Cutting down trees can be good for forests, Mr Blair

In the run up to this week’s environment focused G8 meeting, ex UK premier Tony Blair has once more raised the topic of rich countries paying poor ones to preserve their forests.

Blair is working with a “business oriented” environmental NGO called The Climate Group and has put forward a number of recommendations to G8 leaders to achieve major cuts in their countries’ emissions by 2020. Key among them are measures to halt deforestation and forest degradation.

Prince Charles also backs the idea of the west funding tropical countries so they can protect rainforest from any form of development and limit or stop commercial exploitation by the timber sector. He launched the Prince’s Rainforest Project to help achieve these objectives.

But the trouble with these approaches is that they reinforce perceptions that the only way to protect forests is to preserve them in aspic and also that felling trees for timber is inherently a bad thing. In fact, of course, sustainable timber production has the potential to be an instrument for helping to preserve forests long term; providing a financial incentive to local populations for maintaining tree cover, rather than clearing land for agriculture or construction. At the same time, of course, commercial forestry provides a truly sustainable, low embodied energy construction and manufacturing material that locks in CO2 for generations.

The question is whether the timber and forestry industries can generate the willpower, unity of purpose and resources needed to get that message across to the opinion formers and decision makers. Perhaps the question they should be asking themselves, as the lobby for taking forest out of production gathers support and momentum, is whether they can they afford not to.