Tropical Forests

Tropical forest biome

Size. Size is the first opportunity related criteria. Indeed, among the forest biomes, tropical forests have received by far the most attention. They cover an area of over 1700 million hectares and contain 471 billion tons carbon. Most of this carbon, 320 billion tons, is stored in the above ground vegetation. Tropical forests also have the highest growth rates and species biodiversity among all the world’s biomes. Thus the size of the opportunity is clear. 1

Subtype: The second opportunity related criteria is type. In tropics this forest problem is not a silvicultural or a nature related problem at all. It is economic and societal. As is well known – and quickly became apparent form our discussions with specialist organizations – this is economics-led deforestation: converting vast areas of “unproductive” forest land into revenue producing agriculture and animal husbandry. The economics are driven by soybeans and cattle Brazil, palm oil in Indonesia.

Furthermore, the issue is generally not even about lack of national laws, for example in Brazil the nature related legal protections are quite sound. The problem is generally enforcement, and the overall governance weakness of federal and regional governments.

Solvable: Therefore the real question and main problem is whether this is solvable by outsiders. Over USD 5 billion have already been pledged by western governments and large corporations on REDD+ programs – but it is highly unclear what the successes are. 2 The main problems continue to be:

  • Limited Impact on Forest Cover: Despite efforts, REDD+ has generally not succeeded in significantly reducing overall forest cover loss. They also have very mixed results across different regions and projects.
  • Economic Ineffectiveness: The financial incentives provided are often very insufficient to compete with the profits driving the deforestation, cattle ranching and commercial agriculture.
  • Governance and Implementation Challenges: There continues to be serious implementation problems such as inadequate community involvement, inequitable benefit-sharing, and too complex governance structures. Many programs have disrupted local socio-cultural systems and livelihoods, leading to unintended consequences for forest-dependent communities.

Overall, while there have been some successes, the general consensus is that REDD+ programs face significant challenges that need to be addressed for them to be able to combat deforestation and forest degradation.

Scalable, Smart: Given the difficulty of determining how and whether the problem can be solved, there is doubt about scalability, especially given the costs involved. The problem is also highly heterogenous between different nations, and as the below table shows, tropical forests cover a multitude of nations, continents and conditions. There clearly is no single solution, and no apparent ‘smart” one. 3

Table of tropical forest countries: total area and carbon stocks:

Suitable, Specific: However, what became most obvious from all these discussions was that this problem was not suitable for a small R&D foundation with limited resources, and that Aurora Forealis had no specific advantages in the tropical biome.

  1. From a climate perspective their importance has increased in the last decades as they have turned from carbon sink to carbon source. Their annual emissions are over 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide (about 500 million tons carbon). Of the three tropical regions – Amazon basin in Latin America, Kongo basin in Africa, and tropical East Asia – only Kongo basin acts as a carbon sink today. ↩︎
  2. Mainly Norway, Germany, United Kingdom and United States. ↩︎
  3. Areas which are often protected are often not the most endangered – they are often ones which are cheapest to protect, i.e. least endangerd. ↩︎