Kyoto and tree plantations

Brenda Rosser

2007 – December. Restrictions removed on eligible tree plantations under the Clean Development Mechanism.

Two recent decisions however may yet attract more plantations to the CDM. First, restrictions have been removed that required that tree planting CDM projects could only happen on land that had not been forested after 1990.
This restriction, originally put in place to guard against the CDM providing a perverse incentive to cut down forests to replace them with CDM sponsored monocultures, has recently been removed by the CDM Executive Board. With this change, the CDM will become much more attractive to plantations companies and the change “will make substantive areas used for controversial large-scale plantation management eligible as CDM projects.” [see WRM Bulletin Nº 119 at http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/119/CDM.html].

The second change has just been agreed at the climate talks in Bali; it increased the size of tree planting projects that can apply to the CDM under simplified procedures and with fewer requirements to assess social and environmental impacts. This again will be an additional incentive for plantation companies to try accessing the CDM.

Another point worth mentioning is that while only one tree plantation project has been registered as a CDM afforestation and reforestation project, plantations companies have discovered another route into the CDM: as energy projects –rather than carbon sink projects. V&M do Brasil, whose plantations in Minas Gerais, Brazil, have taken this route and are now cashing in on the CDM without being identified as tree plantation projects in the CDM. In the case of V&M, even murder by its security guards of a peasant inside the V&M plantations was not enough to revoke the CDM registration [see WRM Bulletin No 119, at http://www.wrm.org.uy/boletin/119/Brasil3.html].

Reference: Why carbon sink plantations have been hardly implemented within the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism…so far

WRM Bulletin. Issue 125 – December 2007