One thing you realise about a rainforest is that
it's never quiet unless the animals are scared. The birds are talking, every animal is making
noise unless it's hunting. There's a constant hum of chirping and noises and everything.
It's just a beautiful, beautiful environment. OK, but what's it worth? What do you mean? Like yeah the jungle's lovely, it's beautiful etc etc. Cash on the table what's the sound of the forest worth to you? Ten dollars? One hundred dollars? Can we do a wee swap - so your lovely forest sound for say the
smell of wildflowers in a meadow? I'll consider it. But i'm raising this really because there's this idea we could fight climate change by putting a price on the priceless. This is The Climate Question from the BBC World Service with Kate Lamble and Jordan Dunbar asking, can putting a price on nature help? At the end of the day price is what you pay at
econ 101 and value is what you receive. Pavan Sukhdev is the chief executive of Gist - the Global Initiative for a Sustainable Tomorrow. The interesting thing about nature is that
actually the price of nature is zero because most of what nature provides us is
free it's public goods and services. Whereas actually its value is very high
because what would you do if you didn't have trees and oceans to absorb the pollution
that you emit. Pavan's company measures the impact of businesses on the environment right
down to their smallest and worst paid workers. Bees. I keep saying that bees
provide pollination services but when did a bee ever send you an invoice for
pollination? But at the same time we can estimate as economists we can estimate the value of
pollination based on good bee years and bad bee years and that answer is close to 200 billion
dollars. That's huge. That's humongous. But like our parents love we don't necessarily appreciate the
service provided. Our generation is so mesmerised by the magic of markets that we think that
anything that doesn't have a price doesn't have a value. Someone who owns a mangrove forest for example could make lots of money by cutting it down and building a hotel. Everyone else has to deal with the consequences of the forest no longer protecting the land from erosion, no longer providing a home to animals and so on and so on. We end up in this sort of bizarre game of making
private profits, public losses, private profits public losses. You can't keep doing that it's like
music the chairs the music will stop at some point. Some people have come up with an idea to
stop the game. Kevin Conrad grew up in the forest of Papua New Guinea where his parents were
working as missionaries. You know I was blessed, I went to a one-room school and the teacher
would put the assignments up on the board and when you were done you could leave and so I
figured out how to do my assignments as quickly as possible so by about 09.30 or 10.00 I was out in the forest and that's when my real education began right. I learned all about the
plants and the animals and how they behaved and what was dangerous and where was safe and
what you could eat and what you shouldn't. Kevin now runs a coalition of 60 developing
countries looking to protect their rainforests. These resources are fragile. A small change in
temperature or soil can trigger big consequences When I was young the birds of paradise used to
fly in all the high trees and when I go back to my village area I don't see the birds
of paradise anymore and the reason is those high tall trees have been cut as part of
shifting agriculture, you know. Communities will cut the forest, burn them for the nitrates in
the soil and then plant food for their families. And the problem is as families get bigger those
forests don't recover. All of this of course has an impact on the climate. Growing trees naturally
hoover up carbon dioxide as part of photosynthesis and lock it away. Globally forests actually absorb
around a third of all of our emissions every year. Gases that otherwise would be warming the planet. So when you cut the trees down you get a double whammy. Not only are they no longer around to suck up all those emissions the trees can also rot or burn, releasing all the carbon they once stored. The same is true of grasses on the savanna or kelp in the oceans. Alive they store carbon. Dead they release it. So how do we make the common ecological good trump personal profit? Well what you learn very quickly in the rainforest is that it's hard work to deforest. You only do it if you're planning to sell the wood or plant something on the soil, otherwise you know it's hot, it's thick, it's difficult to deforest. So no-one's doing it for fun it's not like a weekend activity. Exactly right. So the idea is to make forests worth more alive than dead. What if - stay with me - we pay the
trees for sucking carbon dioxide out of our air? In the late 1980s small experiments were started
in places like Costa Rica, Colombia and Brazil. Villages were paid in hopes it would encourage
them to protect patches of forest instead of cutting them down but it didn't always work. So we observed that paying a community in one area wasn't sufficient because what would happen is
a community could take that money and then use it to deforest around the mountain on the other
side. Oh come on guys. Kevin decided they needed to go bigger. Entire countries would need to be paid
for the service their trees provide. I thought this was such an obvious concept it would take one or two years for everyone to understand that. 15 years later we're still working on it. Kevin's being modest. There is now an international agreement for the scheme he helped set up: Red plus. Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. Some details are still being ironed out but it's designed to allow countries to pay each other to help fight climate change by keeping
trees alive. So how does it work? I mean you look at a tree, how do you calculate how much carbon is stored in it? How much it's worth? How much of a job it's doing? Well that's not as hard as it sounds. You have to learn different tree species and their densities, right. A hard wood basically pulls in more carbon than a soft wood, so you need to know what type of tree it is, you need to know how many of them are in a hectare so we come up with these estimates, again they are only estimates, and it entails scientists running out and measuring trees and you know taking in
a fallen tree and studying it. But once you get... Hang on because sorry sorry whoa whoa whoa
whoa because in my mind you're taking satellite images you're not sending scientists out with a
tape measure? Well no you're doing both right. Thankfully we don't need to send a scientist
to the Amazon with a ruler and tell them not to come back until they've measured every tree. Detailed calculations can be scaled up using satellite images and a price assigned
for the job the living forest is doing. Red is far from the only scheme to put a price
on nature in this way. At the recent UN climate conference, countries agreed a rule book to govern
the trade of what are known as carbon credits. Tina Stege represented the Marshall Islands as
part of the negotiations, a group of low-lying atolls they're one of the most vulnerable
countries to the effects of climate change. Basically what you have is countries that produce
quite a bit of carbon in their greenhouse gas emissions and then we have lesser developed
nations, or nations like mine, who have really very few emissions. And there is a market where
those with more can put money into those with less. This basically means countries which have forests
that store more carbon than the nation produces can be paid by richer nations to offset a bit
of their carbon emissions too. The idea is that everyone has to become carbon neutral so how do
we do that? We have to reduce emissions ourselves but what happens if we can't do that fast enough.
