Carbon sinks
What they are and why they undermine the Kyoto Protocol		  

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The scientific basics of the carbon sink concept
Forests as well as soils, oceans and the atmosphere store carbon, which moves among those different stores over time. Consequently, forests can act as sources or sinks at different times: Sources release more carbon than they absorb while sinks soak up more carbon than they emit.

Another important carbon store are fossil fuel deposits. But this particular carbon store, buried deep inside the earth, is naturally separated from the carbon cycling in the atmosphere Ð unless humans decide to release it into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil or natural gas. This process has seen greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere soar to levels more than 30% higher than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. And through our current greenhouse gas emissions, we are still adding at least 6 billion tonnes of carbon per year to the atmospheric carbon cycle, significantly altering the intricate web of carbon fluxes, and as a consequence, altering the global climate.

The concept of carbon sinks is based on the natural ability of trees, other plants and the soil to soak up carbon dioxide and temporarily store the carbon in wood, roots, leaves and the soil.

A flawed concept
The absorption of carbon dioxide by trees and the soil, proponents of carbon sink credits suggest, would be just as valid a means to achieve emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol as cutting emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.

Fern profoundly disagrees with this assumption because it overlooks some important facts:

• For every tonne of carbon stored in a carbon sink, the Kyoto Protocol allows the release of an additional tonne of carbon from fossil fuel. This substitution has two important consequences for the atmosphere:

1. Establishing a carbon sink justifies a carbon emission that would otherwise not have occurred because it would have put the user of fossil fuel over its emission allowance under the Kyoto Protocol;
2. The amount of carbon available in the active carbon pool (the atmosphere and the biosphere) increases; this is of key importance because, unlike carbon in fossil fuels, carbon stored in the biosphere can be released very easily into the atmosphere through forest fires, insect outbreaks, decay, logging, land use changes or even the decline of forest ecosystems as a result of climate change. Many of these activities are beyond government control: more than 50% of the timber exported from Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon has been logged illegally and the forest fires in 2000 in the US showed that even technically advanced countries can often do little to prevent or stop forest fires. Carbon sinks are thus likely to contribute to increasing long-term atmospheric concentrations of CO2 – the exact opposite of the intended effect, and a dangerous avoidance of emission cuts which need to take place now to avoid increasing the threats of climate change to future generations even further.
• Afforestation – especially afforestation in northern boreal regions – may accelerate global warming. Climate change is expected to shift Canada’s boreal forest borders northward and boreal forests are expected to replace the southern parts of tundra. While this will mean that carbon is removed from the atmosphere as trees grow, it may not benefit the climate: One of the key factors affecting the global climate is the ‘albedo effect’, a process, which determines how much sunlight is reflected back into space and how much warms the earth’s surface. Dark green forests absorb more sunlight than tundra or farmland, adding to the warming trend in the boreal if large non-forested areas now covered in highly reflective snow were planted with trees that shed their snow much faster than the underlying surface. Similarly in Siberia, it is expected that the positive atmospheric impact of carbon absorbed by establishing new plantations in the taiga will be diminished by a reduced albedo effect.

• Measuring biological activities often involves methodologies with high uncertainties. For many activities, including measuring complete carbon fluxes in forest ecosystems, estimating and measuring uncertainties of 50% or more are common. Uncertainties related to the methodology used to determine the amount of carbon credits from a sink project can thus be bigger than the carbon stock changes measured. This poses the question of how to verifiably assess and determine how many carbon credits can be obtained from a carbon sink project.

Yet more negative impacts
Besides the major shortcoming of the concept of carbon sinks from a scientific perspective, carbon sinks have had and continue to have further negative impacts on the climate change debate as well as on forests and forest peoples:

• Carbon sinks have dominated the climate change agenda, diverting attention away from the inescapable need to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries. The focus on carbon sequestration has also stymied any discussion on how to pro-actively respond to the impacts that climate change is expected to have on the world’s forests.

• Governmental unwillingness to acknowledge the difference between forests and tree plantations in the Kyoto Protocol suggests that a substantial part of these activities would be afforestation and reforestation projects resulting in the establishment of tree plantations, many of which are likely to be large-scale.The first carbon sink project that has entered the accreditation process of the CDM is a tree plantation project in Brazil, where project developers are looking to CDM carbon credits as a substitute to state subsidies (which were discontinued in the 1990s) for the establishment of plantations.

• Many of the carbon sink projects will be located on lands where forest peoplesÕ land rights and customary land use have not been recognized to date Ð and in fact are violated in many cases, as shown in the Fern report Forests of Fear (December 2001, PDF, 1.05MB)]. Yet, forest peoples are not even mentioned in the Climate Convention. Neither the Convention nor the Kyoto Protocol include any direct reference to indigenous peoples or forest dwellers. It seems likely under these circumstances that carbon sink projects will not respect or strengthen forest peoples’ rights to their lands and natural resources. Evidence of this assumption surfaced in 2000 when Norwatch, a Norwegian NGO documented the imminent eviction of local people from lands allocated to a carbon sink project envisaged to provide carbon offsets for a coal-fired power plant in Norway (Tree Trouble, September 2000, PDF, 201k).

• Carbon sinks in the CDM will increase the historical carbon debt the North owes the South. This historic inequality will be superimposed onto the land through the use of carbon sinks in the CDM: The more greenhouse gases a country emits the more land it will be entitled to occupy to make up for its emissions. These lands dedicated to carbon sink projects will be locked up in contractual agreements securing the area to provide emission rights to the North rather than contributing to meeting the needs of people in the South.