Ecologists Letter to Obama on REDD
Carbon offsets are often criticized as ineffectual. Indeed, the cap in cap-and-trade legislation must drive meaningful emissions reductions - by being set to account for any offsets.
It's worth noting that more than thirty prominent U.S. ecologists, including Thomas Lovejoy and E. O. Wilson, have urged President Obama to include forest carbon offsets in U.S. legislation. The letter is published by the Environmental Defense Fund (pdf).
We write specifically to urge you to make the conservation and restoration of native forests in the tropics and sub-tropics a central pillar of U.S. climate policy. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in tropical forest countries, coupled with aggressive action in our own country to reduce emissions, can play a crucial role in limiting warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and in helping nations adapt to the impacts of some unavoidable climate change. ...
Tropical forests are storehouses of natural resources that provide food, fiber, medicines, and ecosystem services to the globe. Because tropical forests house more than half of the world's species, deforestation threatens the biodiversity of the entire world. REDD, by conserving biodiversity and protecting these natural storehouses, can be vital to reducing ecosystem and consequent human impacts of climatic shifts. ...
Further, compensating forest peoples for protecting forests can buttress forests role in the survival of some of the world's most vulnerable people. REDD also offers developing countries the opportunity to demonstrate leadership in rising to the global climate change challenge, set forth in the G-8 declaration, of reducing global emissions goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction of global emissions by 20503. REDD may also provide a model for restoration of other ecosystem types, in which reversing degradation could benefit biodiversity and improve carbon sequestration capacity in other regions.
