The destruction of forests is said to be responsible for 18% to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the most important causes of climate change. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated net forest losses in 2005 at around 7.3 million hectares a year for a total surface area of some four billion hectares, ie 30% of the planet’s land area. Tropical forests – which are mainly in the developing countries (LDCs) – are at the heart of the problem. Aid from the industrialised countries to help them cope with this challenge is therefore one of the key issues of the Copenhagen conference.

The question of the inclusion of these emissions was a debate that long held the attention of negotiators at the Bali climate change conference (December 2007). It ended with the adoption of an action plan and payment mechanism to compensate for reductions in emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, the REDD Programme. Forests thus became ‘attractive’ because their protection and restoration could earn carbon credits for those investing in such operations, a scheme similar to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) created by the Kyoto Protocol. This market lacks transparency, however, and the scheme increasingly appears to be having harmful effects on biodiversity, the climate and local communities.

While deforestation is a source of CO ₂ emissions, the forest as such is a carbon sink, because trees absorb CO ₂ during their growth. Since Bali, the experts have therefore added a carbon capture dimension to the REDD programme, now known as REDD+: the idea is no longer simply to add up the emissions that will be saved through the reduction in deforestation but also to add up the amounts of CO ₂ forests can capture.

The organisation of a fully operational REDD+ mechanism that corrects the shortcomings of REDD and offers LDCs appropriate and sufficient assistance – a point some emerging countries like Brazil (see separate article) and Indonesia have made the spearhead of their position – is one of the tough challenges ahead for the Copenhagen negotiations. The level of financing, practical arrangements (eg, should a ceiling be set on the share of effort/investment by developed countries that will give entitlement to carbon credits), management and supervision of the mechanism are questions still to be settled.