Be mindful of trade-offs between carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection
A FOREIGN researcher has warned Guyana to be mindful of making trade-offs between the need for carbon sequestration of its forests and biodiversity protection.

Professor Francis Putz, of the University of Florida, also expressed concern for what he called the neglect of emissions caused by degradation in international climate talks.

Delivering a lecture, on Monday, in the Education Lecture Theatre (ELT) of the University of Guyana (UG) Turkeyen Campus, he questioned what are the trade-offs of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which is being established in Guyana through the Low Carbon Development strategy (LCDS).

“There are going to be trade-offs. But what are they? What are we losing?” Putz asked.

He noted that carbon emissions from forest degradation are of the same order of magnitude as from deforestation.

“But we don’t have a good measure of degradation. To stop degradation, one has to stop the causes of degradation,” Putz contended, adding that one way to do this is through reduced impact logging (RIL), a term he said he coined in 1993.

Putz said, when a logging operation is shifted to RIL, the likelihood of forest degradation is reduced and, when poor logging is done, carbon stocks get depleted. But, when RIL is practised, although there is a depletion of carbon stocks, they are restored.

He said he is not too comfortable with market based solutions to the problem of carbon emissions.

“It is an approach that we go into with some uncertainty,” Putz said, adding it was clear that, in the negotiations to frame the Kyoto Protocol in the early 1990s, standing forests were not going to be accepted as part of the agreement.
He said that the pact allowed countries which have emitted heavily to redeem themselves through funding, reforestation and afforestation.

For example, Putz said that a country could use the Kyoto Protocol to guide reforestation and afforestation in the name of sequestering carbon but doing so could be at the expense of biodiversity and ecosystems.

He said, within the climate negotiations, biodiversity is not sufficiently considered and, for years, the second D in REDD was the cause of a big battle, as degradation was not given the focus as deforestation.

Putz said Guyana has a rate of deforestation that is quite low but many other countries have deforestation rates that look low but are based on the definition of forest that they use.

On introducing the lecturer, UG Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Mr. Tota Mangar said the talk was timely, given Guyana’s forward thrust on emissions mitigation with the LCDS.

“It comes against the background of climate change and its global implications. It is as a result of the real threats posed by climate change and the need for the reduction of greenhouse gases that Guyana vigorously pursued the LCDS locally, regionally and internationally by President Bharrat Jagdeo,” Mangar said.

He said the LCDS is a brilliant and progressive document and it is gaining the attention of those who really matter.

Mangar said UG has done its part in making meaningful contribution to the debate, having hosted a consultation exercise with President Jagdeo (who recently won the very prestigious ‘Champion of the Earth’ award from UNEP) and done a critical examination of the LCDS and presented the findings to the Office of the President.
Mangar spoke, as well, of a four-part lecture series that UG hosted, earlier this year, in collaboration with the British High Commission.