Prince Charles has been talking trees – about them, that is, rather than to them.
Last week His Royal Highness backed proposals for an international fund to pay countries to preserve their forests. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said that because of poverty in many tropical regions, there is currently more value to local people in the forest being ‘dead’, by which he meant clearing it for development and agriculture and felling trees to make wood products and fuel. He called on the international community to come up with an annual pot £30bn to make it more worthwhile to keep them alive.
His remarks are in line with the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and [forest] Degradation (REDD) initiative which was discussed at the UN Climate Change Confrence in Bali last year. This focuses particularly on the tropics and recommends compensating countries to keep their forests intact, with the sum paid based on their ‘carbon value’.
There are a number of problems with plans simply to take forests out of production. The first is cost. Other commentators say a REDD fund would actually have to run to hundreds of billions of pounds a year to be viable.
The second issue is whether developing countries will back a scheme which dictates how they manage their forestry and shape their economies. Some have voiced support, but others see it as a means for western industrialised countries to salve their consciences for their own poor records on deforestation and greenhouse gas emission. They also feel it’s patronising, hardly surprising given the following recent comment in The Daily Telegraph about Amazonian deforestation from REDD supporter, Andrew Mitchell of the Global Canopy Programme. “Pedro with his chain saw needs cash,” he said, “and the forest is a pretty good ATM.”
The alternative view is that the best way to incentivise people to preserve their forest is to help them manage it sustainably. Maybe a proportion should be taken out of production – and there are already funds available via the World Bank to assist this. But if sustainable timber production is developed in the rest, it provides a sustainable economic reason for the forest to be preserved, while leaving local people to shape their own economic destiny. In short, your highness, the key to preserving the forests is to talk timber as well as trees.
