The Kyoto Protocol and Jakarta's regreening

Edward McMillan, Jakarta

It seems strange, but Jakarta may be in line to benefit handsomely from its lack of greenery. With tree cover accounting for just 10 percent of the city's surface area, Jakarta is one of the least vegetated cities on the planet. That has serious knock- on consequences for air quality, flooding and urban temperatures.

But it also represents a golden opportunity for remedial action -- which, thanks to the Kyoto Protocol, is exactly what Western governments and companies are desperate to try. Jakarta now finds itself in the remarkable position of not only being able to "re-green" itself at someone else's expense, but also being able to make a tidy profit in the process.

The key lies with efforts to tackle global warming. The Kyoto Protocol stipulates that by 2012 the industrialized nations should have reduced their carbon emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels. Many are on-track to miss this target by a wide margin, unwilling to impose the costly and politically-unpopular measures on energy utilities, industry and vehicle owners that would be necessary to cut carbon discharges by the requisite amount.

Help is at hand, however, in the form of "offsets". Under the Kyoto Protocol, nations and companies are able to claim credit for reducing other people's carbon emissions. This makes sense: Greenhouse gases mix uniformly in the atmosphere, so it doesn't really matter where particular abatement projects take place.

For example, an industrialized nation could invest in a hydropower plant in the developing world (where land and labor are cheap) and count the carbon savings of such "clean" electricity generation towards its own national carbon quota. Or a utility company operating in Europe that emits millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide each year could become "carbon neutral" simply by planting thousands of trees in Asia to absorb its emissions.

Four million hectares of such "offset plantations" have now been established, and the figure is growing daily. The International Automobile Association, for instance, is planting 30,000 trees in Mexico to offset the 5,500 tonnes of carbon emitted annually by Formula One car racing.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is planting 3,000 hectares of eucalyptus forest in Tasmania in order to yield 130,000 tonnes of carbon credits. The Dutch government is investing heavily in a 20,000 hectare poplar plantation in Romania. General Motors has planted over one million trees since 1990 to partially compensate for its carbon emissions.

And this is where Jakarta really has something to offer, because it boasts distinct advantages over such rural forestation schemes. For a start, planting trees in an urban environment is much more cost-effective in carbon terms than planting them in the countryside. Urban trees not only absorb carbon dioxide directly, they also provide buildings with shade and reduce urban temperatures through leaf evaporation.

Just a 10 percent increase in tree cover can reduce a city's air temperature by up to half a degree Celsius. That means less air-conditioning, which, in turn, means lower electricity demand and lower carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. A government or company seeking to offset its carbon emissions could plant half the number of trees in Jakarta that it would have to in a rural area.

Jakarta is also in desperate need of trees for reasons unrelated to global warming. The United Nations estimates that there are six thousand premature deaths in Jakarta each year due to air pollution. Suitably-planted urban trees could bring this number down substantially by removing particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from the air -- by as much as ten per cent according to some studies.

Imagine the public relations value to a company of being able to claim it was actively saving lives by re-greening a city: An opportunity not offered by planting trees in the countryside.

And here Jakarta's urban desert actually gives it an advantage over other cities. There are, after all, far more opportunities to plant new trees in a city with just 10 percent tree cover than in cities that are not so denuded.

Such an "urban offset" project has not been attempted before: Jakarta would be a world first. Of course, difficulties would have to be overcome. In order to count as legitimate offsets under the Kyoto Protocol, carbon reductions have to be verifiable and measured against a baseline "business-as-usual" scenario, assessing how many tonnes of carbon would have been emitted in the absence of the offset project.

Calculating such a baseline for a rapidly-growing and evolving city like Jakarta would be tricky. But that's exactly the sort of challenge the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund has been set up to address, and the fact that Jakarta already has an air-quality monitoring network in place will simplify the process.

Carbon offsetting is a growing business. The capitalization of carbon funds worldwide has increased by $675 million in the past year and a half alone. And yet viable offset projects are in such short supply that the International Emissions Trading Association estimates that just 5 percent of this new money has so far been invested.

Jakarta desperately needs trees. And, it seems, the governments and companies of industrialized nations desperately need cities like Jakarta to offset their carbon emissions. Such symmetry spells good news. This could be Jakarta's opportunity to reverse years of environmental neglect and finally re-green its urban desert.

The writer is a British freelance writer based in Jakarta.