SinksWatch is an initiative of the World Rainforest Movement, hosted by the WRM's Northern Support Office and implemented by FERN. The aim of SinksWatch is to track and scrutinize carbon sequestration projects related to the Kyoto Protocol, and to highlight their threats to forests and other ecosystems, to forest peoples as well as to the climate. The focus of SinksWatch will be on tree plantation sinks projects, particularly in areas where land tenure and land use rights are in dispute.

SinksWatch advocates addressing the links between forests and climate change in a way that honours forests as a safeguard against the impacts of extreme weather events without justifying the continued, additional and permanent release of carbon from fossil fuel burning.

Credits from carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol will allow the continued and permanent release of carbon from fossil fuels in exchange for temporary storage of carbon in trees. Carbon sink credits thus increase the amount of carbon in the active carbon pool and only shift the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to future generations.

SinksWatch will scrutinize carbon sink projects, expose the flaws of including carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol’s accounting scheme and raise awareness about the consequences of ignoring the crucial differences between carbon stored in fossil fuels and carbon stored in trees:

• Carbon in fossil fuels barely interacts with the carbon in the atmosphere. It is locked away ‘safely’ from the active carbon pool and is stored permanently in fossil fuels. The main way that fossil fuel carbon enters the atmosphere is when humans choose to extract and burn fossil fuels. There is no reverse flow back into the fossil fuel carbon pool – at least not in the time scale relevant for the Kyoto Protocol discussions.

• Carbon stored in trees, forests and other ecosystems is in constant exchange with carbon in the atmosphere. It is part of the active carbon pool and is frequently released into the atmosphere through fires, insect outbreaks, decomposition, and respiration of plants as well as through logging and clearance for agriculture. Carbon storage in trees is thus only temporary.

Under the Kyoto Protocol accounting scheme, for every tonne of carbon that is stored in a tree, an equivalent tonne of carbon from fossil fuels can be released into the atmosphere.

The underlying assumption that ‘carbon is carbon’ ignores the different interactions of these carbon pools with the atmosphere – a crucial difference with regard to climate change.

The result is that, with every carbon sink credit issued under the Kyoto Protocol, there is an increase of carbon in the active carbon pool – the very pool, which shapes the global climate – even if for some time that overall increase is not apparent because the carbon is temporarily stored in a tree.

In addition to the underlying flaws of carbon sink credits, the Kyoto Protocol also gives the wrong incentives: The focus is on carbon sequestration, not carbon reservoirs: the faster a tree grows the more credits can be gained. This leads to an incentive for large-scale tree plantations. Examples of this perverse incentive are already evident.

The negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale tree plantations are well documented. Large-scale industrial tree plantations often generate poverty, increase inequity, affect food security, deplete water and soil resources, drastically reduce biological diversity, to mention but the most obvious impacts. They are also extremely prone to fires and insect outbreaks, further destabilizing an already insecure carbon store.

Planting trees for the purpose of carbon credits and carbon accounting in the Kyoto Protocol will not address the root causes of the global forest crisis. It also is not an effective way to tackle the pressing problem of climate change. On the contrary, carbon sink credits run the risk of exacerbating both the global forest crisis and climate change.