We are conserving existing forests on private lands in Brazil’s agricultural frontier by paying farmers to forgo their legal right to cut them down.
Today, the demand for carbon offset mechanisms—a way for private citizens or corporations to pay to counter their greenhouse gas emissions—is growing exponentially. For political and bureaucratic reasons, nearly all of those programs, including REDD+, focus on planting trees, which will take decades to grow and have no guarantee of surviving over the long run. Instead, protecting existing natural forests provides far greater and more immediate environmental returns—preserving the immense amounts of carbon already stored in their trunks as well as all of the social and ecological benefits of complex functioning ecosystems.
Our Work
CONSERV is a partnership between Woodwell Climate and The Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) [Amazon Environmental Research Institute]. Our plan is simple: pay farmers to forgo their legal right to cut down trees on their land in Mato Grosso province, Brazil. In Mato Grosso alone, there are more than 7 million hectares (17.3 million acres) of primary tropical forest on private lands that could be deforested legally, demonstrating the critical need to take our test program to scale to lock these at-risk lands into conservation contracts and create an asset for farmers to protect, rather than a barrier to their economic growth.
With the support of more than US$9 million in funding from sovereign wealth funds, we have engaged farmers and tested this idea over the last 5 years in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. We have surveyed farmers’ willingness to take part and leveraged this knowledge to identify, contract, and pay landowners to set aside their remaining forests for conservation. In this initial phase we have contracted with 22 farms in 3 municipalities and are actively protecting 23,000 hectares of forest. We monitor all farms twice annually for compliance. This forest conservation approach has several advantages:
- It is low cost. Landowners are willing to accept payments equivalent to the relatively low opportunity costs (~$70-100/ha) of their land.
- It is low risk. Accepting payment to keep forests is a financially low-risk activity to the farmer compared to legally deforesting and farming the land.
- It is simple. A contract is made between private parties to lease the farmer’s land. There is no government intervention, no bureaucratic processes or third-party funding mechanisms.
- It is additional. We target private lands that can legally be converted to agriculture and are increasingly at risk of exploitation.
What we have found is encouraging. We have surveyed many farmers and have shown that even those not taking part in the program are receptive and eager to convert their standing forests into a reliable revenue stream. With sufficient funding from a stable global carbon market, we are confident that this program could be expanded to much of the 7 million ha in the state of Mato Grosso, and beyond to other geographies.
Impact
CONSERV offers a concrete, scalable mechanism to promote tropical forest conservation on working landscapes. If successful, it would bypass the political and bureaucratic barriers that have long paralyzed international negotiations to establish markets for forest carbon. By showing what is possible when best practices are employed in one of the world’s most active deforestation frontiers, CONSERV provides a model for larger-scale forest carbon trading in Brazil and could catalyze similar projects throughout the tropics.
Visit the project’s website to learn more about CONSERV (Portuguese).
The climate is changing faster in northern latitudes than the rest of the globe, intensifying wildfire regimes across the boreal landscape.
Boreal forests punch above their weight when it comes to carbon storage—they make up a third of global forests, but store roughly two thirds of global forest carbon, mainly in the organic matter in their soils. However, these important carbon stores are at risk in a changing climate.
Longer fire seasons, more intense fire weather, and increased lightning ignitions are intensifying fire regimes in the north. The resulting increase in fires, their severity, and the area burned directly contributes to larger amounts of carbon being emitted into our atmosphere. However, boreal fire emissions are largely missing from the climate models that inform the IPCC and global carbon budgets.
How will boreal fire regimes continue to evolve, how will these changes impact greenhouse gas emissions and our global climate, and is there anything we can do about it?
Our Work
- Fire mapping. We’re pairing multiple scales of remote sensing imagery with deep learning models to more accurately map wildfire occurrence across the circumpolar boreal forest. This new technique is especially important for Siberia, which currently does not have a reliable, operational product.
- Fire carbon emissions and climate impact. We are continuing our work with international collaborators collecting field observations on fire severity, burn depth, and carbon emissions to the atmosphere. These field measurements are combined with geospatial data and models to estimate carbon emissions across large scales, and to quantify the climate impacts of the fire greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions, as well as changes to the land surface albedo.
- Fire self-regulation. We are studying how boreal fires spread and are ultimately extinguished, as well as how this is impacted by top-down (e.g., fire weather, climate) vs. bottom-up (vegetation type, fuel, site drainage) drivers. This information is critical for being able to project fire regimes under continued climate change.
- Interactions with logging. We are using field measurements and mapping techniques to understand the interactions between wildfires and logging in boreal forests. Both are a threat to forest integrity, particularly in southern Canada and Russia.
- Fire management as a mitigation strategy. We are combining fire carbon emissions estimates, econometric data, and modeling to explore the ways in which boreal fire management, particularly fire suppression, could be used as a climate mitigation tool by keeping carbon in the ground and out of the atmosphere.
Impact
While some climate models include boreal fire, they do not capture the emissions generated when fire burns soil organic matter or thaws permafrost. Our work aims to elevate and socialize these emissions as the global climate threat that they are, and to quantify how their release will impact our ability to meet climate targets.
Our research showing fire management to be a cost-effective natural climate solution has received attention because of its potential impact on carbon budgets. Our ultimate aim is to increase funding for boreal fire management agencies and operationalize carbon and permafrost protection from fire in the US (Alaska) and Canada. Our work on fire management and self-regulation can also help inform fire management agencies’ practices with improved tools and understanding.