Forest carbon

Confidential papers reveal Europeans want assistance for poorer countries to come from existing cash pot. The EU was accused of threatening the global climate talks last night after confidential papers showed it wants existing overseas aid funding to be used to help poor countries adapt to global warming, not new and additional funds.

An expert has warned that the REDD emissions reduction scheme designed to protect forests could be prone to conflicts between rich and rainforest nations, including Indonesia, which could in turn threaten bilateral relations because of complicated mechanisms involved in  the monitoring of the scheme.

A great deal has been learned over the past 15 years about how to reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation in ways that benefit local people and the global environment.

This month, the journal Nature Geoscience published a study calculating that deforestation is responsible for about 15% of global carbon emissions, down from earlier estimates of 20% or more. Most of the world's deforestation is concentrated in a few tropical nations, like Brazil and Indonesia where trees are disappearing fast — when these trees die or are burned, they release into the atmosphere all the carbon they've sucked up while they were alive. According to the Nature Geoscience study, the problem of deforestation is becoming a lot less dire than previously thought.

The research, by Bristol University, suggests that despite rising emissions, the world is is still able to store a significant amount of greenhouse gases in oceans and forests.