The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) has promulgated an action plan with the aim of promoting cooperation, sharing and monitoring trans-boundary water resources from now to 2020. The plan also looks to improving the management, conservation, and utilisation of water resources to serve the country’s sustainable socio-economic development and ensure water security amid climate change. The MoNRE has been building institutional and legal documents in the direction of refining technical standards and regulations regarding the management of water resources, as well as implementing financial policies to provide clean water for the daily use and sewage treatment. It has been conducting a study on water resources as well as evaluation and forecast of climate change impacts on water resources, thereby submitting a national strategy on water resources through 2030, with a vision towards 2050, to the Prime Minister for approval. The MoNRE will increase the dissemination of information about policies and regulations to raise public awareness of managing, using and protecting water resources, while keeping a close watch on the exploitation and usage of water resources in the upper reaches of the Red and Mekong rivers. It will draw maps on water resources with scales of 1/100,000 for 50 percent of the nation’s total area, 1/50,000 for water-shortage regions, and 1/25,000 for key areas, alongside with building a national database and a cross-border water resource monitoring network. The ministry will also classify water resources and recover contaminated rivers in addition to controlling reductions in underground and surface water resources in line with the Viet Nam Sustainable Development Strategy for 2011-2020.

DONG KY, Vietnam – A mere 45 minutes northeast of Vietnam’s bustling capital city of Hanoi is the carpentry town of Đồng Kỳ, where conversations take place above the incessant din of electric saws cutting wood. A thin layer of sawdust coats every surface, and after a few hours you can feel the dust in your throat. Furniture showrooms filled with incredibly ornate table and chair sets that cost upwards of $10,000 line the main road, while workshops fill side roads and back alleys.
Renowned for its traditional hand-carved wood furniture, most of which is made from rare hardwood species such as Siamese rosewood (Dalbergia cochinchinensis), this town is ruled by the timber industry. It’s very big business: Vietnam’s overall timber and wood furniture exports were worth $7.3 billion in 2016, according to the Forestry General Directorate. The workshops and showrooms of Đồng Kỳ mainly serve clientele from the giant consumer market to the north, China. Situated less than 200 miles from the Chinese border, Đồng Kỳ is perfectly placed to ship traditional furniture to wealthy buyers.
There are complications, though. Much of the wood is sourced from other Southeast Asian countries, including Cambodia and Laos, according to recent reports from Forest Trends and Global Witness. Siamese rosewood is listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of threatened species and is “virtually commercially extinct,” according to the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
On the ground, Vu Quoc Vuong, head of the Đồng Kỳ Timber Association, explained that 70 percent of the furniture produced in the town goes to China. The rest is bound for the domestic market. Ornate Hongmu (which means “red wood” in Chinese and collectively refers several tropical rosewood species) furniture pieces are status symbols in both countries, despite the fact that they are very uncomfortable to sit on. According to a report from the EIA, sales in China’s Hongmu market exceeded $24 billion in 2014 and Vietnam remains the second-largest consuming market of rosewood.

In Đồng Kỳ alone, there are currently around 200 companies operating in the furniture trade, the bulk of which are very small and often family-run, according to Vuong. His association hopes to increase this number to 1,000 by 2020. Such a rapid increase would require a huge financial investment that doesn’t currently exist. In the meantime, furniture makers are running into a more immediate problem: access to the timber they need to maintain the status quo.
“Currently the Chinese have high demand to import timber and furniture but the situation is difficult because Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have stricter policies than before,” Vuong said. He is referring to the various logging bans in place across Southeast Asia, in addition to international efforts to stop illegal timber trading and to protect rosewood species.
In September 2016 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) placed all of the roughly 300 species of rosewood under trade restrictions. According to the landmark World Wildlife Crime Report issued by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in May 2016, rosewood species are the most trafficked wildlife products in the world, accounting for 35 percent of wildlife seizures between 2005-2014. In value, these seizures were worth more than elephant ivory, pangolins, rhino horn and lion and tiger parts combined.
Now nearly all international trade of Dalbergia species requires a permit. Beginning in 2017, that includes almost half of the official Hongmu species.
In Đồng Kỳ’s furniture showrooms, many items are carved from species of rosewood and other rare hardwood species, meaning increased CITES protection is bad news for the town. However, in the bustling central market where woodworking shops buy timber to cut into furniture pieces, it is hard to see how regulations have had an impact.

