So hard to see the wood for the trees

摘要

If the Bali conference on climate change brought good news to anyone, it must surely be the inhabitants of the rainforests and others committed to preserving those trees. But their reactions have been mixed, ranging from delight to scepticism. For rainforest campaigners, the Bali statement's allusion to an urgent need for "meaningful action to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" was a sweet victory, even if the only concrete step in that direction was a "work programme" to test various approaches. Under the current regime (expiring in 2012), financial rewards for storing carbon through trees were attached only to reforestation or planting new forests. That restriction became hard to justify as evidence mounted that the destruction of tropical forests caused as much as 20% of heat-trapping greenhouse emissions.