A
deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests - paying,
for the first time, for their upkeep as "utilities" that provide vital
services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.
The
agreement, to be announced tomorrow in New York, will secure the future of one
million acres of pristine rainforest in Guyana, the first move of its kind, and
will open the way for financial markets to play a key role in safeguarding the
fate of the world's forests.
The initiative follows Guyana's extraordinary
offer, revealed in The Independent in November, to place its entire standing forest
under the protection of a British-led international body in return for development
aid.
Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of the London-based financiers Canopy
Capital, who sealed the deal with the Iwokrama rainforest, said: "How can
it be that Google's services are worth billions but those from all the world's
rainforests amount to nothing?" The past year has been a pivotal one for
the fast- disappearing tropical forests that form a cooling band around the equator
because the world has recognised deforestation as the second leading cause of
CO2 emissions. Leaders at the UN climate summit in Bali in December agreed to
include efforts to halt the destruction of forests in a new global deal to save
the world from runaway climate change.
"As atmospheric levels of carbon
dioxide rise, emissions will carry an ever-mounting cost and conservation will
acquire real value. The investment community is beginning to wake up to this,"
Mr Murray-Philipson added.
Guyana, sandwiched between the Latin American giants
Venezuela and Brazil, is home to fewer than amillion people but 80 per cent of
its land is covered by an intact rainforest larger than England. The Guiana Shield
is one of only four intact rainforests left on the planet and at its heart lies
the Iwokrama reserve, gifted to the Commonwealth in 1989 as a laboratory for pioneering
conservation projects.
Iwokrama, which means "place of refuge" in
the Makushi language, is home to some of the world's most endangered species including
jaguar, giant river otter, anaconda and giant anteater.
Guyana's President
Bharrat Jagdeo, a former economist, has appealed for state and private sector
help for the country to avoid succumbing to the rampant deforestation currently
blighting Brazil and Indonesia, in an effort to raise living standards in one
of Latin America's poorest countries.
"Forests do much more for us than
just store carbon ... This first significant step is in keeping with President
Jagdeo's visionary approach to safeguarding all the forests of Guyana," said
Iwokrama's chairman, Edward Glover.
The deal, drawn up by the international
firm Stephenson Harwood, is the first serious attempt to pay for the ecosystem
services provided by rainforests.
"We should move beyond emissions-based
trading to measure and place a value on all the services they provide," said
Mr Glover.
In addition to providing shelter to half the world's terrestrial
species and one billion of the earth's poorest people, forests such as Iwokrama
act as pumps, drawing water from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Amazon and Guiana
Shield where they help to seed clouds and deliver moisture over vast distances.
The
Amazon generates the rain that falls on the vast soya estates of Sao Paulo, helping
to make Brazil the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world.
Guyana's
attempt to secure its entire standing forest has received the backing of the British
environment minister Phil Woolas and Downing Street has told The Independent that
it is "considering the offer". President Jagdeo met with Gordon Brown
on the sidelines of a recent Commonwealth Summit in Uganda where they discussed
the proposal. The UN road map to a deal to replace the Kyoto protocols foresees
payments from wealthy climate-polluting nations to developing countries to compensate
for potential income lost through avoiding deforestation. But there are fears
that this formula may simply displace the demand for timber and cheap agricultural
land.
Andrew Mitchell, head of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of
rainforest scientists, said: "The decision on forests at December's conference
in Bali is a major step in tackling climate change but it fails to reward countries
such as Guyana that aren't cutting down their forests."