Tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet and play a vital role in regulating levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Deforestation is a major cause of increasing levels of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and various efforts have been made, with little success, to curtail the activities of loggers and ranchers who slash and burn vast areas of tropical forest each year.
Now Guyana, a South American country on the Atlantic coast north of Brazil, has entered into an agreement with Norway to keep its tropical forests intact in return for a cash payment. Each year Norway will make a payment to Guyana provided the tropical forests are not destroyed and Guyana will use the money on a range of sustainable projects. In 2011 some $40million is being transferred and the money is being used to install solar panels on houses of indigenous people, to link remote communities to the internet and for other sustainable projects in the area of health, education and business. The total amount of money to be transferred will be calculated on the basis of how successful Guyana is in preventing deforestation but will run into hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 5 years.
This initiative could provide a template for other countries in the developed world to recognize the priceless services that rain forests provide to the entire world. It can also assist poor countries such as Guyana to make it more profitable to keep the forests intact rather than to cut them down.
Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the Environmental Protection Agency has published its forecast for greenhouse gas emissions up to 2020. The emissions projections are calculated on the basis of the best available economic forecast. Because of the economic slowdown Ireland will be able to meet its commitments under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol for the 5-year period from 2008 to 2012. However it will not be able to meet commitments made under the EU Commission’s Energy and Climate Package which commit member states to legally binding emission limits up to 2020. Even using the best scenario the annual limits will be breached by 2016 and could amount to 8.8 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020. If the economy recovers faster than predicted then the breach could be even higher than that.
The figures show that we should not rely on an economic recession to meet our climate change obligations. Instead, we should use this time to develop and implement a new energy strategy that is not dependent on imported fossil fuel. Fortunately we have the natural resources of wind, wave and tide to free us completely from the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry. Using a combination of wind power and pumped water storage we can eliminate our fossil fuel bill of over six billion euro each year. If our new Government has the foresight and courage of its predecessors, who built the hydro –electric station at Ardnacrusha in the 1920s as the country took its first steps into independence, then we, like Guyana, could become an example for the world.
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