public policy.

Watch the video, or read more …

Some of the thinking in the talk is new and unorthodox. It treats Earth systems as complex and assumes that, like other complex systems, they can tip suddenly from one state to another after they have been under stress for a long time. Julian argues that just such a stress is the trapping of heat in the biosphere by greenhouse gases at a concentration in the air above 300 ppm CO₂, which has been the case since about 1950. Its direct consequences include rising heat content of the world ocean and increasing global mean surface temperature (GMST). Its indirect consequences include declining polar sea ice volume, melting glaciers, marine and terrestrial heatwaves, weakening ocean currents and changing weather patterns that are often experienced as environmental chaos and usually described as climate change (CC).

The current 1.5 C goal, based on GMST, helps to focus public attention and mobilise action by governments. But it does not reflect the non-linear responses to be expected of a system as complex as the biosphere. The continuity of cause and effect over time, and the prospect of tipping points, challenge the realism of CC mitigation planning and investment assumptions. Improvements can be made by using an estimate of when Earth systems will, with current timing and heating trends, become irreversibly committed to transformational (‘tipping point’) change. This will pre-date the tipping point itself, so estimating when allows us to judge the effectiveness of CC mitigation investments in postponing it. Postponing tipping points is how we can buy ourselves time to make the changes needed for longer-term safety.

But such postponements may well become harder to do over time, as each system becomes steadily more inclined to transform itself. A relevant case is the ice-free Arctic Ocean, anticipated for September 2035 ± 5, which may already be unstoppable and could well drive a dangerous methane surge when it occurs. The mitigation value of delivering avoided net emissions would presumably decline in real terms as the commitment point is approached, either suddenly on its eve or more gradually in the preceding years. Uncertainties abound and call for precautionary thinking about the dates involved and the mitigation value of investments, including the unit value of mitigation returns on those investments. For these purposes, it is more realistic to reduce that value exponentially from now to the commitment point, rather than to assume a change from ‘valuable’ to ‘valueless’ the day before it.

Thus, a dated ‘deadline’ in mid century (2050 ± 10) might be chosen to represent the transformation commitment point of key Earth systems. This is based on the trajectory of change in sea ice minima in the Arctic Ocean, and on the rate and direction of change in other cryosphere (ice-world) and oceanic systems, and in major equatorial forest areas. Whatever the deadline chosen, precautionary investment plans would exponentially reduce the value of each expected mitigation unit as the deadline approaches. Such plans would therefore express all expected emission reductions not in tCO₂e but in tCO₂edmv, where ‘dmv’ stands for dated mitigation value. This would have the effect of valuing early net emission gains more highly than later ones. This is already in principle a common aim, but a standard metric would allow direct comparison of true cost-effectiveness between alternative investments in practice.

Julian tested the usefulness of this approach with data from projects funded by one EU member state in three developing countries, targeting: avoided deforestation; forest regrowth (also representing tree planting); wind farming (representing renewable energy, RE); and capacity building for economy-wide decarbonisation. Over 21 years with a constant 0.1 exponent used to depreciate mitigation value (such that 1 tCO₂edmv in year 1 = 0.41 tCO₂edmv in year 10 = 0.14 tCO₂edmv in year 21), returns were estimated at 0.90 tCO₂edmv/€ for capacity building, with least certainty; at 0.40 tCO₂edmv/€ for avoided deforestation, with moderate certainty; at 0.05 tCO₂edmv/€ for forest regeneration/planting, with moderate certainty; and at 0.01 tCO₂edmv/€ for wind farming, with most certainty.

Among the cases with moderate to most certainty, the much higher mitigation returns from avoided deforestation than from RE and tree planting investments offer a key lesson to mitigation planners. Variation in the certainty of returns is an important factor in choosing the right mix of investments for each location, but so too are the varied co-benefits (biodiversity, adaptation, human rights, sustainable development, etc.) available from different investment strategies. And the biggest risk of all is that transformation commitment points in Earth systems cannot be postponed (or will not, due weak precaution and/or weak leadership).

This all suggests that a key starting point for justifying the expenditure of public mitigation funds lies the calculation of tCO₂edmv/€. Once this is done, other factors such as expected co-benefits can be considered in detail. But the initial calculation would require an agreed deadline date (which could be moved by agreement later, if success is achieved), an agreed exponent for converting tCO₂e into tCO₂edmv, and attention to the comparative valuation of co-benefits for fine-tuning the justification of each investment.

Watch Julian’s talk and the Q&A afterwards here.