NAIROBI (Reuters) - International researchers launched a $12 million study on Monday intended to help many of the world's poorest farmers benefit from multi-billion dollar schemes to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.
The 18-month Carbon Benefits Project will examine rural sites in Kenya, Niger, Nigeria and China to see how much carbon is stored in trees and soil when land is managed sustainably.
It is led by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Washington-based financial arm for international conventions on green issues.
Tropical deforestation accounts for a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they are burned or rot.
Farming contributes as much to global warming as all the world's planes, cars and trucks, and that will increase as the world tries to feed an extra 3 billion people by 2050.
Putting a price on living trees and storing carbon in the soil could give developing countries an incentive to save forests and adopt more climate-friendly farming practices.
The new study would measure the impact on soil carbon of such practices, an area which lags measuring carbon in trees.
About 190 nations have agreed to thrash out a new U.N. climate treaty in December in Denmark that would step up the fight against global warming, which scientists say will bring more heat waves, droughts, floods and rising seas.
They will consider paying developing nations for maintaining standing forests -- but so far there is no agreement on how to put a price on carbon in forests and especially soil.
"We all hope for a deal in Copenhagen, and it is having such tools (as the Carbon Benefits Project) that will actually make the deal implementable on the ground," GEF official Maryam Niamir-Fuller told reporters at UNEP headquarters in Kenya.
"The true economic value of ... ecosystem services has not been integrated into the value of crops or livestock. Since that value is not there, it is not captured by the markets -- then you have all kinds of distortions."
MARKETS UNEASY
Rich countries agree they have to lead a climate fight after enjoying two centuries of industrialization and pollution, but they disagree with developing nations on how much of the burden they should carry under a new global treaty.
Suggestions range from carbon trading to levying new taxes in developed nations to raise cash. Carbon trading puts a cap on emissions in one region but allows participants to pay for cuts elsewhere, and so channels funds into developing countries.
But such carbon offsets could divert from climate action at home, skeptics say. Greenpeace said in March that the price of carbon market credits prices could fall 75 percent if credits for safeguarding forests were added to existing markets for industrial emissions -- dramatically reducing the incentive for carbon reduction.
Including soil among carbon offsets options could further swamp demand. Scientists say that the soil could store as much as one-tenth of annual global carbon emissions, if farmers used longer crop rotations and grazed fewer livestock, for example.
A European Commission report last year also said the European Union should not let industry meet its climate goals by funding forest conservation in tropical nations before 2020.
It said this would cause serious supply and demand imbalances, and that deforestation emissions were three times bigger than emissions regulated by the EU emissions trading scheme. But such estimates are highly approximate.
David L. Skole, a forestry expert from Michigan State University, said the new project would help develop more accurate tools to measure the amounts of carbon involved.
"When it comes to agro-forestry, agriculture and forestry and land-based carbon sequestration, there is a lot of uncertainty and uneasiness in the market," Skole said.
"This is then an obstacle ... Without a way to quantify the carbon from those farms as accurately as you can quantify the CO2 from a smokestack, smallholders can't get engaged."
(Additional reporting by Gerard Wynn in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
