English Abstract This report aims to determine the function of tropical
forestry in the climate and other global conventions. Because the Clean
Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol is the major instrument linking
the developing countries (hence the tropical forest) to the climate issue,
CDM will be a major focus. First, the general feasibility of plantations as
carbon storage fasilities (i.e sinks) is examined. Formal constraints
concerning permanence, leakage and baseline calculation are recognized.
Furthermore, the external effects in the tropics are deemed predominanatly
negative. Plantations included under CDM as sinks may be a hindrance for
achieving sustainable development and may contradict other international
conventions such as CBD and CCD. Subsequently, the report explores two
alternative implementations of forests in the mitigation of GHGs. Both are
based on output financing. The first concerns using tropical plantations
are sources of renewable (biomass) energy or energy saving material. A
framework is developed for operating this 'zero pollution' contribution to
the global climate, which is compatible with the CDM criteria, in CDM.
Doing so, no substantial need exists any more to operate CDM through the
sinks concept and with that, key problems surrounding the sink concept are
avoided. Second, a multi-convention global facility is proposed to perserve
existing forests. The key pronciple her is that net fores benefit producing
countries recieve disbursements from net fores benefit consuming countries
on the basis of standing forest per hectare per year. The facility can not
be placed in the structure of CDM and disbursements may be based on several
global benefits next to carbon storage, such as safeguarding biodiversity,
preventing desrtification and preserving cultural
diversity.
