Saving the rainforests would be a bargain

The Economist

Jun 25, 2023 12:02 AM IST

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Far more money is needed to make conservation more profitable than slash and burn

Profits from chopping down rainforests are surprisingly meagre. The land is not particularly fertile. A freshly cleared hectare of the Amazon fetches an average price of only around $1,200. By contrast, the social costs of clearing it are immense. Some 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide are pumped into the atmosphere. By a conservative estimate, that does $25,000 of harm by accelerating climate change.

Yet still the world’s trees are disappearing. The area covered by primary rainforest has dwindled by 6.7% since 2000. (Unsplash)

Yet still the world’s trees are disappearing. The area covered by primary rainforest has dwindled by 6.7% since 2000. The senseless destruction continues because, for the men wielding the chainsaws, it is not senseless at all. They receive the profits; the costs are dispersed across all 8bn people on the planet. Plainly, if the owners of the rainforest were paid not to destroy it, everyone would be better off. The world would no doubt already have funded such a deal, were rainforests in places with clear property rights and a firm rule of law. Alas, they are not. Rules against deforestation are usually strict, but seldom enforced.

Consider Brazil. Until January it had a president, Jair Bolsonaro, who sided with illegal loggers and ranchers. He torched the environment ministry’s budget, stopped fining forest criminals and told illegal miners on indigenous reserves he would legalise their plunder. On his watch the pace of deforestation rose by 60%. Voters have replaced Mr Bolsonaro with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who is pursuing eco-criminals. But catching them is hard.

Local officials are often in league with the loggers, and may be loggers themselves. Local communities often resist the forces of law and order, since they see more benefit from deforestation than conservation. The forest’s remoteness makes it hard for police to penetrate. And land titling is a mess—in parts of the Amazon overlapping claims add up to five or six times the disputed area. When it is unclear who owns a piece of land, it is unclear whom to pay to conserve it, or whom to fine for despoiling it.

Similar obstacles impede conservation elsewhere. Forests in the Congo basin have long been protected by the region’s dire poverty. Unable to afford chainsaws, local farmers chop trees down slowly and laboriously by hand. But deforestation is accelerating, and if it is mechanised before local governments can regulate it, calamity will follow. The prospects are especially grim in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where vast tracts of rainforest are overrun by militias and are almost wholly lawless.

The presidents of Brazil, Indonesia and Congo, the three countries with the biggest rainforests, are urging rich countries to bankroll conservation. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, co-hosting a forest summit in Gabon this week, promised to do his bit. Activists and consumers can help: after a concerted campaign, four-fifths of Indonesian palm-oil-refining capacity is now forest-friendly. But more effort is urgently required.

Leadership matters. Little progress is possible when countries with rainforests are run by the likes of Mr Bolsonaro. Yet even under better leaders, such places will struggle to enforce their own laws unless the people who live in the forests see benefits in conserving them. That will require a big, reliable flow of cash to make rainforests more valuable intact than flattened. This should come from rich-country governments and from private firms buying carbon credits to offset their own emissions.

In the past such flows have been too small and ill-designed. Rather than financing lots of small projects, which are hard to monitor, more money should go to political entities large enough to make a difference, such as state or provincial governments. Such “jurisdictional” carbon credits could be used to accelerate the transition to a greener local economy, to clean up local land registries and to police infractions. If there is enough cash, conditionally disbursed, locals will have more incentive to protect trees and less inclination to elect environmental renegades. By one estimate, $20bn a year would slow deforestation significantly. To preserve such a huge carbon sink—never mind the biodiversity it contains—this would be a bargain.

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