Jagdeo to promote forest value in Suriname today

Sep 08, 2008 News

…we must recognise the potential to earn large sums of money

President Bharrat Jagdeo has travelled to Suriname where, today, he will play a part in that country’s national forestry consultations.
According to Jagdeo, he was invited to make a presentation on the work that is currently being done in Guyana and its valuation of carbon services.
The model that is being prepared in Guyana will also be presented to other forest countries later in the year, when they meet in Poland.
According to Jagdeo, “We must recognize the potential for earning large sums of money and ensure that we don’t get our forest locked away in some multilateral non-government organisation type of arrangement, which does not give much money.”

A section of Guyana’s rainforest

Jagdeo has already offered to place the country’s extensive rainforests under the control of an international body in exchange for development aid and technical assistance.
A recently published study calculated conservatively that Guyana could earn in excess of $50M per year in carbon credits from such efforts, and other estimates based on the concept of “avoided deforestation” are even higher.
In 1989, Guyana deeded one million acres of forest to the Commonwealth of Nations as a ‘sustainable-use’ reserve, called Iwokrama.
Scientists estimate that Iwokrama locks up around 120 million tons of carbon, an amount roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of the United Kingdom.
Jagdeo has publicly criticized the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change for failing to allow countries like Guyana, with pristinely preserved forests, to earn carbon credits.
“The Kyoto Protocol is limited in that sense, and it’s short-sighted in that it encourages bad behaviour basically among countries. If you cut down trees and you plant them back, you get money; if you preserve them, you don’t get anything,” Jagdeo is quoted as saying in the media.
The Guyanese leader noted that Guyana would reap miniscule assistance under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol when it begins large-scale production of ethanol and other types of agro-based energy.
He said that Guyana has decided to get into the production of bio-fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.
But assistance is miniscule through the Clean Development Mechanism, as compared to the carbon credits we could get from standing forests.
Carbon credits are the centre of a system of credits that allow a company or country that reduces its carbon-dioxide emissions below a target level to sell the extra reduction as a credit to a company or country that has not met the target level.
Under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, developed countries can take up a greenhouse gas reduction project in a developing country where the cost of greenhouse gas reduction projects is usually much lower.