Rosewood finds a way in

While Đồng Kỳ’s businesses may worry over a potentially diminishing tide of timber, plenty of rosewood is still making its way to the Vietnamese market. Phuc Xuan To, a program analyst with the international non-profit Forest Trends, explained that “it’s obvious that a lot of species which are banned from export by Laos and Cambodia are still being imported into Vietnam.”
In very diplomatic language, he added that, “this shows that there must be mechanisms that you can interpret as corruption or collusion to get them into the country.”
Customs data compiled by Forest Trends and provided to Mongabay shows that from January to the end of October 2016, roughly $116 million worth of sawn timber and rosewood logs entered Vietnam from Cambodia. While this total is much lower than the $276 million in rosewood imports clocked in the same period of 2015, it occurred despite Cambodia’s new ban on rosewood exports to Vietnam and an announced crackdown on timber smuggling by Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister.
This initiative was effective early in 2016, when rosewood import values dropped from $26.2 million in January to just $3.4 million in February, but by May this figure had risen to nearly $13 million, a trend that continued into the winter.
This highlights the inconsistent nature of enforcement along the border. For instance, when government agencies step up inspections timber importers simply wait until the crackdowns end before resuming their trade, Phuc explains.
He adds that this data is not available to the public.
“We have been collaborating with the national timber associations for about five years and their mandate to understand exports, imports and production gives them access to this customs data,” he said. “We provide it to policymakers not only in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia.”

A sea of timber

Piles of various-sized pieces of timber stretch for several blocks along Đồng Kỳ’s market district. Traders selling wood to furniture workshops in the area seem to be doing brisk business. Motorbikes and three-wheel carts course through the narrow path that cuts between the trading stalls, picking up pieces of wood for delivery.
Most of the wood is called trac (Siamese rosewood) in Vietnamese. Much of it is imported from Laos and Cambodia. On a recent visit to Đồng Kỳ, traders didn’t express concern they are likely selling illegal timber. There was also no clear sign of government oversight or monitoring.
Vietnamese government officials couldn’t be reached for comment.
Vuong says that “some is legal, some isn’t. The authorities can’t check everything and it’s hard to tell what is and what isn’t [legal]…nobody manages it, so that’s why they cannot check the timber. There is no official administration here.”
Phuc Xuan, from Forest Trends, said that Vuong isn’t technically correct.
“There is a legal framework for the import and export of timber,” he said. “The big question, of course, is whether that framework is enforced on the ground.”
A complex collection of government bodies is tasked with managing the flow of timber in and out of Vietnam. At the border alone the customs department under the Ministry of Finance, the border police, the Forest Protection Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and the Ministry of Health are all involved.
According to Phuc, in order to bring timber across the Cambodian border, for example, to a wood processing town like Đồng Kỳ, importers must have a log list showing which species they are transporting, in addition to their volume and value. Import companies also need a photocopy of the contract they signed with their Cambodian counterpart to bring wood products into the country.

Once timber arrives in Đồng Kỳ, the same ministerial departments are in charge of checking the legality of materials, minus the border police.
However, Phuc admits that association head Vuong is absolutely correct that little oversight is actually accomplished on the ground.
“I’ve talked to officials (in Đồng Kỳ) and they really care about the livelihoods of the local people,” he said. “They don’t want to cause any problems since the town has been operating like this for many years, and it’s about local livelihoods and the local economy.”
However, even without significant government oversight, the local economy is struggling. A cheerful middle-aged woman selling small pieces of sawn timber in the market (she didn’t give her name) described the current state of business as dwindling.
“There’s traditionally been a wood carving village here, so everything comes here,” she said. Though she isn’t worried about competition, she does lament that it is becoming harder to find high-quality timber, and this has hurt sales.
“Several years ago we made $45,000 to $90,000 per year,” she said, describing a relative fortune in a country where the GDP per capita is just over $2,000, according to the World Bank. “However, in recent years it’s been $22,000 to $27,000 per year.” Though the annual salaries she named can’t be independently verified, she did offer to sell a piece of timber for about $2, and inquired about help with exporting her products to the United States.

