Recession: Carbon Crunch?

Here is a simple introduction to what has become a complicated but potentially exciting alternative economy: carbon credits.

Claims and predictions of anthropogenic climate change are based on data such as shown in this diagram sourced from NOAA via this wikipedia page. Over the past century atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen dramatically in correlation with changes in annual global temperature. As of yet there are no signs of this trend stabilising and so we should expect further climate change in the near future.

Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and global annual
average temperatures over the years 1880 to 2009.

Climate is the term used to describe patterns in temperature and seasonality on a regional and global scale. Weather is what effects people on a local and temporal scale. Extreme weather events are predicted to be more likely under projections of climate change, although it is impossible to take a particular weather event and prove that is has been cause by climate change -there is a somewhat smaller chance, but still a chance that it could have occurred anyway.

Climate scientists predict the countries to be most effected by raised temperatures and extreme weather are those around the tropics. And already we hear news reports of unusual droughts and weather events in East Africa; Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. These and other such countries are most likely to be negatively effected by climate change and yet are the least responsible for increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. 

The schematic below describes just this. The scale shows the average ecological footprint of citizens in each country (with dark red being the highest). This is because of the industrialisation of these mostly Northern nations using fossil fuels and other resources. In the South where ecological footprints are very small there is little industrialisation and limited resource use due to subsistence life styles.

But what these Southern countries have is large resources of biomass; rain forests, peat swamps, coastal forests, mangroves and coral reefs. These are the lungs of the earth and provide a crucial role in extracting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in real time and storing it in biomass or laying it down in the earth. We, in the North, are benefiting from these green resources in the South but are paying nothing towards the services we are receiving, while the Southern countries are crippled in poverty and the only way out appears to be removing these green resources to enable industrialisation.

The idea of a Carbon Credit is that:

 “...someone values carbon being stored in the earth from the atmosphere for a certain amount of money...”

 This has been operating voluntarily for a number of years now, where you have the option to alleviate your carbon guilt by paying for trees to be planted when you take an air flight for example. The proposal to formalise this exchange is referred to as REDD+ . Money could be transferred from industrialised nations to developing nations in exchange for 

R - reduced  

E - emissions  from 

D - degradation  and 

D – deforestation.

Current models direct the money to grass roots organisations such as indigenous forest peoples who live on the land in return for their stewardship and sustainable use of the forest.

So what do you think? Do you think this will work? Is it a brilliant new way to transfer aid that will promote poverty alleviation and environmental action? What effect will a global recession have on these plans?

Read more about this by following these links:

Wikipedia: attribution of recent climate change

The UN REDD program

Wikipedia: REDD

REDD in the newsk