Flaws of the concept


Kyoto Accounting Framework
For every tonne of carbon stored in a carbon sink, the Kyoto Protocol allows the release of an additional tonne of carbon from fossil fuel. This substitution has two important consequences for the atmosphere:

1. Establishing a carbon sink justifies a carbon emission that would otherwise not have occurred because it would have put the user of fossil fuel over its emission allowance under the Kyoto Protocol;

2. The amount of carbon available in the active carbon pool increases because the carbon stored in the biosphere can be released very easily into the atmosphere through forest fires, insect outbreaks, decay, logging, land use changes or even the decline of forest ecosystems as a result of climate change. Many of these activities are beyond government control: more than 50% of the timber exported from Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon has been logged illegally and the forest fires in 2000 in the US showed that even technically advanced countries can often do little to prevent or stop forest fires. Carbon sinks are thus likely to contribute to increasing long-term atmospheric concentrations of CO2 - the exact opposite of the intended effect, and a dangerous avoidance of emission cuts.

Kyoto Protocol gives wrong Incentives
• The focus of the Kyoto Protocol is on carbon sequestration, as opposed to maintaining carbon stores. Hence more credits can be gained the faster a tree can grow, which in turn leads to an incentive for large-scale tree plantations and ignores the role of forests, particularly old growth forests which have accumulated carbon over centuries, as carbon stores.

• In addition to the incentive provided through the focus on sequestration, governmental unwillingness to acknowledge the difference between forests and tree plantations in the Kyoto Protocol also suggests that a substantial part of afforestation and reforestation projects will result in the establishment of large-scale tree plantations.

• The emphasis on sequestration further suggests that afforestation of previously unforested lands is desirable from a climate perspective. However, there may be situations, where afforestation - especially afforestation in northern boreal regions - may accelerate global warming. Climate change is expected to shift boreal forest borders northward.

While this will mean that carbon is removed from the atmosphere as trees grow, afforestation activities may not benefit the climate: One of the key factors affecting the global climate is the 'albedo effect', a process, which determines how much sunlight is reflected back into space and how much warms the earth's surface: Dark green forests absorb more sunlight than tundra or farmland, adding to the warming trend in the boreal if large non-forested areas now covered in highly reflective snow were planted with trees that shed their snow much faster than the underlying surface.

• Many of the carbon sink projects will be located on lands where forest peoples' land rights and customary land use have not been recognized to date and in fact are violated in many cases, as shown in the Fern report Forests of Fear http://www.fern.org/pubs/reports/fear.pdf . Yet, forest peoples are not even mentioned in the Climate Convention. Neither the Convention nor the Kyoto Protocol include any direct reference to indigenous peoples or forest dwellers. It seems likely under these circumstances that carbon sink projects will not respect or strengthen forest peoples' rights to their lands and natural resources. Evidence of this assumption surfaced in 2000 when Norwatch, a Norwegian NGO documented the imminent eviction of local people from lands allocated to a carbon sink project envisaged to provide carbon offsets for a coal-fired power plant in Norway (Tree Trouble http://www.fern.org/pubs/reports/treetr.pdf ).

Measuring fraught with uncertainties
• Measuring carbon pools is fraught with uncertainties. Assessments of the amount of carbon stored and sequestered in forests can vary hugely, depending on the methodologies used, the assumptions made, and the carbon pools within a forests that are taken into consideration or ignored (e.g. soil, litter, below ground biomass). Estimating and measuring uncertainties of 50% or more are common, and differences in assessments for Russia, Canada and Australia for example vary by as much as 565 million t C/ year among different assessments. These variations are bigger than the reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, which is 200 million tC.

• Recent research in the US suggests that the flux of carbon into forests is uncertain by a factor of two or three and annual variability as high as 100 per cent. For the continental US, sink estimates range between 0.2 and 1.3 billion tonnes per year and for Europe, between 0.2 and 0.4 billion tonnes. Canadian scientists have pointed out that uncertainty in estimates of the carbon balance in their country's forests could be greater than 1,000 percent if even seemingly small factors such as increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere are not taken into account.