Point Carbon reports that Director General Jacques Diouf of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has announced a satellite monitoring system that would permit developing countries to monitor deforestation in their countries. Satellite monitoring has become accurate enough that deforestation can be easily monitored remotely anywhere in the world of any forest in the world. Much of the concern over what are called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) was that the deforestation could not be adequately monitored. With satellite imagery this has largely been resolved.
Deforestation accounts for about 17 to 20 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This exceeds the total emissions from transportation activities. Thus, reducing forest destruction and degradation is truly the "low hanging fruit" in reducing human greenhouse gas emissions on a global basis in terms of low cost reductions.
“Monitoring will be cheaper, more accurate and transparent for countries that want to participate in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation," said FAO Director General Jacques Diouf.
The goal of the program is to make it easier and cheaper for developing countries to monitor forests and to implement REDD programs.
"This system will not cover all information needs for REDD, but the remote sensing approach, together with field verification, will provide forest area changes in a robust and verifiable way - a crucial component for carbon accounting under REDD," said Mette Wilkie, coordinator of FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment Program.
FAO is a member of the UN-REDD Program, a partnership between UN organizations to support developing countries in preparing to implement REDD programs.
The private markets are very interested in investing in these projects to produce carbon credits or greenhouse gas offsets that can be used for a portion of the compliance obligations under cap and trade programs in the United States that are being developed by states, particularly California, and being developed by EPA and being considered by Congress. The Waxman-Markey Bill passed by the US House of Representatives and the Kerry-Boxer Bill filed in the Senate both contain extensive provisions permitting the use of both domestic forest carbon projects and international forest carbon projects. Both contain programs to provide financing incentives for international REDD projects.
This steps by the UN demonstrates the growing movement toward the use of REDD as a means of offsetting human greenhouse gas emissions and hopefully the use of private capital and project-based programs to immediately and efficiently begin to preserve the world's forests, particularly the rain forests.
