June 14, 2000

For immediate release:

Contact: Ben Lilliston

612-870-3416

Minneapolis – A new study published in the latest issue of the journal Science concludes that there are financial benefits from conserving tropical rain forests. The study found that efforts to protect biodiversity and stem global warming pay off economically for local and global communities.

"For the first time, we’ve considered the economic benefits of preserving rain forests on the local, national and global level," says co-author Philip Guillery, Forestry Program Director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in Minneapolis. "The economic benefit of rainforest preservation can be quite substantial for local communities around the world."

The study, "Economic Incentives for Rain Forest Conservation Across Scales," appears in the June 9 issue of the journal Science. The article is co-authored by Claire Kremen, Gretchen Daily, Paul Ehrlich and John Fay of the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology; M. Dalton of the California State University, Monterey Bay; D. Grewal of Yale Law School, and Philip Guillery of IATP.

More than 32 million acres of tropical forest are destroyed annually by logging or "slash and burn" farming - an area about the size of North Carolina. As a result, at least 14,000 species of plants and wildlife disappear every year, according to the study. The authors point out that rapid deforestation also has devastating consequences for the people who depend on rainforests for food, medicine and shelter.

Globally, tropical deforestation releases 20 to 30 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Conserving these forests could reduce emissions. With the proper incentives in place, nations could be persuaded to stop deforestation if they are compensated for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the recent Kyoto protocol.

The authors looked at the case study of Masoala national park in Madagascar and found that protecting the park against deforestation provided economic benefits locally, through ecotourism and sustainable development of a variety of forest products, such as medicines, at a community level. Globally, forest conservation also pays by lowering greenhouse gas emissions. At the national level, large-scale logging currently appears to outweigh the economic benefits of strict conservation - from a purely economic perspective.

On a global scale, the study shows that protecting Masoala park could generate hundreds of millions of dollars simply from the "avoided damages" of greenhouse gas release, and other effects such as severe flooding. The park also brings in ecotourism dollars and provides other benefits to local people, such as stabilizing erosion and water flow to prevent downstream flooding and sedimentation of rice paddies and fish nurseries.

According to the study, the Madagascar government nearly abandoned the Masoala National Park project in favor of a logging company, but pressure from conservationists and diplomats helped persuade the government to reject the loggers` proposals.

"Without this pressure," write the authors, "the Masoala Peninsula, one of Madagascar`s most import reservoirs of biodiversity, would perhaps have become a forestry concession instead of a national park."

One mechanism for aligning economic signals across local, national and global scales could be provided by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. The CDM allows developed nations to obtain emissions reduction credits by financing emission reduction projects in developing countries. If forest conservation were an allowed emissions reduction activity under the CDM, then a huge international market for carbon credits would be available to finance forest conservation projects. Such projects could provide equitable economic benefits across local, national and global scales. By including provisions that finance carbon conservation projects, countries will have a powerful economic incentive to protect tropical rainforests and their climate-mitigation properties.

Countries such as Costa Rica and Norway have already begun CDM projects. U.N. representatives will meet in The Hague, Netherlands, next November to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Until then, delegates will be negotiating everything from carbon emissions to carbon credits, beginning in Bonn on June 12.

Phil Guillery is the Director of IATP’s Forestry Program, which works with rural people, urban communities and counties to manage their woodlots and forests more profitably and sustainably. The Program assists landowners and communities with Forest Stewardship Council certification, market development, carbon credits, and ecological landscape assessments. More information about this program can be found at: http://www.iatp.org/forestry/

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