Financial mechanisms to compensate countries for conserving their tropical forest cover are not the full answer for heading off climate change, the Malaysian Timber Council’s (MTC) London’s office has said.
The MTC’s Sheam Satkuru-Granzella spoke following a BBC 10 O’Clock News special report from Sabah, which suggested that plans to pay the developing world to preserve forests could earn Malaysia billions of pounds just for leaving its forests untouched.
Ms Satkuru-Granzella told TTJ that the only way to save the carbon-storing tropical forests was for them to be used sustainably.
She said Malaysia’s timber industry generated revenue of US$6bn annually, about 4% of GDP.
“Pure conservation means there has to be some compensation,” she said. “ But is the world prepared to pay Malaysia 4% of its GDP annually? I don’t think so, it’s highly unlikely.”
She said there needed to be pressure on industrialised countries to reduce their carbon emissions, rather than the onus being just on tropical forest countries.
She pointed out that natural forests cover 60% of Malaysia, with the federal government committed to preserving 50%. A further 15% of forest cover is plantations, which are planted on degraded land or state forests.
David Shukman’s BBC report from Borneo showed tropical hardwood logging and quoted Dr Glen Reynolds, senior scientist at the Danum Valley Field Centre as saying the “rainforests are worth more dead than alive and something has to be done to reverse the situation”.
But Dr Waidi Sinun of the Sabah Foundation told the BBC that the state didn’t have large mechanised industries like other countries but had resources such as timber it could use.
