U.S. seen open to forestry offsets in climate fight

As it inches toward forming climate policy, the United States is more open to attempting to slow global warming through investments in tropical forests than the European Union is, a broker that works on forestry deals said.

"There's been this kind of predisposition against forestry on the part of the EU," Ross MacWhinney, a carbon markets analyst at energy brokers Evolution Markets LLC said at the Reuters Global Environment Summit in New York.

"But I think that in the U.S. legislators are looking at forestry as a lower-cost option."

Clearance of forests to create farmland in developing countries emits nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, according to the U.N.'s climate science panel.

Trees store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when they grow and release it when they rot or are burned.Ahead of a U.N. meeting late next year in Copenhagen at which delegates from around the world will attempt to agree to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, policy makers are increasingly looking at ways to make tropical forest preservation a tradable commodity.

Developing countries like Brazil and Indonesia stand to earn billions of dollars from trading carbon credits if the meeting results in forestry deal.

Movement in the United States, the developed world's largest greenhouse gas polluter, toward forestry offsets ahead of the Copenhagen meeting could increase the odds the world agrees to such a system.

"Everybody is going to stand up and take notice of that" if the United States embraces forestry projects, said MacWhinney.

It would also be dramatic since the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, on which carbon credits have traded since 2005, allows some trade in reforestation credits under the Kyoto pact, but not in forest preservation, also known as avoided deforestation.

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Source: Reuters