Not to Sink: Bringing the Tropical Fores into the Climate and Other Global Conventions, without Needing the 'Sink' concept

First, the general feasibility of plantations as carbon storage fasilities (i.e sinks) is examined. Formal constraints concerning permanence, leakage and baseline calculation are recognized. Furthermore, the external effects in the tropics are deemed predominanatly negative. Plantations included under CDM as sinks may be a hindrance for achieving sustainable development and may contradict other international conventions such as CBD and CCD.

Subsequently, the report explores two alternative implementations of forests in the mitigation of GHGs. Both are based on output financing. The first concerns using tropical plantations are sources of renewable (biomass) energy or energy saving material. A framework is developed for operating this 'zero pollution' contribution to the global climate, which is compatible with the CDM criteria, in CDM. Doing so, no substantial need exists any more to operate CDM through the sinks concept and with that, key problems surrounding the sink concept are avoided.

Second, a multi-convention global facility is proposed to preserve existing forests. The key principle here is that net fores benefit producing countries receive disbursements from net fores benefit consuming countries on the basis of standing forest per hectare per year. The facility can not be placed in the structure of CDM and disbursements may be based on several global benefits next to carbon storage, such as safeguarding biodiversity, preventing desertification and preserving cultural diversity.