Rainforests play a key role in maintaining the world’s environmental balance, soaking up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Unlike the uniform environments of tree plantations and land cleared for agriculture, old growth forests additionally include a complex mix of new growth, solid mature stands and decaying old trees, providing crucial habitat for native plants, animals, birds and insects.

Tropical Forests Store Carbon

Tropical forests, their soils and peatlands absorb and store carbon, but they also support half the species of life on Earth. This web of biodiversity maintains our atmosphere and provides vital ecosystem services upon which all of humanity depends. These services include rainfall generation, regional climate regulation, habitat conservation, watershed protection, and soil stabilisation – at local to global scales. Every person on the planet benefits from these services, but none of us pay for them.

Protecting rainforests also means reducing one of the chief causes of harmful carbon-dioxide emissions: fires set to clear the forests for other agricultural purposes. According to the World Bank, roughly 22 million acres (9 million Ha) of rainforests are lost globally each year when they are cleared by fire for alternate use. These fires account for about 20% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions – more than the total from all vehicles, airplanes and ships.

save a rainforest

plant a rainforest

other projects

Kyoto Protocol Credits Tree Planting

Curbing forest destruction is gaining more attention as a strategy to combat global warming. The Kyoto protocol, the global treaty intended to cap emissions, allows companies to earn the right to pollute by funding emission-reducing projects in developing nations. Credits to pollute are traded around the world. Major buyers include heavy-emitting companies in Europe and Japan, which are subject to Kyoto related emission caps.

Currently, the treaty allows companies to generate credits by planting new trees. But it doesn’t cover efforts to preserve existing trees. Even so, most of the Kyoto-sanctioned projects have focused on cutting pollution from industry. Policy debates have been dominated by clean energy solutions, yet forests indisputably offer one of the largest opportunities for cost effective and immediate action and must now be treated with equal urgency.

But now, as diplomats begin debating a new international agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, there’s increasing talk of changing the rules to allow tree-preservation – also dubbed ‘avoided deforestation’ – to produce emission credits that can be bought and sold.

Save Forests to Fight Climate Change

Many global warming experts say paying governments in developing nations to protect forests needs to become part of the arsenal to stop climate change. The forests of developing nations sustain the livelihoods of 1.4 billion of the world’s poor, and with no other source of fuel, fodder or income many of them have no choice but to degrade forests to survive.

The concept of avoided deforestation, whereby countries are paid to prevent deforestation that would otherwise occur, is attractive to both policymakers and environmentalists alike, because it could help fight climate change at a low cost while improving living standards for some of the world’s poorest people while simultaneously preserving biodiversity and other ecosystem services. A number of prominent conservation biologists and development agencies including the World Bank and the U.N. have already endorsed the idea.

On 28th May 2009, after a three-day meeting of Nobel prize winners in London at which the Global Carbon Project was invited to speak, 25 of the laureates signed a memorandum calling for ‘an effective and just global agreement on climate change, low-carbon energy infrastructure and tropical forest protection, conservation and restoration’. They stated that ‘without a solution to rainforest protection, there is no solution to tackling climate change’...

• Climate Change and Australia's Rainforests
• Carbon Conservation & Avoided Deforestation