Furniture workshops hurting

Chu Van Nhung, who owns a timber workshop in Đồng Kỳ, tells a similar tale of struggling business. Sitting in his living room beneath portraits of Ho Chi Minh, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Friedrich Engels, a plastic film protects his big-screen TV from the town’s omnipresent sawdust.
“Four years ago I had 20 workers, now I only have four,” he said. “The strategy used to be just sell to China but now the availability of the material is lower.” He added that what’s now on sale at the open market doesn’t meet the exacting standards of Chinese buyers, who prefer timber that happens to be among the rarest in the world.
“Chinese only purchase precious timber, and there is less of that coming from Laos and Cambodia now,” Nhung said.
While this may seem like the result of logging bans and regulations doing their job, the reality is that there simply isn’t as much rosewood left in these countries as there used to be.
Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show that in 1990, 73.3 percent of Cambodia’s land area was under forest cover. By 2015 that figure had fallen to 53.6 percent. Phuc says that “if you go to forests there it’s not easy to find these species anymore. For example, loggers in Cambodia have to go to protected areas in Thailand to find them. The supply is vanishing.” Data analysis from the World Resources Institute notes that from 2001-2010, Cambodia’s tree cover loss accelerated more quickly than any other country in the world, in large part due to conversion for rubber plantations.
Whatever the cause, the source product is not as abundant as it once was. As a result, Nhung and other furniture company owners in Đồng Kỳ are eager to diversify to other markets.
“The plan is to shift to the European market but the workshop conditions cannot meet the requirements of these countries,” he said. “They have requirements not only for products but also for labor and working conditions. If the European countries had easier regulations like China, where they don’t worry about the environment, it would be easy to switch.”
Such mentions of Europe are common. According to a Forest Trends report with the most recent figures available, in 2013 just 6 percent of Vietnam’s timber exports went to the EU, and suppliers are aiming to increase that figure.
In the late autumn of 2016, Vietnam was in the process of negotiating a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) on clean timber licenses with the European Union. A VPA is a legally binding trade agreement brokered between the EU and timber-producing countries outside of the EU. Under this arrangement, Vietnamese timber exports to the EU will require certificates proving the legality of their origin and production process. It is still being negotiated.
Such certification is known as a Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) license. So far Indonesia is the only Asian country to have issued such a license, according to the EU FLEGT website. This system, if enacted, stands to provide safeguards for Southeast Asia’s forests, but Nhung is concerned. He believes small companies like his can’t meet the requirements.
“If FLEGT is applied to the whole country it will be a problem for villages like this,” Nhung said. Đồng Kỳ’s free-wheeling open timber market and chaotic workshops reinforce his point.
Indeed, Nhung’s workshop is filled with equipment and discarded timber – a dust-covered obstacle course that reflects a lack of concern over safety or work standards from Chinese buyers who simply want expensive and prestigious finished products in the form of furniture.

As a result, Đồng Kỳ’s small businesses face a conundrum. They are running out of high-quality rosewood for the Chinese market due to a combination of regulations and vanishing natural supply, and they can’t prove their products don’t contain illegal timber in order to sell to the EU.
As for Vietnam, about 14.8 million hectares (48 percent) of the country’s land area is forested, according to the FAO. However, 3.7 million hectares of that “forest” consists of planted tree cover – much of it in the form of acacia and eucalyptus plantations, which are useless as material for Hongmu furniture.

