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CLIMATE CHANGE: Cuba Wants to Enter the Carbon Market

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Dec 14 2004 (IPS) - Cuba could enter the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon market if it is able to keep up the current pace of reforestation, through which a full 30 percent of the island’s territory would be covered with forests ten years from now.

Forests serve as “carbon sinks” by absorbing carbon dioxide – one of the main greenhouse gases – from the earth’s atmosphere, making reforestation one of the least costly ways to fight global warming and climate change.

The estimated cost of global warming caused by greenhouse gases (which trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere) is two percent of global gross domestic product.

Through the buying and selling of carbon quotas, industrialised nations can work towards meeting their targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by financing reforestation programmes or projects to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources in developing countries – which have no targets – and using the credits earned themselves.

The 30 industrialised countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol – which enters into force on Feb. 16, 2005 – are obliged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels 5.2 percent lower than in 1990, by deadlines that range from 2008 to 2012.

Once the protocol goes into effect, the international carbon market will enter into full operation. It is already generating completely new businesses and professions, like carbon brokerages and consultancies and emissions verification services.

These alternative strategies, known as the “flexible mechanisms” of the Kyoto Protocol, make it possible for the wealthy developed countries and their industries to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions without necessarily doing so “at home”.

According to specialists in Cuba, the Caribbean island nation has developed the databases and trained the personnel needed to establish reforestation projects, but has yet to submit any concrete proposals for entering this new market.

Some believe that the Kyoto Protocol could generate significant business opportunities involving the development of cleaner, more efficient technologies and the promotion of renewable energy sources.

Cuban specialists, however, are less enthusiastic, and believe that the carbon market is not a real solution to environmental problems, but rather a negotiating tool.

“Global emissions will remain the same,” said Arnaldo Brito, head researcher at the Cuban Forestry Research Institute.

Moreover, Brito told the Cuban press, the necessary negotiations will not be simple, and will require a precise economic analysis to ensure that the country ends up winning out, instead of losing.

Some non-governmental organisations have been even more harshly critical of the carbon trading strategy.

Environmental groups participating in the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-10), currently underway in Buenos Aires, Argentina, believe that the emerging carbon market has become a false solution to the climate change crisis.

“Powerful interests have appropriated the debate on climate change and are steering it towards the free market and corporate interests, putting the planet in danger,” said the Indigenous Environmental Network.

According to official figures, Cuba’s greenhouse gas emissions in 1990 totalled close to 13.8 million tons, while in 1994, the country actually registered a net absorption of 2.6 million tons.

The island became a net “absorber”, as opposed to an emitter, as a result of the grave economic crisis and 45 percent drop in production that followed the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, its main trade partner.

The impact of the crisis was felt especially hard in key economic sectors like the sugar industry and others that represent high emission levels, like electrical power generation, the iron and steel industry, construction, transportation and nickel mining and processing.

However, a specialised study concluded that this reduction in emissions was also partly due to a more efficient energy policy and better use of national energy sources.

In addition to a series of measures adopted on the energy front, a new programme has been designed for development of the forestry sector up through the year 2015. Presented this year, the plan foresees an increase in forest cover from 23.4 percent to 29.3 percent of the national territory.

Cuba’s total forested area is currently 2,572,000 hectares, and should grow to 3,254,700 hectares by 2015.

To help achieve this goal, Cuba’s socialist government has granted the forestry sector control over land holdings formerly used for growing sugar cane, coffee and other crops or for cattle farming, but with extremely low yields because of unsuitable soil conditions.

The plans include planting fruit and timber-yielding trees on more than half a million hectares of land controlled by the sugar industry, which was scaled back in 2002 to produce no more than four million tons of sugar a year.

Reforestation in the developing South as a means of creating carbon “sinks” is a profitable strategy for the nations of the industrialised North, according to René Castro, a former Costa Rican minister of environment and energy who is now a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

A study by Castro published in October by the UNDP shows that it is much more costly to create carbon sinks in the North than in the South.

The cost of planting trees in the United States to absorb greenhouse gases is roughly 100 dollars per ton of carbon, while it would cost half as much in Costa Rica, the study revealed.

This fact was also stressed at the COP-10 in Buenos Aires.

According to the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, the flexible mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol have allowed the countries of the North to evade the emission reduction targets they are committed to achieving by investing in projects in the nations of the South.

These projects can include large-scale tree plantations, meant to serve as low-cost carbon sinks.

The WRM opposes large-scale monoculture tree plantations, because of their detrimental impact on local ecosystems and native flora and fauna.

Because it is an island, Cuba is among the countries most vulnerable to the climate change effects caused by global warming, such as the rise in sea level, more powerful hurricanes, and frequent, prolonged droughts.