Translator: Nadja Nathan Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello. I'm going to start with a question.
And this is the question:
what has been the most important policy
in reducing carbon emissions over the last 10 years?
There have been plenty.
Now we're down to four, the top four.
In top slot is renewable energy, particularly wind and solar.
This is spreading throughout the world, it's getting more efficient every day.
It's not as efficient as number three, which is our hydro-power,
which has always been important but continues to be key.
And those two pale into insignificance when you compare it to number two
which is industrial gas emissions.
We are seeing fewer,
particularly of the exotic, most potent warming gases
being thrown into the atmosphere.
But actually the number one slot
is bigger than all those three combined,
- and this might be surprising to you -
It's protecting rainforest.
It will surprise you
because we don't often hear good news about it.
But it's what I want talk about today,
in particular, how we make sure over the next 10 years,
it remains just as important in our fight against climate change.
You will have seen, I expect, a rainforest talk before.
So, I'm going to get the extraordinary amphibian picture
out of the way early on.
(Laughter)
I'm not going to do biology, but I'll start with a bit of geography.
This is South America, we are zooming in.
We're going to a small village
on the western edge of the Amazon called Cutivireni.
And Cuti sits on the western edge
of the arc of deforestation of the Amazon.
So, this is basically where to the west you see degraded ex-forest,
and to the east you see the pristine habitat
the little fellow earlier would enjoy.
And the reason I want to tell you about Cutivireni
is because it is emblematic
of so many indigenous communities in the tropics.
Ten years ago, Cuti was 300 km from any chainsaws.
Then it was 30 km,
then 5 years ago, a gang of loggers walked into the village
and offered them 10,000 dollars for their 40 cedar trees.
Now, this was a tempting offer.
The community was suffering from malaria,
it had a very high levels of malnutrition.
and even though 250 dollars a tree,
for something that's probably worth 50 times that at least,
didn't seem like a good deal,
even though they could see from communities to the west
that loggers weren't the people you wanted to deal with
because it wouldn't end with the best trees;
they would try to lend money, put you into a position of debt bondage.
Even though they knew all these things, it was still very tempting
because, if you have a sick child, and they need to get to hospital,
that's 8 hours by boat away.
How do you pay for the fuel?
If you have as I say, 4 out 5 children suffering from malnutrition,
it's very difficult to think
how you are going to find the cash for that emergency bag of rice.
So, while it's easy to paint the loggers as a terrifying destructive force,
the real driver to deforestation here is poverty.
We can get rid of the logging gang very easily,
but their barrier to entry is so low,
there will be 20 more queuing up behind them.
The real issue instead is finding an alternative for a community
that's been dependent on the rainforest for absolutely everything for generations.
For a community that, in return,
it's been the best possible custodian of that rainforest.
Right up until the point when poverty and the pressures of change
means the last asset they have to sell is that forest.
This sort of piecemeal destruction, let's call it degradation,
is now the biggest threat facing the rainforest.
And that's partly because of the good news that I mentioned earlier.
So, one form of deforestation is actually in decline.
The clear cutting, industrial deforestation
that you'll all be familiar with
from so many terrific Greenpeace campaigns.
That is actually now starting to slow.
We are not out of the woods yet, but it's on the way out.
Because it's a commodity play, and this is important.
The reason that it was so easy to clear cut so much forest
is because we didn't care where our soya, or our palm, or our beef came from.
We didn't care, so long as it was cheap, and therefore, demand was there.
When demand starts to falter because we have terrific campaigns,
or because the Brazilian real goes through the roof,
or because, and this is the real key one,
because the U.S. starts making its own ethanol,
then you'll actually start to see rates of deforestation start to fall.
As I say, it's not over yet,
but we now know how, from the top down, to control this awful trade.
That does leave us with a problem though,
namely, what are going to do about the 260,000 acres we still lose every day?
The irony, of course, is that these are not acres lost every day,
these are individual trees.
But, and this is the shocking thing,
if we add it all up, degradation is actually destroying more rainforest
than any clear cutting, or any industrial deforestation today.
What it's actually doing is twice as much forest,
some studies even think it's four times as much,
so really it's a priority.
You would probably think that if we can sort out soya,
if we can sort out palm, or at least get towards that,
we can do something about this trade.
Surely, there must be 101 regulations to stop the illegal timber trade.
Surely, if you think about it,
roundwood timber is conspicuous enough that there must be a way to prevent this.
The funny thing is though, this is such a high value trade,
illegal loggers will always find a way of circumventing those regulations.
Let me tell you the most popular way of doing it at the moment.
Let's say you have a legal logging concession.
You're allowed to take wood out from there,
but you've used all the mahoganies and the cedars.
So what you do is you go to somewhere like Cutivireni,
you offer 250 dollars for a cedar tree,
chop it down, ship it back to your concession
- 100 miles away normally -
and then you forge the paperwork and send it on its way;
It's basically money laundering, but for logs.
What is really interesting though is that sometimes,
they don't just take the tree, they take the trunk,
they dig the thing up, and shift that 100 miles,
they dig a hole, pop it in there, pat it down,
and claim that this tree has always been there,
so, of course it must be legitimate.
Now, that sounds like a lot of work, I think you'll agree.
I mean this is 100% humidity, this is 100 miles.
And it is laborious stuff,
but it's no more laborious than planting, for example,
400 coca bushes in small patches around the rainforest.
So, when the marines fly over they don't actually see what's going on.
Then picking the leaves off these coca bushes,
putting them in a ditch - there's lines for the tarpaulin –
adding sulfuric acid,
maybe some caustic soda and some battery acid,
mixing it all up and forming the paste into blocks and shipping that 100 miles
to where you then recrystallize it
into something like cocaine hydrochloride.
This sound like going off in a tangent, but I promise you it's not.
