Brazil demonstrating that reducing tropical deforestation is possible while expanding biofuels

Brazil is not only a success story when it comes to biofuels, it is also an example of how a smart series of policies and economic incentives can reduce tropical deforestation, while at the same time increasing biofuel production. Despite what some campaigners claim, Brazil's energy crops do not grow in tropical rainforest zones, and deforestation is not automatically fuelled by the expansion of these crops. Land-use change and deforestation resulting from agricultural production for food is not simply causally related to land-use changes from expanded energy cropping. For this reason, Brazil has been able to steadily increase its biofuels output, while at the same cutting deforestation rates by half, in less than 5 years. A major achievement of the left-wing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that has been noted by climate scientists and policy makers alike.

Tropical deforestation is the source of nearly a fifth of annual, human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. Recent studies by Woods Hole Research Center scientists demonstrate that during years of severe drought, tropical rainforest fires can double emissions from tropical forests. Now, an international team of forest and climate researchers has found that halving deforestation rates by mid-century would account for 12 percent of total emissions reductions needed to keep concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere at safe levels - and they take Brazil's efforts as an example of the way forward. The scientists' work [*abstract] is profiled in a recent issue of Science.

"Compensated reduction"
A policy mechanism is needed that rewards those tropical nations that succeed in lowering their emissions of heat-trapping gases from deforestation and forest degradation. This is a particularly urgent need since most of these emissions are associated with only modest economic gains, but provoke high losses of biodiversity. Such a policy mechanism is now under discussion in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The "Compensated Reduction" (CR) (earlier post) of greenhouse gas emissions from tropical forests would provide payments to those tropical nations that succeed in lowering their emissions from deforestation and tropical degradation, beginning during the second compensation period of the UNFCCC (beginning 2013). This proposal has now been endorsed by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, which currently represents 29 tropical countries who support the CR proposal, and which formally advanced the CR proposal during the Conference of the Parties in Montreal, 2005, and will be voted on by the UNFCCC delegation in Bali Conference of the Parties in December.

Brazil's example
"More than any other country, Brazil has demonstrated that it is feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation", says co-author Daniel Nepstad, Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. He, along with colleague Marina Campos, showed that since the beginning of 2004, Brazil has created more than 20 million hectares of parks, extractive reserve, and national forests in the Amazon region, and many of these protected areas are located in the agricultural frontier. These protected areas, if fully enforced, will prevent one billion tons of carbon from being transferred to the atmosphere through deforestation by the year 2015. Brazil's deforestation rates have been cut nearly in half in recent years through a combination of government intervention and economic trends:
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"We are encouraging the Brazilian government to fully endorse the Compensated Reduction proposal", states Paulo Moutinho, Scientist and Coordinator of the Climate Change Program of the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), a non-governmental research institute in Brazil. CR would help Brazil offset the costs of slowing deforestation rates. In Brazil, the cost of reducing deforestation emissions by half will be less than $5 per ton of carbon dioxide, as estimated in an unpublished study of IPAM and the Woods Hole Research Center.

"Slowing tropical deforestation won't, by itself, solve the climate problem," said Dr. Peter Frumhoff, co-author and organizer of the study and Director of Science and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But for many developing countries, it is their largest source of emissions. Climate policymakers have a historic opportunity to help developing countries find economically viable alternatives to deforestation and participate in the global effort to address climate change."

Biofuels expansion
The Brazilian government has been trying to decouple the problem of deforestation and biofuel production, and stresses that increased use of tropical biofuels over fossil fuels offers an equally potent strategy to mitigate climate change. Energy crops grown in Brazil for liquid fuels like ethanol (sugar cane and cassava), biodiesel (jatropha, palm oil and castor beans), and biomass (eucalyptus), do not thrive in former rainforest zones. Land-use changes resulting from agricultural production for food and agricultural production for energy are different and not simply causally related. Pressures on land from the biofuels sector are not straightforwardly translated into pressures on land for food cropping, because both systems require different climates, growing conditions and soils. Some organisations however have launched an uninformed campaign against biofuels, by coupling both forms of land-use change and claiming that biofuel production fuels deforestation.

Brazil's biofuels efforts explicitly take sustainability into account. Strict zoning rules and land use management policies are under development, organic energy farming is becoming more common, and policies aimed at strengthening the social sustainability of biofuels have been implemented. Moreover, the country has over 100 million hectares of degraded pasture-land that could be recovered and restored by planting biofuel crops. In this context, the Brazilian government has launched a financing mechanism making it easier for ranchers and land-owners to convert their pastures into land suitable for energy plantations.

More information:
Eurekalert: Brazil demonstrating that reducing tropical deforestation is key win-win global warming solution - May 15, 2007.

Raymond E. Gullison, Peter C. Frumhoff, Josep G. Canadell, Christopher B. Field, Daniel C. Nepstad, Katharine Hayhoe, Roni Avissar, Lisa M. Curran, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris D. Jones, Carlos Nobre, "Tropical Forests and Climate Policy" [*abstract], Science, May 10, 2007, DOI: 10.1126/science.1136163