A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 173Who Owns Forest Carbon?The United Nations has never been ableto work out a convincing way of decidingwho owns the carbon-recycling capacityof forests – and therefore who should beable to cash in on it in a carbon market.Early in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations,the EU and some Southern countries wereeager to prevent industrialised countriesfrom using regrowth of their forests as anexcuse for not reducing industrial emissions.They demanded that marketable bioticcarbon assets be limited to those resultingfrom ‘direct human-induced’ carbonuptake, and not include ‘natural fluxes’.Awkwardly, this opened up the entireterrestrial biosphere to carbon propertyclaims. Every part of the globe has beenaffected by human activity over millennia,from Australia’s fire-moulded landscape toNorth America’s forest mosaic. 393Not even the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change has been able to factorout ‘direct human-induced’ effects from‘indirect human-induced and natural effects’such as those due to enhanced CO 2concentrations and nitrogen deposition.‘The phrase “human-induced”’, it admits,‘has no scientific meaning’. 394 Hence it’sbeen hard to identify which biotic carbondumps should be regarded as belonging tohuman beings at all.The IPCC’s suggested way out – to define‘directly human-induced’ activities arbitrarilyas those resulting from the decisionsof contemporary ‘land managers’, including,most obviously, professional ‘afforestersand reforesters’ – tends to exclude historicalactors who often have better claimsto conserving carbon.As one of Tuvalu’s negotiatiors once pointedout, a government or company that hiresan aeroplane to scatter a few particles offertiliser over its land-holdings could gainthe right to claim credit for the carbon inthe forests below, while indigenous andsettler peoples who had a hand in the earliershaping of such ecosystems – or farmerswho happen to look after lands classifiedby experts as ‘unmanaged’ – might get nocredit at all. 395 That would make propertyownership pretty much entirely dependenton professional and economic status,together with technical measurement capability.to tackle climate change are tacitly excluded, their creativity unrecognised,and their claims suppressed. As Janica Lane and colleaguesobserve, ‘Most climate change aid goes to current or future pollutersin developing nations, while people conducting relatively climatefriendlypractices are ignored.’ 392In other words, carbon off set trading is treating the worst climate off enders asclimate heroes, while failing to support many of those who are addressing theproblem at its roots.