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

252 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingTrust Me, I’m a Doctor:Three Professionals on How to Measure Carbon Off sets‘…I’ve often asked myself, when I’ve beenflying in an aircraft, and I’ve flown overcomplex landscapes…how the hell can youmeasure carbon down there to a few percent? The people that measure the carbon,either by satellite measurements or byflux towers, or by, sort of, sort of lookingat the forest…all claim that within somereason able degree of accuracy or precisionyou can do it. But when I look downon a complex landscape, I have to be honest,it’s…um…I get very impressed if theseguys are indeed correct. But, hey, the factthat when I look down in an aircraft andI think its going to be complicated, that’smy gut instinct versus the scientific community’s.And they claim they can demonstratewhat precision and accuracy theycan get… One has to go with what thesescientists are saying.’ 57Dr Robert T. Watson, Ex-Chairman,Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,interview with Cathy Fogel, Washington DC,6 October 2001‘If you know that saving the Amazon isbetter for the atmosphere than keeping onecar off the road, then you ought to be ableto calculate how many cars are equivalentto saving the Amazon. The calculationsmay be difficult, but I don‘t see why theproblems should be insurmountable.’ 58Dr Richard Tipper,Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management‘Baselines are not a question of imagination.At the International Centre for Research inAgroforestry, we have developed a methodfor monitoring and evaluation of environmentaland development projects that involvesproject baseline measurement for anyresponse variable that one deems important(e.g. household income, adoption ofimproved farming technologies, etc.). Thissame method could easily be used for carbonaccounting and take the guesswork outof ’without-project’ baselines, additionalityand leakage. The simple solution to a problemthat has been overcomplicated in thedebate is: just measure it! It is really not thathard. Environmental monitoring is a maturefield and rigorous methods exist for attributingproject impact.’ 59Dr Louis Verchot, Lead Scientist forClimate Change, International Centre forResearch in AgroforestryYou still haven’t mentioned any problems.The first problem is that you still have to measure the carbon storedby a project over a particular year or decade. That runs into the sameproblems with ignorance, uncertainty and all the rest mentionedabove. Second, no one knows how long the ‘equivalence time’ shouldbe. Figures ranging all the way from 42 to 150 years have been mentioned.60 Another difficulty is that even if one settles on a figure of,