Readiness for REDD:
A preliminary global assessment of tropical forested land suitability for agriculture
As UNFCCC negotiations move towards a powerful new mechanism for compensating tropical countries for their nation-wide reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), several important questions remain: How much will REDD cost? Will it benefit forest people? Is it possible to monitor forests when so many countries are chronically covered with clouds? These and other questions are the topics addressed in four new studies released by the Woods Hole Research Center in anticipation of the 13th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP-13) in Bali, Indonesia.
Objectives
- To develop preliminary maps and statistics about the area and carbon content of forests on lands that are highly suitable for industrial agriculture and those forests that have high concentrations of forest-dependent people. These two drivers of deforestation—the expansion of industrial agriculture and smallholder farming—may represent the most expensive component of the REDD programs that are in development. Thus, these types of maps also serve as a basis for estimating the price of carbon by using them to estimate the flow of economic benefits derived from crops and livestock since these represent the income foregone if forest is conserved instead of cultivated.
- To provide a conceptual approach to the mapping of the constraints to agricultural expansion imposed by soils, drainage, and climate as one componentof the analyses that each nation must undertake in projecting future deforestation trends. For some nations, the potential financial benefits of participation in the emerging REDD regime will be negligible unless projected increases in emissions are added to the historical emission baseline. In developing REDD programs, each nation will need reliable information on the portions of their forests that are not suitable for highly profitable agriculture, or are very sparsely populated with forest-based farmers, allowing them to better constrain their estimates of the opportunity costs of REDD.
Key Assumptions
- We assume that global trends in population growth, eating habits (e.g. the growth of meat-eating in China and other countries, Nepstad et al. 2006, Nepstad and Stickler, in press), and biofuels will apply steadily growing pressure on lands with agricultural potential and that tropical nations could incorporate the costs of restricting agricultural expansion into their forestlands as part of their REDD programs.
- We assume that a more complete assessment of future business-as-usual trends in agricultural expansion into tropical forests will necessarily involve information about infrastructure (transportation, storage), market trends, and the governance capacity of each nation.
- We carried out the analyses for all forested areas, regardless of their land tenure status, but indicate where protected areas are currently located on the assumption that these will be maintained and could be eligible for compensation.
A more complete set of assumptions pertaining to REDD can be found in our companion report, "The costs and benefits of reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon."
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