Skepticism over potential for change

Meanwhile Jago Wadley, a senior campaigner with the EIA, is skeptical that an agreement between Vietnam and the EU will improve this situation.
“The EU-Vietnam VPA announced in Hanoi in November is no more than a promise to work together going forward to agree to a…set of rules and obligations that might exclude illegal timber from Vietnam’s domestic market and in turn from its exports to the EU,” he told Mongabay in an email.
According to Wadley, the most important aspects of the VPA have not actually been agreed upon yet, and everything hinges on the Vietnamese government strictly implementing and enforcing regulations.
Wadley believes this is cause for concern.
“In theory, the imported timber legislation Vietnam has promised to pass…could, if properly designed and implemented, structurally remove a significant quantity of illegal timber from the Vietnamese market.”
This would completely upend Đồng Kỳ’s current business model, as workshops would be forced to procure legal timber. However, as Wadley explains, “this theory relies on exemplary design and implementation, while significant concerns remain about the will and capability of the government to ensure illegal wood is structurally prevented from being imported into the country.”
Such implementation would fall under the purview of government agencies such as the Forest and Customs Departments which, according to Wadley, have been key in facilitating the illegal timber trade and present glaring corruption threats.
Vuong, of the Đồng Kỳ Timber Association, recognizes the need to move away from China and toward clean timber. He hopes to find investment for a large industrial park in the town where small businesses can access the technology and processes needed to produce furniture that can be exported to stricter markets.
“Shifting sourcing would make it less risky and labor would be more secure,” he said. “It would also be more legal.”
Banner image: Carved rosewood furniture. Photo by Jane Tan Kok/Pixabay
Michael Tatarski is a freelance journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. You can find him on Twitter at @miketatarski.

29 January 2017 / Nathan Siegel

A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed in 2015 between the two countries is leading to tighter, more streamlined regulations.

LUNGA LUNGA/HOROHORO BORDER POINT, Kenya/Tanzania – Along the porous, 477-mile border between Kenya and Tanzania, small-scale timber smuggling is commonplace. A group of woodcarvers who have done business for the last two decades near the Kenyan border town of Lunga Lunga have long imported a few thousand logs from Tanzania every year. Mostly they utilize bicycles to carry timber through backdoor paths across the border.
But this method of timber smuggling could soon become a thing of the past.
In a bid to halt illegal timber trade between Tanzania and Kenya, the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in March, 2015 to increase border patrols, create one-stop border points and harmonize bureaucratic processes like taxes and customs. Only partially implemented, the five-year agreement is expected to “make business much more difficult for the woodcarvers,” according to Edwin Misachi, a forest officer with the Kenya Forest Service based near Lunga Lunga.
While a handful of the initiatives outlined in the MOU – like the one-stop border points and increased collaboration on border patrols – are underway, border officials say a large chunk of the agreement is behind schedule. So far, the committee that will oversee the implementation of the agreement and deal with financing has only met once since the MOU was signed. Known as the technical committee, it is supposed to meet every three months. Harmonization of tax and customs between the two countries – such as different units of measurement of timber shipments on forms – has also been delayed.
The MOU is intended to stem East Africa’s contribution to global illegal timber trade, which accounts for 50-90 percent of the total trade around the world, according to the United Nations Environment Program. It could also help reduce the region’s deforestation rates. According to satellite data from the University of Maryland accessed through Global Forest Watch, Tanzania’s tree cover loss nearly doubled between 2006 and 2014. Overall, the World Wildlife Fund estimates 30 million hectares will be deforested in East Africa between 2010 and 2030.
While experts say the Tanzania-Kenya MOU is a step in the right direction, many are frustrated by delays in the agreement’s implementation.

“Without the technical committee meetings, funding the agreement will be very difficult,” said Jackson Bambo, a forest officer at the Kenya Forest Working Group. Bambo conducted a study in 2011 that found widespread illegal logging was a catalyst for the agreement. “We’re not satisfied with the implementation of the MOU so far.”
Alex Lemarkoko, a commandant with the Kenya Forest Service in Nairobi, said that woodcarvers won’t be the only profession to struggle – all timber smugglers will face “greater enforcement.”. He agrees that delays are being caused by “financial constraints,” but wouldn’t elaborate on specifics.

Collaboration

One of the goals of the deal is harmonization of data, permits and the documentation needed to transport timber. Currently, a trader attempting to transport timber between the two countries must fill out separate forms on each side of the border, according to Bambo. The Kenyan permit, for example, uses “volume” to determine the size of the shipment while the Tanzanian document uses “pieces,” making it very difficult to identify discrepancies.
These discrepancies can be costly to the governments and to the environment. Bambo’s 2011 study found that the Tanzanian government lost approximately $8 million a year in taxes and royalties from timber smuggling. The vast majority of the smuggling was not through back roads on bicycles, but in large consignments that were undervalued or purposefully misidentified.
One factor of the MOU that has been achieved is that Tanzanian and Kenyan officials are now stationed in the same building. Before the agreement, the two governments had border posts that were up to a few miles away from each other, making information exchange problematic. Documents would sometimes take days to reach the other border post. With funding from the Japanese government, which is investing heavily in infrastructure across Kenya, single border points have been built at three different crossings so far. These modern buildings house all the government agencies involved in cross-border trade and traffic.

