Past the guards with semiautomatic weapons, many security checkpoints, and my favorite statue of a chattering squirrel, inside the convention center many voices in languages I often don’t understand (though it’s really exciting when I can pick up some German or Spanish) are eagerly discussing deforestation, a major theme of the Bali international climate negotiations.
To show how serious they are about it, the UN has granted this topic its own acronym: REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries).
It turns out that deforestation is responsible for about 20% of all emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector, and here in Indonesia, a country heavily dependent on its forests, deforestation has made it onto the agenda of COP 13.
Deforestation is a complicated topic intricately interwoven with pretty much everything else. Many forest-dependent indigenous peoples have been suffering from losing their homes, habitats, and sources of valuable indigenous knowledge (to connote its importance, this has also been given an acronym, IK). Illegal logging has been responsible for much of this devastation. Some forests are being replaced with agrofuel crops, which many people do not view as a viable solution because it’s an energy intensive process that benefits a few at the expense of many others. Women, historically closely linked with nature across many cultures, are suffering particularly—-when their valuable knowledge of forests is undermined, so are they. Devaluing biodiversity, one woman from India said eloquently, is closely linked to devaluing cultural diversity.
Indonesia, a heavily forested country, is losing its trees rapidly, and now is asked to stop cutting them down. But forestry is key to Indonesia’s economic growth. One hectare of timber is worth US$10,000–and the average person here in Bali lives on two or three dollars a day.
The question becomes, what are these forests worth alive, and who will pay Indonesia not to cut them down?
This is a major focal point of the UN deliberations here in Bali. The Forest 11, a new coalition of rainforest nations, is working to ensure reducing deforestation is a crucial part of the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The Indonesian youth activist presence here is made up of forestry students.
Meanwhile, deforestation remains largely removed from climate discussions in the US. We tend to talk in terms of energy: conservation, renewable, and fuel efficiency, probably because those are the things we can connect to our own behavior most easily. But it would be a fallacy to believe that we have nothing to do with deforestation in developing countries.
Our own consumption habits and wildly permissive laws for corporations are among the major causes of deforestation in the first place. In Ecuador, for example, 40% of all forested wood is exported to the United States. When the trees are gone, the companies leave the communities without jobs or the services the forest provided for them. How have we created such a disconnect between our own consumption habits and their reverberations around the world?
It’s important for developing countries to take a central role in discussions of deforestation at these negotiations. But if the countries exploiting these forests make no effort to change their own behavior, we may not make a lot of progress.
