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.

Victurine said money raised by the credits could encourage farmers to stop slash and burn agriculture through investments in rice cultivation or in taking advantage of cloud formations in the forest to improve irrigation.

In Madagascar about 100,000 hectares (386 square miles) of forest are lost each year by agricultural burning, according to WCS.

The burning of forests by farmers accounts for 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. An agreement at a 190-nation UN conference last year agreed to work on ways to reward countries for slowing deforestation.

Credits in a global climate trade system could generate $2 billion to $14 billion for developing countries, according to a study by EcoSecurities and the University of British Colombia. 

The WCS and Madagascar are hoping to sell their credits in the rapidly developing voluntary credit market. Later, they could adapt them for any post-Kyoto global trading system if the world agrees such credits would save forests in a fair way.  

Victurine said they are working with the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to ensure the credits would be high quality and would pay for actions to save the forest that would not have occurred otherwise.

The higher the perceived quality of the credits, the higher price they may fetch. In today’s prices at the EU’s compliance carbon market the 9.5 million tonnes would be worth about $291 million, though carbon prices are volatile. In voluntary, unregulated carbon markets the tonnes would be worth closer to $62 million. 

All of which leads to a question.  Are financial instruments the best way to change human behavior and save the planet?

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!”

Madagascar is a classic example of natural selection at work: most of its species have evolved in splendid isolation because the island broke free from the rest of Africa tens of millions of years ago. 

This is what evolution and natural selection are all about. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace separately stumbled upon this profound notion in the 19th century while observing life on islands — or, more specifically, the difference to be found in life on islands often only a few miles apart. 

Madagascar, because of its size and the length of time it has been a cast away, is a prime an example of natural selection run riot.

Its snakes have no venom because that is an evolutionary trait they picked up after Madagascar and the rest of Africa went their separate ways.

It has boa constrictors (which I have observed in its forests) which are found nowhere in Africa but are found in South America. Why? How? Because, or so goes one theory I have heard, Madagascar and South America BOTH broke free from Africa at one point. So it stands to reason that they might both keep something that died out in Africa and vice versa.

That is the dynamic of natural selection.

I could go on and on and on. Madagascar is most famous for its roughly 70 species on lemurs, dainty primates that come in all shapes and colors. The largest among them, the indri, has a haunting cry that belies its small stature and which sent tingles down my spine the first time I heard it.

Much of the indri population is now restricted to a fragment of isolated habitat in a protected reserve. An island on an island.

For a good popular introduction to the study of island life I would recommend David Quammen’s superb book “The Song of the Dodo.” It inspired me to go to Madagascar in the first place with my wife when I was a Johannesburg-based correspondent.

And if you really want to see natural selection at work on an island, go to Madagascar yourself. Eco-tourism can help preserve species by giving rural people an economic incentive not to hunt them or destroy their habitat.  And that can only help the scientists and their new efforts to save this cradle of weird and wonderful evolution.