Should we be paying someone else to reduce if they can go faster than us? So the idea is that all
of us have to get to the end point, let's pay those that can move the fastest. I want to take you somewhere this idea is already taking root. Jordan can you guess where this is? That is the beautiful sound of summer in Belfast city centre right? Sadly not. It's Gabon on the west coast of Africa. Right now I'm stood up at the Raponda Walker Arboretum. It is located at Akanda. We call it the Wood of the Giant that is another name. Standing in the shade of these giants is journalist Gloria Bivigou. How sort of wide are they? Wide? I mean if you tried to hug one now, how far do your arms go around the trunk? I shall give a hug to the
tree. Go on, give it a go for me. OK, these trees! Right now I'm under a big tree and it's very big.
When I try to give a hug I can't even embrace them. And people call us tree huggers. Well a whopping 80%
of Gabon is covered in forest just like this. And it's recently become the first African country
to receive payment to protect its rainforest as part of a UN-backed deal. Norway has agreed to pay Gabon $150 million over 10 years for these forests to absorb carbon dioxide from
their emissions. It could be just in time. Gloria says forests are important to the people of Gabon. It's like it's part of their culture. They grew up around the forest what is inside the forest can even be used for health. Forest plants are used to treat malaria, stomach pain and other illnesses. But Gabon is developing, its population growing. The government itself is willing to build for example more hospitals, more schools, more houses - many for the poor ones and I think if you want to
develop you go to a place who is not inhabited and maybe they will be tempted to destroy our forest. Of course from a climate perspective the hope is that Gabon can use the money from Norway to help it develop while it protects its forests allowing them to keep locking away carbon emissions. But it's not clear there are any requirements on where, or how these millions of dollars should be
spent. Norway paid Gabon it was in June, $17 million. Right now the government hasn't said what they have done with this money. I even think that some of the local communities don't
know anything about this money. I heard about this money from
Norway. This news warmed my heart because we are fighting every day
to try to preserve our environment. Given to realities that are frightening as
the sea is advancing in leaps and bounds. We've heard about this money through the media
but we don't know if we are going to receive it. The forest is a great wealth for us. It is
from the forest that we eat, breathe and live. So you just don't know how that money is going to
be spent at all? I can't tell you, I really can't tell. Since Gabon received this money we've not
heard anything from them. Now there's no evidence Gabon is doing anything bad with this money.
The government's say they're putting together a plan to invest it in ways to tackle climate
change - there are just no details available yet. Kevin Conrad says from a climate perspective it
doesn't actually matter what they spend it on. If you try to micromanage from the beginning
and attach too many strings to every dollar it creates so much friction that countries
give up and don't even want to engage. So we've got to flip it, we've got to have trust
but we've got to have trust with transparency. It's the same kind of thing they were doing with
the Iran and the nuclear right you've got to trust and then you've got to be able to verify and
that is the way we can move at pace and at scale. So in Gabon they're in the dark about how the
money is being spent. Outsiders worry about whether the trees may be cut down. On that point there is a check. Countries have to report to the UN every couple of years about what they're doing. These reports are public and independently reviewed. So think about it this way let's assume Gabon
gets that money and wastes it. Now next year what will happen there will be no money going to
stop deforestation and deforestation rises again. So Gabon now sees that it is in breach of
its agreement so Gabon understands that it has to put money in the right place if it
wants to keep this payment system coming. Beyond the detail of what was agreed by Norway
and Gabon there are wider criticisms of putting a price on nature. Here's the British writer and activist George Monbiot talking about it at a public lecture. The pricing, the valuation
the monetisation, the financialisation of nature. In the name of saving it. Oh sorry did I say nature? We don't call it that anymore. It's now called natural capital and ecological processes are
called ecosystem services because of course they exist only to service. And hills, forests, rivers, I hope you don't call them that anymore that's terribly outdated terms - they are
now called green infrastructure. I love a good walking green infrastructure. He's saying trying to put a price on nature is like trying to compare apples and pears. Or apples and a supernova, apples and your best friend's smile, apples and a developing country's chance to grow. To him it just doesn't work. Tina Stege from the Marshall Islands can see where he's coming from. Nature is your home. I don't know if you put a value on that in the Marshalls. We don't sell land. You inherit land as part of your family, as part of a larger clan. Those sales if they do happen, and they're very rare and quite fraught because you're not selling just a piece of property, it's
a heritage of which many, many people take part. But to protect that heritage Tina thinks
the world needs practical solutions. To some extent you know we're in a world that has put a price on nature, that exploits nature. And living within that world we have to decide how best to essentially make sure that nature is protected and that some of that benefit of that activity in fact supports our people. If carbon credits are going to be traded there should be a rule book to set out how it can be done fairly. Folks, countries, businesses are either trading credits already or looking to buy credits. It's happening and what we need to do is make sure that it's happening in