Increased patrols

The MOU has set in motion a ramp-up of border patrols by both countries. At one of the main border points in Namanga, charcoal is a big, but largely unregulated, business. In October, a group of about 20 Tanzanian and Kenyan border police evicted a few dozen charcoal vendors from their normal place of business in the town’s “no man’s land,” part of a larger plan to clear the approximately 200-foot-wide stretch of land along the border that is neither officially Kenyan nor Tanzanian.
Vendors of all kinds have traditionally operated there with essentially no oversight.
With the construction of the single border point in Lunga Lunga in May 2016, the woodcarvers say their lives have been upended. They were allotted plots of land much closer to the authorities and movement permits for timber are now more strictly enforced. As a result of the increased regulation, reduced timber supply and decrease in tourism, woodcarvers in Lunga Lunga say their industry has declined dramatically.

In the last decade, more than a thousand woodcarvers have left the business, says Martin Mutunga, chairman of the Lunga Lunga Handicraft Cooperative Society, which is the umbrella organization for all the woodcarvers in the area.
The Kenya Forest Service acknowledges that the MOU will hurt the woodcarvers’ business, as they rely on unregulated timber. When asked how they will help them get back on their feet, officials admit there is no strategy to employ the traders or train them for other jobs.
Many say they will return to their homes to farm or search for work as motorcycle taxi drivers in nearby big cities. One of them is Festus Tola, who has been working as a woodcarver for the last 20 years.
“Staying here is impossible,” Tola said.
Banner image: A bag of charcoal for sale in Namanga border point. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay
Nathan Siegel is a Nairobi, Kenya based freelance photographer and writer. Follow him on Twitter at @nathansieg
Citations:
Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R. Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice, and J. R. G. Townshend. 2013. “Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA Tree Cover and Tree cover Loss and Gain, Country Profiles.” University of Maryland, Google, USGS, and NASA. Accessed through Global Forest Watch on January 27, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org.

30 January 2017 / John C. Cannon

A new study examining the changes in forest cover along national borders finds that as incomes increase, so does deforestation.

Economists have for the first time shown a definitive link between rising incomes and a corresponding uptick in deforestation using satellite mapping data.
For a long time, economists have assumed that this more-or-less predictable pattern exists in developing economies, but it’s been difficult to prove.
“Until now, nobody had found a way of testing it empirically in a convincing way,” said Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, an economist at the International Institute for Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is also the lead author of the study reporting the findings, published on Jan. 16 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Part of the reason is that information about forest cover, especially in the poorest economies where this effect is most pronounced, hasn’t been reliable, Crespo Cuaresma told Mongabay. Much of the economic research on this type of trend used estimates and simulations of forest cover, such as those from the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Those gaps in the data led to conflicting conclusions at times on the parts of researchers investigating this relationship.
“Satellite-sensed data provides exactly what would be required to overcome all those data problems that were present until now in the literature,” Crespo Cuaresma said.
For this study, he and his colleagues pulled together the numbers for the economies of 130 countries and then looked specifically at the trends in forest cover along borders using satellite data from 2005.
Examining the areas around human-drawn lines on maps is a technique that social scientists sometimes use to understand why conditions – often the result of disparities in politics or institutions – differ between two neighboring countries, the authors write. Important variables at national borders, such as rainfall and temperature should be fairly similar.

In effect, they tested their hypothesis with this “natural experiment” in which the differences in forest cover could be ascribed to the economic disparity between the countries found on either side of the border.
They found that in the poorest countries, this effect was clear. In particular, as per capita incomes rose, so did the level of deforestation.
For example, agricultural expansion in western Brazil has led to significant deforestation in the region, while forest on the other side of its border in Bolivia – one of South America’s poorest countries – has remained relatively unscathed.
They also expected a reversal of this trend in comparing middle-income or emerging economies with wealthier countries, but it wasn’t clear whether that part of their hypothesis held.

