The Kyoto Protocol and Jakarta's regreening

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.