THE ROLE OF FORESTRY IN CLIMATE CHANGE AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY PRODUCTION - Economics of Sustainable Energy in Agriculture - page 130

It may be difficult, however, to prevent tropical deforestation from
occurring. While mechanistic causes of land use change (logging, road
construction, illegal land clearing by peasants, etc.) are often easy to
identify, as are possible domestic policies for correcting these forms of
market failure, the underlying or ultimate factor is government policy
related to revenue and foreign exchange needs, and urbanization and
population control (Bromley 1999). Income and/or the foreign exchange
generated from logging concessions ( e.g., SE Asia) or the new land use
(cattle ranching in Brazil) are important for some governments in tropical
regions. Governments may also permit or even encourage land use changes
as part of an overall policy to address urbanization pressure and general
over-population in certain areas. Indonesia has moved peasants into
outlying forested regions as a means of addressing over-crowding in Java,
for example, while Brazil has promoted development of the Amazon in
order to encourage migration into the region and away from more
urbanized areas to the South.
Next, consider the role of land use change more broadly.
Conversion of pasture into cropland will release carbon stored in the soil,
while draining wetlands releases methane Changes in management
practices will also cause C to be released or stored. An indication of the
effect on terrestrial C sinks of enhanced management of existing land uses
and changes in land use is provided in Table 10.4. This table gives
estimates of the potential of these activities for mitigating climate change
(i.e., the potential of land use management to achieve Kyoto targets). But it
also demonstrates how current land uses have resulted in the release of C
over time - for example, cultivation alone has resulted in the historical
release of 54 Gt C (Paustian et al. 1997). While a strategy to reduce forest
degradation ( viz., deforestation) is addressed in Table 10.4, reforestation
and afforestation programs are ignored. These are considered in the next
sub-section.
2.2 Enhanced management of existing forests and
afforestation in northern countries
There remains disagreement about what is meant by reforestation and
afforestation; some countries interpret reforestation to mean that any
growth in trees planted on forestland denuded after 1990 is eligible for
carbon credits. In effect, they want C credits for replanting forests that have
been logged, thereby violating additionality. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC 2000) interprets reforestation as tree planting on
land that had at some time in the past been in forest, but has recently been