“Eventually, as countries get rich enough and there is enough demand for environmental quality, you would expect reforestation to take place,” Crespo Cuaresma said. “That is the part where we have not found strong evidence.”
What is clear, he said, was the importance that sub-Saharan Africa will likely have in the future as we search for ways to stem climate change.
“The future of sub-Saharan Africa seems to be particularly central to what’s going to happen with climate change challenges in the future,” he added.
Home to some of the poorest countries in the world, those economies are still expected to grow. As Crespo Cuaresma and his colleagues have shown, that will likely mean a decline in forest cover.
“This is particularly worrying because Africa is home to some of the world’s largest tracts of remaining undisturbed forests,” said Ian McCallum in a statement. McCallum is a remote sensing scientist at IIASA and coauthor of the study.
“Factors that keep deforestation in check in other tropical regions of the world, like good governance, monitoring systems, and peace, are lacking in much of tropical Africa,” he said.
CITATIONS:

• Crespo Cuaresma, J., Danylo, O., Fritz, S., McCallum, I., Obersteiner, M., See, L., … Abrams, M. J. (2017). Economic Development and Forest Cover: Evidence from Satellite Data. Scientific Reports, 7(January), 40678. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40678
• Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R. Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice, and J. R. G. Townshend. 2013. “High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change.” Science 342 (15 November): 850–53. Data available on-line from:http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest. Accessed through Global Forest Watch on January 25, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org

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31 January 2017 / Mongabay

Norway is marshalling $400 million to help cut deforestation rates and bolster sustainable small-scale farming.

Norway is pulling together $400 million for countries to fight deforestation.
According to a press release issued by the World Economic Forum from the organization’s annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, the fund’s aim is to safeguard more than 5 million hectares of peatlands and forests.
“The future of the planet depends on our common ability to both protect and restore forests at unprecedented scale, while simultaneously increasing agricultural production to meet growing global needs,” Erna Solberg, Norway’s prime minister, said on Jan. 18 according to the release.
“Through this fund, we will work with forest governments, the private sector and civil society to make this happen in innovative ways,” Solberg added.

The World Economic Forum aims to foster public-private partnerships to solve global problems.
Several major companies, including Unilever, Mars and Nestlé, have voiced support for the fund. Corporations, as well as “other bilateral and multilateral donors,” are expected to add to Norway’s initial $100 million investment to reach a goal of $400 million by 2020.
“The fund is at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals and climate nexus,” said Paul Polman, chief executive officer of Unilever, in the release. The Sustainable Development Goals combine human welfare targets, such as reducing poverty, with environmental steps, such as mitigating climate change and protecting forests and biodiversity.
Unilever is the first corporate investor to the fund, and has pledged $25 million over five years.
“This unparalleled public-private partnership will leverage the commitment of Consumer Goods Forum companies to meet our shared goal to eliminate deforestation, while supporting enhanced livelihoods for farmers in our supply chain,” Polman said.
The statement notes that part of the fund is earmarked for small-scale farmers. More broadly, the thrust of the initiative will be to encourage the intensification of agriculture where it already exists, as well as to limit its expansion into forested areas.

