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It will take a lot of investment to turn this trend around. As Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, noted before the United Nations climate summit in Dubai began in November, “There needs to be a volume of resources that perhaps, until today, has never been proposed.”
Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and expert on forests at the World Resources Institute, pointed out that land use change worldwide, including deforestation, adds up to 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere annually. Brazil alone emits over 600 million tons of carbon dioxide annually from the exploitation of its forests. Even at a fairly conservative cost of $10 per ton — to compensate Brazil’s farmers to keep the rainforest standing, to restore degraded land, to monitor the forests and develop new models of sustainable farming — would cost $6 billion a year.
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Only about $1.7 billion has been channeled to pay for preventing the deforestation and degradation of the Amazon, mostly from Norway via the Amazon Fund set up by the Brazilian government in 2008. This provided compensation for some 300 million tons of carbon dioxide that was kept out of the atmosphere — less than 5 percent of the 6.4 billion tons of avoided emissions between 2005 and 2012, a period during which Brazil managed to cut deforestation in the Amazon by roughly 80 percent.
More funds need to be mobilized. And they won’t come from Greta Thunberg’s friends or enlightened governments like Norway’s (which, uncomfortably, pays for its environmental altruism with taxes on its vast oil sector). To get funding at the necessary scale will require contributions from corporations — including even oil companies — that understand that rainforest preservation is a cost-effective means of fighting climate change.
Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinionsFollowTo get that capital into the forest, though, requires overcoming two powerful forces: the political right’s opposition to corporations that devote attention or money to societal challenges such as climate change, and, perhaps more importantly, the hostility from the political left — and much of the environmental movement — toward the use of the tools of capitalism to problem solve
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Undaunted, state governments across Brazil’s Amazon region are working hard to woo private money. By next summer, the state of Tocantins is set to issue a first batch of carbon credits under a U.N. verification program known as jurisdictional Redd . These credits will be bought by Swiss oil-trading firm Mercuria.
Dan Nepstad, a tropical ecologist specializing in the Amazon and who runs the Earth Innovation Institute,........