Reforestation can play on climate change

March 20, 2009 by timbercommunity

 A reforestation project in Moldova given the green light by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) demonstrates that the carbon market can work for rural communities and that forests can play a major role in dealing with climate change.

 
The Moldova project is reforesting 20,290 hectares of degraded and eroded state-owned and communal agricultural lands spread throughout the country. The reforestation proposes to achieve multiple objectives, and in particular to restore degraded lands through improvement in the vegetative cover and sustainably enhance supplies of forest products to local communities including fuel wood, timber and non timber products to meet the needs of rural communities.
 
Given the success of the Moldova Soil Conservation project the World Bank has engaged in the preparation of a second project in Moldova. This follow-up project—Moldova Community Forestry Development Project—aims to reforest 8,157 hectares of eroded and unproductive land based on the same implementation technology as the first project. The project is expected to sequester about 0.4 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2012 and one million tons by 2017.
The BioCarbon Fund was created to open the carbon market to forestry and agriculture activities. Unfortunately, this segment of the carbon market, that is transactions based on forestry and agricultural projects, is grossly underdeveloped with a share of just one percent of the total market.
This is mostly due to the restrictions that have been imposed on the tradability of credits from forestry and agricultural projects at the level of the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol and the exclusion of such credits in the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme.
For more information, please visit the following websites:

http://www.carbonfinance.org