MAKING FOREST PRESERVATION PROFITABLE

Forests help to regulate the Earth’s water cycle, sustain a great diversity of plant and animal species, and directly support more than 750 million people. Yet each year over 32 million acres of tropical forests are lost. Destroying forests not only releases carbon into the atmosphere through burning and decomposition, but also removes their ability to serve as carbon sinks – natural reservoirs of carbon. Tropical deforestation represents around 15 percent of global carbon emissions – more than all the world’s cars, trucks buses, trains and airplanes put together.

The Clinton Foundation is working to make it more profitable for countries to preserve forests than to cut them down, create robust systems to measure the carbon content of forests, and actively involve local communities in the preservation of their forests.

THE CLINTON HUNTER DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE

In both Rwanda and Malawi, the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (CHDI) instituted a large-scale carbon sequestration program with local farmers by growing and planting a large number of trees across the region. CHDI is facilitating the sale of the credits for the carbon stored within these trees on the world market, thereby providing enough income to sustain the project and increase the income of the farmers who maintain the trees. It is estimated that these trees have contributed to saving approximately 450,000 tons of carbon.

Since its launch, thousands of farmers have planted over 4 million trees under different planting systems such as boundary planting, woodlots, and fruit orchards.

Learn more about CHDI’s forestry work.

THE CLINTON CLIMATE INITIATIVE

The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) is working with government partners including Indonesia, Cambodia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Guyana to develop projects that enable local communities to be compensated for preserving and regrowing forests. Most developing countries lack the technology and tools to track emissions and estimate forests’ carbon absorption and storage abilities. CCI is helping partner countries including Guyana, Tanzania, and Kenya to design and implement their own national measurement, reporting, and verification systems, giving unprecedented accounting rigor to national forest inventories as well as to individual projects.

Learn more about CCI’s Global Carbon Measurement Program.