January 2005 z KERALA CALLING
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contain 50 per cent carbon, that is 5
tonnes per hectare of carbon in one year.
Such carbon projects could potentially
recover habitat on millions of hectares of
heavily populated forest and farmlands.
This would bring social, economic, and
local environmental benefits to hundreds
of thousands, and potentially millions, of
poor rural people in the developing world.
According to the researchers, there are
126 million hectares (311 million acres)
of low-yielding crop and pastureland.
Converting some of these areas to higher-
yielding agro forestry would sequester five
to 50 tons of carbon per hectare per year.
Rehabilitating dry forests in India could
double sequestration from 27 to 55 tons
of carbon yearly for every hectare of dry
B. Harikumar
Ideas are like dreams. Unbelievably
romantic. And, such one is carbon
trading – an idea that lays its
foundation on ‘tena thyektena bhunjeeta’
(earn by giving).
Born in the 1997 World Earth
Summit held at Kyoto, Japan, this dream-
child can make miracles on society if
practised rightly.
The convention, participated by 160
countries of the world, was to negotiate
binding limitations on greenhouse gases
for the developed nations pursuant to the
objective of the Framework Convention
on Climate Change of 1992.
The outcome was the Kyoto Protocol,
in which the developed nations agreed to
limit their greenhouse gas emissions,
relative to the levels emitted in 1990 or
pay a price to those that do. At this point
comes the carbon trading.
The idea was to make developed
countries pay for their wild ways with
emissions while at the same time
monetarily rewarding countries with good
behaviour in this regard. Since developing
countries can start with clean
technologies, they will be rewarded by
those stuck with ‘dirty’ ones. This system
poises to become a big machine for
partially transferring wealth from wealthy,
industrialised countries to poor,
undeveloped countries.
Say a company in India can prove it
has prevented the emission of x-tonnes
of carbon