For countries like Brazil, which holds the world’s most tropical forest but has also seen a recent uptick in deforestation, the money will help achieve milestones to address climate change.
“As part of the Paris Climate Agreement our country has committed to 12 million hectares of forest restoration and 20 million hectares of sustainable intensification of agriculture,” said Roberto Jaguaribe, the president of the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency, in the release. “This fund will help us to develop scalable models to achieve that.”
Norway created the fund under the umbrella of the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020, which brings together leaders of public institutions and private companies to ferret out deforestation from supply chains.
Andrew Steer, president and chief executive officer of the World Resources Institute, said that the combination of donors is critical.
“By drawing upon the best private and public actors, and new understanding of business opportunities in tropical landscapes,” Steer added in the statement, “the impact of this fund on climate, biodiversity and economic opportunity could be truly transformational.”
Disclosure: Mongabay receives funding from both WRI and the Norwegian government. Neither entity has any editorial influence over the stories Mongabay produces.
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It’s estimated that about 10 percent of global emissions comes from deforestation — meaning we could make considerable progress toward halting climate change simply by keeping what remains of the world’s forests standing.
Agricultural commodities — especially beef, palm oil, soy, and pulp and paper — have become an increasingly important driver of deforestation over the past couple decades, particularly in the tropics.
A December 2015 study found that the production of those four commodities in just seven countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea) led to an average deforestation area of 3.8 million hectares (9.4 million acres) and land use change emissions of 1.6 gigatonnes CO2 equivalent (GtCO2) per year between 2000 and 2011. That’s 40 percent of total tropical deforestation and 44 percent of associated carbon emissions, due to the production of just four commodities in seven countries.
The production of these commodities in the tropical forest regions of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa is worth roughly $180 billion every year, according to a new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 (TFA 2020). But transforming the global supply chains for beef, palm oil, soy, and pulp and paper so that they are truly sustainable “is an investment opportunity to the tune of roughly $200 billion a year,” Marco Albani, the director of TFA 2020 and a member of the executive committee at WEF, wrote in a blog post accompanying the release of the report.
This is an opportunity that the financial sector can capitalize on “by scaling up emerging models of deforestation-free finance,” Albani adds.
Since the adoption of the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) in 2014, the number of deforestation-related pledges made by the private sector has continually increased. A progress report on the NYDF released last year by Climate Focus found that the number of companies making commitments to protect forests had jumped to 415, up from 307 the previous year.
Of the deforestation commitments made by companies active in the trade of the four major agricultural commodities, which can cover more than one commodity, the majority address palm oil (59 percent) and wood products like pulp and paper (53 percent). Despite representing a much larger share of global deforestation, the soy and cattle supply chains are the subject of significantly fewer commitments — 21 and 12 percent, respectively.
Another major hurdle is the fact that, based on recent research, companies that rely on agricultural commodities like beef, palm oil, soy, and pulp and paper have underestimated the risk of deforestation in their supply chains and are unlikely to achieve their time-bound goals for cutting the ties between their operations and forest destruction.
While there’s a lot of work left to be done, WEF and TFA 2020 see momentum building toward a sea change in the global supply chain for these much-in-demand commodities: “Although challenges remain, the extent and pace with which commitments have been made suggest a potential tipping point, with deforestation-free standards becoming the norm,” the authors of the report write.
In perhaps a sign of this building momentum, seven oil palm-growing tropical African nations pledged last November to work with TFA 2020 and others to protect their forests by shifting entirely to sustainable palm oil production.
Investments in sustainable production can lead to a boost in productivity per hectare and therefore significantly higher overall profitability, reduced input costs, and improved worker productivity, the report states. “In addition, it could bring ‘price advantages’ in the form of a small market price premium from conscientious consumers and the potential monetization of ecosystem services (e.g. carbon sequestration) through private or public payment systems,” the authors add.
Overcoming the barriers to sustainable production of the big four commodities and supporting the transition to deforestation-free supply chains represents an investment opportunity that will “roughly total US$ 200 billion annually” by 2020, per the report.
“The commercial case for sustainable production points to a virtuous cycle of attractive returns, reduced risk and greater access to cheaper capital,” the authors conclude, noting that “Leading investors can better prepare to capture this opportunity through enhanced knowledge of the types of investments that provide strong returns, and through improved risk assessment.”
The report, Albani writes in his blog post, focuses on six models for promoting deforestation-free finance, “none of which is mutually exclusive and which are, indeed, often deployed in combination.” They are: “Compliance requirements applied by financial institutions”; “Compliance requirements applied by integrated or midstream players”; “Revision of financial institution’s risk-assessment methods to incorporate the benefits of deforestation-free supply chains”; “Innovative and green-labelled instruments that reduce the cost or increase the pool of finance”; “Sustainability-linked offtake agreements tied to finance”; and “Publicly funded facilities to provide long-term capital, enhance returns or off-take risk.”
However, in order to unlock the many benefits of achieving sustainability in the global commodities supply chain, the financial sector “needs to step up its involvement in this agenda,” Albani writes: “Cooperation between the financial industry, governments, producers and supply-chain partners can help identify opportunities for deforestation-free investments, develop a pipeline of projects and design scalable financing models.”

