Cut down forest on Indonesian Borneo
In order to develop poorer areas, the Brazilian government has been stimulating agriculture in some remote and forested areas until recently. Although the education and healthcare facilities have improved the lives of the local people, it has come with great natural depletion. Deforestation accounts for 70% of Brazils carbon emissions today.
The richness of the soil in these areas make for attractive farming of soy and palm oil for which there is a high demand in American, European and Chinese industries. Because people cut down their trees for economic reasons, it is necessary to provide them with a financial alternative.
Several payment strategies have been proposed or put into practice on a small scale. These include direct payments to those farmers leaving the trees (which turns out to be very expensive in order to seriously compete with crop profits) and indirect subsidies like a higher price for crops produced without forest destruction. Because of the amount of money at stake, these programs often remain vulnerable to corruption and could easily end up serving as cash cows for the very people destroying the forests today.
The UN’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) will actually reward the countries that do preserve their forests with carbon credits which be sold at the global carbon market. This seems a little useless since these extra carbon credits will actually lead to extra emissions (from the companies buying them), which was the very thing the program set out to prevent. Looking at what happens in the economy when money is created ‘out of thin air’ this doesn’t seem to be the right way to go.
I believe the very fact that our natural world is limited to earth’s resources comes with the opportunity to actually link specific value to natural resources. Another shift that I think should be made to a set up similar to the REDD’s system is a that of payment, from the national level (governments are rewarded carbon credits) to the local level (reward the actual farmers and communities that choose to preserve their forest). With this shift I think a great deal of corruption can actually be controlled through systems of social control.
Summary and considerations with an article published in the New York Times