'Vanishing species key in carbon trading'

The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and the Society for Tropical Ecology (GTOE) have jointly issued a “Marburg Declaration” that highlighted potentially serious weaknesses in current efforts to slow global warming and tropical deforestation.

Professor Nigel Stork, and Professor Steve Turton, professors at the University of Melbourne and James Cook University, respectively, are Councillors for the ATBC.
“If we’re going to limit harmful climate change, we simply must reduce the rampant destruction of tropical forests, which throws five billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” says Professor Turton.

“But it’s not enough just to reduce carbon emissions; we also have to save our most biodiverse forests and their imperiled species.”

The problem, say the scientists, is that international carbon traders will often focus on protecting disappearing forests where land is cheapest, such as in the Brazilian Amazon. Under agreements to be negotiated this December at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, such carbon trading could soon amount to billions of dollars each year.

“Although it is important to save the Amazon, some of the most critically endangered species are not in Amazonia, they’re in the last surviving scraps of forest in places like the Philippines, Madagascar, West Africa, and the Andean Mountains of South America. These places are biodiversity hotspots, final refuges for thousands of endangered plants and animals,” says Stork.

“There’s enormous potential to help protect vanishing forests with carbon money, but if we’re not careful we could squander our chance to save critically endangered wildlife. We urge all nations and corporations to invest in carbon funds to help preserve disappearing forests.”

“But when you do so, pay a little extra so you’re protecting the most imperiled habitats. That way we can slow global warming and also save some of the most amazing and imperiled wildlife on earth.”