- Forest Day and the global perspective on forests and climate change
- Counting carbon to make carbon count
- REDD+: Location, location, location …
- Coping with climate change in Costa Rica
- Transforming tenure in Guatemala
- There’s more to conservation than wildlife
- Indonesia’s lessons for REDD+
- Cameroon’s foresters align rules with reality
- Setting the standards for small-scale forestry
Counting carbon to make carbon count
The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) enables industrial countries to meet emission targets by financing projects in developing countries that help to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. One way of doing this is by planting trees. However, designing forestry projects for the CDM has proved ferociously complicated but not impossible, as research in Latin America has shown.
The FORMA project helped managers of 10 forest-carbon projects acquire the skills and knowledge needed to negotiate their way through the complex process of joining the CDM. The project, ‘Strengthening CDM Projects in Forestry and Bioenergy Sectors in Ibero-America’ is funded by the Spanish government, and managed by CIFOR and the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE).
‘It’s a measure of how successful FORMA was that 6 of the projects are now well on the way to being recognised, or already have been recognised, by the CDM or by voluntary carbon markets,’ says Zenia Salinas, who managed the FORMA project before moving to the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund.
Under the FORMA project, scientists developed a tool to calculate the amount of carbon that would be saved or sequestered by forestry projects. The Tool for Afforestation and Reforestation Approved Methodologies (TARAM) has been used and refined by the BioCarbon Fund. ‘TARAM has helped us to estimate emission reductions for our whole portfolio,’ explains fund analyst Mirko Serkovic, ‘and we have had feedback from our projects that TARAM is useful.’