There are so many similarities
between the cocaine trade and the illegal logging trade.
Not least, it's the same people, and often the same places,
who are running it.
It's also immensely profitable.
And if you look at the value that you can get
from taking cocaine from rainforest to retail,
it's pretty much the same mark-up
as you are going to get from doing the same with mahogany.
It's also though, and this is the key thing,
a trade that we've been very bad at stamping out,
and in fact, the hopeless success the governments have had
stamping out cocaine from the retail end,
is exactly why the only way you can do anything about illegal logging,
and the huge amount of forest degradation it causes,
is by doing it from the ground up, and let me explain why.
It's not like soya, It's not like palm,
it doesn't respond to the commodity controls from the top down.
This is a trade that, like it or not, is negotiated tree by tree,
in a muddy path somewhere in the rainforest.
It's informal, it's dispersed, it's - I suppose you can argue - local;
and this is the key thing.
And the local elements of this trade is where the solution lies.
What lies behind the Cool Earth's model, because at the end of the day,
often as not, a tree will be sold off to realise short term cash
for medicine, for fuel, for food.
And Cool Earth has come up with a way of offering an alternative to that.
Anyway, back to Cutivireni.
When the loggers came in 5 years ago,
the man that they were making that offer to is Cesar Bustamante.
You couldn't come across a more impressive individual.
Cesar is the chief of Cutivireni.
And he's a member of the Ashaninka Nation, which is Peru's largest indigenous group.
Through a huge stroke of luck,
Cesar was able to call on the advice of someone else.
This is Dilwyn Jenkins.
Now, Dilwyn, we tragically lost him last year, but he quite simply is
the most ballsy and affective anthropologist Peru will ever see.
He's been working with the Ashininka for 30 years,
and, as soon as he got this call,
which was within hours of the loggers turning up,
he said, "You should probably talk to Cool Earth,
they might be able to help.”
And we could, and I've got to say, not with anything particular clever.
What we did we sat down and said,
"How about we cobble together 8,000 dollars, we'll give you half now,
half in a year's time,
as long as you don't give in to the loggers
and you keep the trees standing.
Could we also ask two other things?
The first: could you form an association
so we have some thing rather than somebody to give the money to,
that has a committee that rotates?
It's not because we care at all what you do with the cash.
We just want everyone to have a say."
And the second commitment we asked, and this was a real stroke of luck,
"If it all goes well, in a year's time could you have a meeting
with your neighbours and just tell them what's been going on?"
As simple as that.
It was agreed and things went well.
So, money was spent on mosquito nets to address the malaria issue.
They put some money aside to have an emergency evacuation fund.
And most important of all, they invested in a cacao solar dryer,
which sounds terrific,
it's actually less impressive when you see it,
but it's a very important bit of kit
because what this is, while it looks like a shed without walls and a plastic roof,
it enables you to get your cacao beans
to just the right level of moisture content,
which means that they don't have mold,
they don't spoil, and you get a much much higher price for them.
And true to his word, Cesar also organized a meeting.
He said he had a much better idea; we are not going to have a meeting,
we are going to have a chotonka tournament.
Now, chotonka is a cross between volleyball and badminton, OK?
We'll all be playing it very soon.
(Laughter)
And Cesar put together the guest list,
and there were 14 teams from 8 different villages.
And it was a great success.
Lo and behold, at the start of the next year,
we didn't have just Cutivireni as a partner, we had 9 other villages.
And then next year, more chotonka, a pig raffle
- which is what it sounds like -
(Laughter)
more rainforest saved.
And it works out very well it seems.
So let's have a quick look at the impact on the communities.
Well, the key thing, and I can't underestimate how important this is,
incomes have risen by 70%
simply because of more solar cocoa dryers and the like and better access to markets.
Think what that does
when you have a logger coming into your village offering.
You're in a far better position to say no.
And what about the forest?
Well, Cool Earth only operates where, as you would expect,
the forest is under imminent risk.
Where within the next 18 months or so, we think it is going to be destroyed.
And where we are operating with the Ashininka in Peru
over the last 5 years, the canopy loss has been 29%.
The communities that were good enough to partner with Cool Earth, less than 1%,
which is a wonderful statistic to boast about.
But what's really exciting is that thanks to that chotonka,
these are neighbours, they are contiguous communities of rainforest.
The result, when you put that number into acres,
is 150,000 acres that is in the community's control.
But, it's actually well over 1,5 million acres
that is shielded by that community forest.
It is having a far bigger impact than we ever thought would be the case.
So that's great, but the best bit, and this really is the best bit,
is how little Cool Earth does.
We make small grants, we do small investments,
we find a helping hand,
but all the decisions are made on the ground by local people.
And this means that we don't have just to work
in three projects now in Peru, or indeed in Ecuador,
or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Papua New Guinea
where, incidentally, the sports day
is the most exciting canoe race you will ever see.
(Laughter)
We can work pretty much anywhere.
So we're now well on our way to having over a million acres
in the hands of indigenous communities.
And thanks to the tournaments that shielding will have 10 million acres.
This means Cool Earth, and I'll admit, we are small outfit,
are protecting more forest through this type of community partnership
than any NGO, than any government even.
And what's more, we can carry on growing.
Thanks to these tournaments, we are going to be doubling our size in 18 months.
Now, one of our favourite supporters
doesn't just think we're saving the rainforest,
he's actually, very kindly said that we're probably saving the world,
and of course, we would agree.
So, if there is one thing I am going to leave you with it is this:
next time you think about saving the rainforest
- I really do hope you are going to do it very soon –
forget about the tree frogs,
put your support instead
to find local people like those families in Cutivireni.
Because they'll always get the most out of keeping the rainforest safe,
but, boy, will we all benefit.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)