Rainforests Could Be Traded On World Market

American Electric Power and BP invested in the pilot project alongside environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy to find out if protecting forests compensates for their own pollution.
The burning of tropical forests emits more carbon dioxide every year than all the cars, planes, and boats on the planet - about 17% of global emissions.
A deal at Copenhagen could mean both governments and businesses paying billions to keep the forests standing.
With agreement looking unlikely on many other areas, some negotiators feel preventing deforestation may be the most concrete outcome from the talks.
Valuing a forest
Professor Geoffrey Heal is working out how this money would be spent.
The Columbia University economist used to advise Opec on how to manage the oil market. Now he teaches courses on corporate social responsibility and energy to Business MBA students.
In 2004, he was approached by a student who knew the prime minister of Papua New Guinea. The student had been sent to New York on a mission.
"Deforestation was a big issue there," he says. "The prime minister had asked him when he was in New York to look into whether there was any way to make money from the forests without cutting them down."
The Rainforest Coalition - a loose grouping of more than 20 nations - grew up in response to that question.
Their first task was to find a way to reward nations for not cutting down their forests.
"Basically the mechanism we've come up with is the following; countries reduce their rates of deforestation below what they historically have been and in exchange for that, they get carbon credits which they can sell on world carbon markets," says Heal.
To work out exactly how much money each country would get, they needed to calculate how much carbon was released by burning their forest. They get paid for every tonne they keep trapped.
Different forests contain different amounts of carbon.
So teams of conservationists turned economists are being dispatched around the world to work out a forest's value.
"It is possible to calculate the amount of carbon in a hectare of rainforest to a reasonable amount of precision," he says.
Data from numerous plots is then combined with satellite imagery of the forest.
Once the carbon stock is calculated, satellite pictures are used to track the impact of any deforestation.
Nations would be paid from annuities - the money would only keep coming if the forest kept standing.
Creating a market
Valuing the forest is complex - finding the money to pay for it even harder.
The movement has turned biologists into entrepreneurs. Andrew Mitchell is one. He wrote the Little REDD Book, on plans to fund forest protection.