African officials to push for deforestation credits as nations head to Bali for UN climate change meeting

In Burkina Faso, officials of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) completed three days of meetings that coordinated biofuels policy prior to the commencement of the 13th UN Conference on Climate Change which will be held in Bali next week.

African ministers are expected to push for the inclusion of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) credit for nations that institute sustainable forest management practices. The credit would produce earnings of up to $119 per rural household.

African analysts estimate that conserving biodiversity and carbon through forest management has to take into account “degradation” (removing valuable timber without proper post-logging care) as well as outright deforestation, for the policy to have success in Africa.

The deforestation issue has increasingly been raised as a concern in biofuels development, The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned, in a paper presented at the FAO Conference, against the excessive use of wood energy as an alternative fuel strategy. The report said that fuelwood and charcoal supply as much as 70 percent of the energy needs of developing nations, and supply two billion people with energy for cooking and heating. The report warned against the dangers of deforestation.

Also, Greenpeace released its “Cooking the Climate” report which concluded that forest clearance in Indonesia for palm plantations has made the country the third largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, behind the United States and China. The study found that Indonesia is losing 2 percent of its tropical forest each year to deforestation, and that the resultant emissions more than offset the gain from switching from fossil fuels to biofuels. Indonesia has six million hectares of palm under cultivation and plans to expand this to 10 million hectares by 2015.

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