Saving forests? Take a leaf from insurance industry's book
A group of environmental scientists, including Environment Institute member , say a problem-ridden economic model designed to slow deforestation can be improved by applying key concepts from the insurance industry.
REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is a UN-promoted scheme that allows countries to trade in carbon credits to keep forests intact. It is mainly targeted at developing nations where deforestation and exploitation are a major threat.
[caption id="attachment_3904" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Professor Corey Bradshaw"][/caption]
In a , ecology researchers from Australia and South Africa argue that REDD projects can suffer from three major problems. They have proposed strengthening the scheme by using insurance policies and premiums, creating a new scheme known as iREDD.
"The idea of paying a nation to protect its forests in exchange for carbon pollution offsets can potentially reduce overall emissions by keeping the trees alive, and ensure a lot of associated biodiversity gets caught up in the conservation process," says Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the 成人大片's Environment Institute and a senior author of the paper.
Professor Bradshaw and colleagues from James Cook University and the University of Pretoria have suggested using a form of REDD 'insurance policy' (iREDD) to avoid these problems.
iREDD involves the buyer and seller together assessing the risk in a forest conservation project, agreeing on that risk and then purchasing an insurance policy scaled to that risk.
REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is a UN-promoted scheme that allows countries to trade in carbon credits to keep forests intact. It is mainly targeted at developing nations where deforestation and exploitation are a major threat.
[caption id="attachment_3904" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Professor Corey Bradshaw"][/caption]
In a , ecology researchers from Australia and South Africa argue that REDD projects can suffer from three major problems. They have proposed strengthening the scheme by using insurance policies and premiums, creating a new scheme known as iREDD.
"The idea of paying a nation to protect its forests in exchange for carbon pollution offsets can potentially reduce overall emissions by keeping the trees alive, and ensure a lot of associated biodiversity gets caught up in the conservation process," says Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the 成人大片's Environment Institute and a senior author of the paper.
Professor Bradshaw and colleagues from James Cook University and the University of Pretoria have suggested using a form of REDD 'insurance policy' (iREDD) to avoid these problems.
iREDD involves the buyer and seller together assessing the risk in a forest conservation project, agreeing on that risk and then purchasing an insurance policy scaled to that risk.
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