...there now appears to be a concerted effort by members of the biofuel industry and many of its proponents to equate climate change emissions solely with fossil fuel emissions, to disregard or downplay emissions from the destruction of forests, grasslands, peatlands and previously diverse agricultural systems with high-biodiversity, and thereby suggest that anything that reduces fossil fuel burning must be good for climate.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a more extreme version of the ‘shifting the burden’ archetype...whereby the symptomatic solution of fossil fuel carbon accounting takes precedence over the fundamental solution of addressing full lifecycle emissions. Simply put, in the name of reducing fossil fuel burning, global warming is actually being accelerated. This new and dangerous development requires a clear response from all climate change activists and means that we need to revisit our own thoughts regarding fossil fuel carbon versus biological carbon...

The amount of carbon which is added to the atmosphere is the difference between the quantity emitted and that absorbed by ecosystems. With current estimates of just over 50% of global emissions being absorbed by ecosystems, clearly sinks as well as emissions are equally important issues.

At present, carbon trading provides funding for 'afforestation and reforestation', which generally means monoculture tree-plantations which often have a devastating impact on environment and local communities. Under the Kyoto protocol, no carbon finance is available for protecting existing forests. The Coalition for Rainforest Nations aims to raise large sums of funds for conserving tropical forests, much of it via carbon trading mechanisms. Their most recent proposal...aims for a combination between emissions trading and a separate fund. New funding would be for protecting existing forests only, though Clean Development Mechanism funding for afforestation and reforestation would also be expanded. The trading mechanism would be introduced after 2012 and would be in addition to emission reduction targets by Annex 1 nations.

To take a real-life example, the province of Sarawak on Borneo has been, and continues to be cleared, for oil-palm plantation monoculture and hydro-electric dams

The rate of primary forest destruction in Brazil increased from 2.729 million hectares per year in the 1990s to 3.466 million hectares between 2000 and 2006. Continued tropical deforestation ('business as usual') is widely expected to release between 87 and 130 billion tonnes of carbon between now and 2107.

Quoted from Almuth Ernsting and Deepak Rughani, "HEADING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION: Critical Ingredients for Stabilising Climate