Bring tree farmers into carbon markets, Icraf urges

Despite their contribution to reducing carbon emissions there is still no agreement globally on how to enlist millions of smallholder farmers who grow trees on their farms in global efforts to fight climate change.

The fear is often expressed that doing so will flood carbon markets and that the logistics f bringing on board hundreds of millions of farmers will be impossibly complicated.

But the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre (Icraf) thinks farmers have a role to play and need to be brought into global carbon markets.

Icraf’s argument is that farm forests are just as good as natural forests, at capturing and storing carbon emissions as industries and millions of cars burn tonnes of fossil fuels each day.

At the just-concluded Global Conference on Climate Change in Poznan, Poland, the international research centre lobbied hard for farmers who have planted trees on their farms to be allowed to sell the carbon their trees capture in the global carbon market.

As the conference got underway, Icraf released a study that detailed how bringing smallholder farmers on board would help fight the twin threats of climate change and poverty.

According to Icraf director-general Dr Dennis Garrity, this will encourage farmers to adopt “carbon-saving development approaches” while at the same time helping the world reduce greenhouse gas emissions “as quickly and effectively as possible.”

Icraf’s sentiments received support from 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Prof Wangari Maathai. who said; “Allowing local communities to benefit from the carbon market through the planting and protecting of forests will put money in their pockets while also helping to protect our environment and fight climate change.”

If craf’s proposal is taken up, farmers who plant and maintain trees on their farms will be selling carbon credits to major polluters in developed countries.

Data shows that the value of such credits stood at $64 billion in 2007. Icraf believes that allowing farmers to sell their carbon credits could generate $10 billion each year and thus go a long way in fighting poverty and deprivation.

Icraf’s position appears to resonate with the findings of hundreds of scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — ­that planting trees on farms (or agroforestry) has the potential of removing 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The IPCC also estimates that as many as two billion acres of farmland in developing countries are suitable for intensive agroforestry.

For decades, the World Agroforestry Centre has been involved in encouraging the adoption of policies that will make it possible and attractive for developing countries to plant and maintain trees.

Icraf says that such trees are both useful for maintaining an environmental balance and also crucial in supplying food and income needs to farmers and their families.

But though there appears to be such immense potential for the agroforestry to fight global warming, there is still a reluctance to embrace its contribution at the global level.

The fear, it appears, is that acknowledging that an immense tonnage of carbon could be cleared from the atmosphere by trees planted on farms will end up flooding the market with what Icraf terms “cheap carbon credits.”

“Carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns are impeding efforts to encourage…better forest management and growing more trees on farms.”

However, Icraf estimates that agroforestry could curtail up to 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, the global carbon market largely focuses on rewarding industries that reduce carbon emissions in China, Brazil and India.

For instance, reports from the World Bank show that, this year, Africa accounted for only 1.4 per cent of projects to be rewarded by the global carbon market, with China accounting for 73 per cent while Brazil and India accounted for 8 per cent.