Press release: Researchers warn that politics and technical concerns unfairly thwart efforts to use carbon markets to halt deforestation and help poor farmers

World Agroforestry Centre
NAIROBI (26 November 2008)-Carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns are impeding efforts to encourage sustainable land use practices in tropical regions-such as better forest management and growing more trees on farms-that could curtail up to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions while also boosting incomes of the rural poor, according to a new analysis by the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre.
"If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and effectively as possible, we need to do everything we can to encourage the people living in and around the world's tropical forests to adopt carbon-saving and carbon-enhancing approaches to development," said Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, one of 15 centres supported by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). "One crucial way to do that is to give them the same opportunities to sell their carbon as a commodity in the global market as is encouraged in other sectors."
The analysis will be presented in Poznán, Poland at the influential Conference of the Parties (COP 14), an international gathering of experts working to ensure that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) effectively and fairly discourages activities that boost harmful emissions, while encouraging carbon-saving approaches to development that could halt or at least slow global warming.
For full press release: http://www.worldagroforestry.org/index.php?id=107&NewsID=388AB7AC-34AA-4...