Ecuador, your global utilities provider

Paying for rainforest services is a logical step

The Yasuní rain forest reserve in Ecuador is one million hectares of the most biodiversity territory on the planet. There are less than three months left to keep it that way.

That’s because underneath the Yasuní reserve lie nearly a billion barrels worth of oil.

Photo: www.amazoniaporlavida.org

Last year, in a revolutionary approach to preserving what’s left of our planet, the Ecuadorean government proposed to keep the oil in the ground if the international community was willing to fork out half of the money Ecuador would get if it actually exploited the oil field. That amount was calculated at 350 million dollars a year for ten years.

Worryingly, the deadline for other countries to commit to saving Yasuní runs out in December with hardly any funding in sight. By the beginning of next year oil companies could be staking claims to the underground wealth of Ecuador.

That would be disastrous for the natural habitat of thousands of species of flora and fauna, not to mention the indigenous communities that live in the reserve, some of whom have no contact with the outside world.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Past experience in Ecuador has proven that oil companies aren’t exactly beneficial to the environment. The damage in pollution caused by Chevron-Texaco, which dumped 18.5 billion gallons of highly carcinogenic toxic waste into unlined pits, swamps, streams, and rivers over a 28-year period has been calculated at 16.2 billion dollars.

Oxfam calls it the “environmental crime of the century.” So understandably the communities that live in the Yasuní reserve – and sane people in general– are hoping that the exploitation can be avoided.

What makes Yasuní so special? Here’s a statistic. On one acre of this pristine rain forest there exist, on average, more tree species than in the entire United States. It’s a tropical haven, where flora and fauna took refuge during the last Ice Age, and which today hosts the world’s greatest biodiversity. It’s home to jaguars, giant otters, woolly monkeys and no fewer than 630 types of birds – including the rare harpy eagle – and 25 species of endangered mammals.

But it’s not just an unusually high species count that makes this a place worth saving. The world’s rainforests hold tight tens of billions of tonnes of carbon in vegetation and soils, and continue to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere even when the have reached the stage of old and mature ecosystems.

As they breathe they pump out some 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere every day, influencing global rainfall patterns. Deforestation and drought go hand in hand.

"Rainforests are like a giant global utility right now, like a water utility or a power station, that's providing a service we're not paying for," Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, told the Guardian recently. "When you don't pay your electricity bill, you get cut off. We should recognize that these countries [such as Ecuador] shouldn't provide us with a service for free."

That’s what makes the Yasuní plan so attractive. Paying 350 million a year now, will save us billions in the future spent on carbon sequestration and water desalination.

Of course the plan has weaknesses as well. A serious drawback, according to the Yasuní Green Gold non-governmental organization, is that the government’s proposal leaves open the possibility to return the money and exploit the oil field anyway.

Another weakness is that local Yasuní bodies were not invited to participate in the proposal or in any future planning, casting doubt on how much money would be channeled into the development of much-needed local alternative economic activities.

But these issues, and others, can be hammered out in a round of negotiations. The important thing is that rich countries show willingness to embrace this innovative way of preserving our global resources.

In fact, according to the Swedish-born businessman and activist Johan Eliasch, paying other countries not to cut down their forests is the best way to fight climate change.

In a report released last week, Eliasch, who is also special advisor the British prime minister on things environmental, argues that a global carbon market could pay the tropical rainforests' owners, or people living in them to save and maintain the trees, thereby cutting emissions. He himself has bought several thousand acres of rainforest in Brazil and urges others to do the same.

Deforestation contributes about 17% of global carbon emissions, the third biggest source behind power generation and industry, and bigger than either China or the United States, says the report.

Obviously there are concerns about spending money this way. Especially in countries like Ecuador, where corruption is often out of control. Therefore such a plan needs to be executed with full oversight and involving the people whose lives are directly affected.

The time to act is now and saving the Yasuní reserve would be a magnificent first step down a new road of combating climate change.

So far though, only a few European countries have shown interest in the scheme and only Spain has officially committed. The fear is, that as the economic global downturn sets in, countries will be even less inclined to spend on the environment. But not acting now means that sooner or later we’ll be presented with a horrendous utility bill. And getting cut off is not an option.