Improving Tropical Forest Management Mitigates Climate Change

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The international climate change agreement that is being drafted to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 has as one focus the on reduction of carbon emissions due to deforestation and degradation (REDD).

Most REDD discussions focus on tropical deforestation but ignore the potential carbon savings that could be realized from reduced forest degradation.

Botanist Francis Putz and colleagues say ignoring evidence that better forest management practices can substantially reduce carbon emissions means an obvious and cost-effective approach to mitigating the effects of global climate change is being missed.

This oversight is problematic because "carbon losses due to degradation could be of the same magnitude as those from deforestation."

Logging practices can minimize ecological impact, but even when trees are picked selectively there is often collateral damage--ten to twenty times the number of harvested trees is destroyed through human error and poorly designed procedures for locating and removing correct targets. Worker training in directional felling and better planning of timber extraction paths can reduce these effects by at least 50%.

Improved management reduced carbon emissions by approximately 30%, compared to conventional logging, in long-term studies of conventional versus improved forest management practices in Malaysia and Brazil.

Using data on intensities and intervals of logging, areas of production forest (managed for timber and forest products), and their estimates of carbon loss, it was estimated that global implementation of improved forest-management techniques would save 0.16 gigatons of carbon per year.

Emission policies in one area can sometimes have the unintended effect of raising emissions in another--for example, economic restrictions in one country can give its neighbor a competitive advantage; however, better logging techniques have no negative impacts on production and can even improve financial yields, making this rearrangement of emissions, or "leakage," a non-issue.

"Incentives to retain more forest carbon through improved management would represent a big step toward sustainability in the vast area of tropical forests outside protected sites," the authors argue.

"Although many details on measuring, monitoring, and compensating carbon sequestering by individuals, companies, communities, and governments need to be sorted out, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases from tropical forest degradation should be given a high priority in negotiations leading up to the new climate change agreement to be formulated in Copenhagen in 2009."