In the fight against climate change....

A Comprehensive database on climate change legislations

By 2050, 40% of the Amazon green cover might vanish if the current trend in deforestation and illegal forestry clearance continued. Land-use changes in the tropics account for about 17% of greenhouse gas emissions while clearance of forests leaves future mitigation targets difficult to achieve. Preserving the Amazon forests and other forest cover is vital to mitigate the deleterious effects of climate change.

Forests, the terrestrial carbon reservoirs, account for 77% of the carbon stored in vegetation, which is twice as much as carbon in the atmosphere. Forests are net source or ‘sink’ absorbing more carbon than they emit. Deforestation causes irreversible loss of biodiversity leading to release of half the stored carbon while destroying several indigenous forest cultures. Clearance of forests emits much more carbon than any fossil fuel power plant.

By creating biodiversity corridors to prevent illegal deforestation and indigenous species, Brazil came to be the forerunner in conserving forests and ecosystems. United States has taken steps to include international forest carbon in its cap-and-trade policy allowing capped entities to use international forest carbon allowances as offsets to their domestic emissions. International forest carbon activities and trading in international carbon offsets can lessen deforestation globally and play a critical role in the success of an international climate policy.

International forest carbon credits can be generated by extending support to forest reserves that protect threatened species, implementing sustainable forestry practices and revoking palm oil concessions issued in respect of those forests that are yet to be cleared. Global policy makers have proposed a financing mechanism to include incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in future carbon agreements. REDD could generate funding from developed countries to reduce deforestation in developing countries.

Using sustainable palm oil

Projects related to deforestation do not find a place under Clean Development Mechanism, a flexibility instrument under Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol which assists developing countries in achieving sustainable development and meeting their quantified emission reductions. The absence of deforestation projects is primarily due to concerns about leakage (increased emissions outside project boundaries), additionality (whether the emissions reduction is the outcome of the CDM project or business as usual reductions) and lack of standards in setting baseline methodologies.


Forest conservation requires substantial funding from developed countries to assist developing nations in adopting sustainable agricultural practices and providing alternate means of economic sustenance to those farmers displaced from forests. Steps to reduce deforestation include stabilizing international prices of commodities like soya, grown on grasslands, and specifying standards to certify that products like soya are not grown on newly cleared forests or on lands adjacent to forests. To sum up, avoided deforestation needs international funding and cheaper transfer of technologies to encourage sustainable agricultural and forestry practices. Finally, reforms to international climate policy backed by stringent domestic legislation are bound to help our fight against global warming.


Here is one reason to push those reforms