Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Carbon credits to rescue a Madagascar forest?
Can credits traded in the world’s financial centers stop local farmers in Madagascar from burning up a rain forest filled with lemurs and other life found nowhere else in the world?
The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society is working with the government of Madagascar to sell about 9.5 million tonnes of carbon credits to help save the Makira Forest, which contains 22 species of lemurs, hundreds of bird species and thousands of plants. Many of those species are found nowhere else on the planet.
”We want to create incentives so people don’t deforest,” Ray Victurine, the finance expert at WCS, told me.
The 9.5 million tonnes is the amount of carbon dioxide stored in existing trees WSC and Madagascar estimate can be saved over 30 years by stopping people from chopping them down.
Magical Madagascar worth saving
Scientists have joined forces to save magical Madagascar by using a new method they hope to apply to other hot spots of biodiversity. For full details you can check my colleague Deborah Zabarenko’s story.
As someone who has had the great privilege of visiting this island continent twice I can only say: “Right on!”