a principled and controlled way with you know the proper safeguards in place. And that is on us to make sure that those protections are there. If we don't do it who's going to do it? It needs to be those whose survival is at stake. So at the UN's climate conference in Glasgow last year Tina and a group of other representatives from the small island developing states came together to try and add what she calls "guard rails" to the agreement. That includes making sure that there's no double counting when a trade is done. You can't have a carbon copy of your carbon credits promising both Norway and say Japan that the same patch of forest is offsetting both of their emissions. We also fought very hard to put in something that we call overall mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. That means some credits taken off the table. They can't all be sold to offset big emitters. Total emissions will have to keep reducing, rather than just being moved around. The third principle is something called a share of proceeds for adaptation. So some of those credits are also supposed to go into what is the adaptation fund so that countries like mine actually
can have some access to funds that we need to just survive. Why is all this necessary? Because carbon credits aren't new. They've been traded for years. What's happening now is an attempt to formalise what has recently been a wild west. There is clearly risk of carbon colonialism. One is carbon credits are stolen from developing countries before they know what they have. What do you mean by stolen, how on earth can you steal a carbon credit? You steal it by taking it out of a developing country without the developing countries approval and that's happening. I'll give you an example. In Papua New Guinea we have some guys from America who are in Papua New Guinea telling the landowners they're going to give them 30% of the profits of whatever
they sell the carbon for. Now anyone who knows how to run a business knows that profits are largely
manufactured right, so their profits can be as high or low as they want and these credits are being
sold and the government didn't even know anything about it. They weren't there to protect the
communities they weren't there to actually assess that it was a fair transaction and this is what's
going on with many of these voluntary projects. That's crazy. Well it's happening at scale all over
the world and you know companies are buying them. You'll have all these companies going
"we're carbon neutral with all these voluntary credits" and I keep
saying look you're trading in stolen goods. So far we've largely been talking
about governments paying each other to protect natural resources. But of course there's a whole other side to this equation. Two-thirds of the economy is private sector so all if you look at the impacts on nature two-thirds of them are coming from the corporate world. Now if we don't explain to the corporate world, "look these are your impacts" how are they gonna ever figure out what is the right thing to do. Enter Pavan Sukhdev. You met him at the start of the program. He's the
one who calculates businesses environmental impact. Take Sweden's largest forestry company. About 20% of their land is conservation forest and they allow people access to their forests for you know gathering mushrooms and bilberries and lingonberries and all
the stuff that grows there and it's free. Not only are people given a helping hand with
their winter baking the trees also capture carbon dioxide as they grow. So they're doing a number of public positive goods which are not being calculated at all and when
they did that calculation, we did that for them, they found out that they were not just
a little machine that makes 1.1 billion Swedish kroner payer for his shareholder,
the government, but actually it makes something more like nine to ten billion dollars if you
account for all of these positive public values. It's good for companies to recognise
the value of all of their behaviour. But to drive change it needs to show up on the
bottom line and that's where putting a price on nature really plays a role. An investor knows that her investment in this carbon emitting company could bite her really hard at some point so she needs some comfort okay, something's being done about this, what's the company doing
about this, are they covering their emissions. Money gets our attention, we know that. We're never going to be able to put an exact value on nature, it's priceless. But using money as a proxy for nature's value could get us to act. This is far from the perfect solution but who says it has to be. Didn't you say that
exact line in another program? Yep. We made another program about giving nature
legal rights and in that we kind of discussed giving dolphins the rights to sue us or you know
giving a river legal standing in a courtroom could help us reframe our
relationship with nature, help us think about it in a different way than just
you know a landscape that can do things for us. What relationship do you think this idea, giving nature a monetary value creates? Well I guess it depends whether you speak to lawyers or you speak
to economists. So a lawyer will tell you you need to sue in order to succeed and that's sort of
the stick and I would say you need a carrot. Humans respond to both incentives and you need to
use both in a very tactful way. We prefer to use start with an incentive and if the incentive is
being misused or breached then you use the stick. That's all we've got time for this week. Thanks to the whole team, researcher Natasha Fernandez, producer Darin Graham, series producer Alex Lewis
and Graham Puddifoot who made it all sound lovely.
