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By Root 759 0

at the group’s December 2008 pamphlet “REDD myths,”58 one cannot help but get the impression that Friends of the Earth’s opposition has more to do with a general aversion to trading and international markets than any specific objections to the REDD scheme. “Allowing countries with carbon intensive lifestyles to continue consuming inequitably and unsustainably, by permitting them to fund cheaper forest carbon ‘offsets’ in developing countries, diverts critical resources and attention away from measures to address fossil fuel consumption and the real underlying causes of deforestation,” FoE asserted. But by insisting that carbon reductions must for ideological reasons exclusively take place in rich countries, groups like Friends of the Earth risk leaving forests unprotected and their destruction to continue by default as they focus on wider political battles. Clearly if forests are to be worth more alive than dead, somebody, somewhere, will have to put up the cash.

This in turn means that the incentive of potential profits must be central to any financing scheme—a prospect Friends of the Earth views with barely concealed horror. In a 2010 publication on the same issue, the group asserts in an outraged tone that “many REDD projects are being set up specifically with a view to making a handsome profit,” and that “a REDD race is firmly underway, with investors, including banks, energy companies and carbon traders fully engaged in seeking out profitable opportunities.”59 To my mind, that powerful interests are beginning to see forest protection as a winning opportunity should be welcomed by anyone who wants to see the survival of tropical forests in the long term. This is simply practical politics: No amount of glossy pamphlets published by Green groups will have a chance of protecting forests if moneyed interests stand to make a bigger profit from their destruction than their protection, as the accelerated rate of deforestation over recent decades has shown. Bringing forests into properly designed markets as living entities is essential for their survival.

Happily, the wider environmental movement has recently adopted a more realistic approach. At the December 2010 climate-change talks in Cancún, the Climate Action Network—a broad international coalition of Green groups—supported REDD during the negotiations, making constructive suggestions for how the draft texts could be improved. Perhaps partly due to this assistance, REDD principles were broadly agreed by the end of the conference, including safeguards for the rights of indigenous peoples and the need for forest countries to begin setting up ways of monitoring forest loss and counting any reduction of emissions due to protection schemes. However, there remains the danger that until international carbon markets are strengthened there may be few places for forest-credit cash to be raised—and this in turn hinges on broader agreement about the future of the Kyoto Protocol and a wider carbon-reduction and trading effort bringing in the U.S., China, and all the other countries that do not have Kyoto targets.

And REDD applies only to forests. At an even broader level, a global system is needed to pay for conservation in wetlands, grasslands, tundra, deserts, and the other ecosystems of global importance. My proposal for how this might work is a straightforward one, based on the fact that the human economy depends completely on the “natural capital” of a healthy biosphere. I suggest each country adds half a percent to Value Added Tax (VAT) with the proceeds raised specifically safeguarded for ecosystem and habitat restoration (“rewilding”) and preservation. This would be fair because a tax on consumption would mean that people pay in proportion to the environmental impact of their lifestyle patterns—with those who consume more bearing more of the cost—and as the economy grows so the yield from the tax would grow too. The amounts raised would be substantial, but barely noticeable to consumers: In the U.K. the rate of VAT has varied between 15 and 20 percent in just a couple of