CITATION

• Henders, S., Persson, U. M., & Kastner, T. (2015). Trading forests: land-use change and carbon emissions embodied in production and exports of forest-risk commodities. Environmental Research Letters, 10(12), 125012. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/125012

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January 9, 2017 by Jennifer Chu

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that warming from short-lived compounds—greenhouse gases such as methane, chlorofluorocarbons, or hydrofluorocarbons, that linger in the atmosphere for just a year to a few decades—can cause sea levels to rise for hundreds of years after the pollutants have been cleared from the atmosphere.
"If you think of countries like Tuvalu, which are barely above sea level, the question that is looming is how much we can emit before they are doomed. Are they already slated to go under, even if we stopped emitting everything tomorrow?" says co-author Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. "It's all the more reason why it's important to understand how long climate changes will last, and how much more sea-level rise is already locked in."
Solomon's co-authors are lead author Kirsten Zickfeld of Simon Fraser University and Daniel Gilford, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
Short stay, long rise
Recent studies by many groups, including Solomon's own, have shown that even if human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide were to stop entirely, their associated atmospheric warming and sea-level rise would continue for more than 1,000 years. These effects—essentially irreversible on human timescales—are due in part to carbon dioxide's residence time: The greenhouse gas can stay in the atmosphere for centuries after it's been emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes.
In contrast to carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons have much shorter lifetimes. However, previous studies have not specified what their long-term effects may be on sea-level rise. To answer this question, Solomon and her colleagues explored a number of climate scenarios using an Earth Systems Model of Intermediate Complexity, or EMIC, a computationally efficient climate model that simulates ocean and atmospheric circulation to project climate changes over decades, centuries, and millenia.
With the model, the team calculated both the average global temperature and sea-level rise, in response to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and hydrofluorocarbons.
The researchers' estimates for carbon dioxide agreed with others' predictions and showed that, even if the world were to stop emitting carbon dioxide starting in 2050, up to 50 percent of the gas would remain in the atmosphere more than 750 years afterward. Even after carbon dioxide emissions cease, sea-level rise should continue to increase, measuring twice the level of 2050 estimates for 100 years, and four times that value for another 500 years.
The reason, Solomon says, is due to "ocean inertia": As the world warms due to greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide included—waters heat up and expand, causing sea levels to rise. Removing the extra ocean heat caused by even short-lived gases, and consequently lowering sea levels, is an extremely slow process.
"As the heat goes into the ocean, it goes deeper and deeper, giving you continued thermal expansion," Solomon explains. "Then it has to get transferred back to the atmosphere and emitted back into space to cool off, and that's a very slow process of hundreds of years."
Stemming tides
In one particular climate modeling scenario, the team evaluated sea level's response to various methane emissions scenarios, in which the world would continue to emit the gas at current rates, until emissions end entirely in three different years: 2050, 2100, and 2150.
In all three scenarios, methane gas quickly cleared from the atmosphere, and its associated atmospheric warming decreased at a similar rate. However, methane continued to contribute to sea-level rise for centuries afterward. What's more, they found that the longer the world waits to reduce methane emissions, the longer seas will stay elevated.
"Amazingly, a gas with a 10-year lifetime can actually cause enduring sea-level changes," Solomon says. "So you don't just get to stop emitting and have everything go back to a preindustrial state. You are going to live with this for a very long time."
The researchers found one silver lining in their analyses: Curious as to whether past regulations on pollutants have had a significant effect on sea-level rise, the team focused on perhaps the most successful global remediation effort to date—the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty ratified by 197 countries in 1989, that effectively curbed emissions of ozone-depleting compounds worldwide.
Encouragingly, the researchers found that the Montreal Protocol, while designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out pollutants such as chlorofluorocarbons—has also helped stem rising seas. If the Montreal Protocol had not been ratified, and countries had continued to emit chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere, the researchers found that by 2050, the world would have experienced up to an additional 6 inches of sea-level rise.
"Half a foot is pretty significant," Solomon says. "It's yet another tremendous reason why the Montreal Protocol has been a pretty good thing for the planet."
In their paper's conclusion, the researchers point out that efforts to curb global warming should not be expected to reverse high seas quickly, and that longer-term impacts from sea-level rise should be seriously considered: "The primary policy conclusion of this study is that the long-lasting nature of sea-level rise heightens the importance of earlier mitigation actions."
More information: Centuries of thermal sea-level rise due to anthropogenic emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1612066114