Amazing Plan to Grow Money in the Trees

One day, about five years ago, Frank Nolvo, a laconic, chunky skipper from the headwaters of the Sepik River, in the north of Papua New Guinea, woke up and went to the city. The 42-year-old Nolvo had nine children. He was working on an extension to the house, and he needed building materials.

If you live in the headwaters of Sepik, you can't just go to the store. Nolvo left his village Kagiru early in the morning. Like other groups of houses with palm roofs on the river, in Kagiru there is no electricity, mobile communications and the road connecting it with other places. Even by the standards of Papua New Guinea, the region is considered too hot, poor and difficult to live. During the rain flooding comes. During a drought, the streams dry up, and people with their canoes become trapped. To go somewhere, you need to go a few days. For ruthless geographical reasons, economic development in the Upper Sepik stalled for thousands of years. And there are very, very many crocodiles.
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Having spent the whole day on the water, Nolvo reached Ambunti, a large village with a population of 2,000, where he spent the night. The next morning he moved on. Nolvo was considered among the local prosperous and influential man. In addition to the boat, he had the post of chairman of the district, which includes 30 villages, including Kagiru. But for him the journey was a serious undertaking. One fuel had to be spent on almost 1000 kin [about 20,000 rubles]. By noon the second day, Nolvo moored the boat and boarded a truck heading for Wewak, the provincial capital. This was the purpose of his trip, which was four hours from the coast. It was on the market in Wewak, when buying materials that Nolvo met with another district head in the upper Sepik, David Salio, who invited him to a meeting at a local hotel dedicated to trading in CO2 emissions.

Hotel In Wewak Boutique is the smartest place in town. It is located on a cliff near the city center, in a white two-story building. There is a small pool and verandas gazing at the South Pacific. The meeting was organized by Stephen Hooper, a former football player and entrepreneur from Australia. Coarse-grained, having experience in the extraction of ore, Hooper periodically worked in APG from 2007 - first in the timber industry, and then on the issue of carbon trading.

Nolvo sat and listened. Since he attended school, he remembered how photosynthesis works, so the fact that Hooper was talking about leaves, carbon and oxygen was not completely incomprehensible - but still quite complicated. The bottom line was this: because of the pollution that far countries are guilty of, and because something happens to the atmosphere, people living on the Sepik River can start selling clean air produced by their trees. And apparently, they can become quite well off.

“For me it was amazing,” Nolvo told me. - I have never heard of such things before. It is clear that I can catch a fish and sell it. But it was something completely different. ” He became interested. Four other regional leaders have already decided to participate in this endeavor along with their communities. Nolvo decided to think about it. He bought the necessary materials for the house, and began a long way back to Kagira.

Once again on the water, Nolvo looked at the lean trees with gray bark growing along the banks, turning into a forest on the hills behind them. They framed a mighty and harsh landscape that had been familiar to him all his life: sources of food, fuel, and spiritual energy, where men and women periodically spent several days in a row to prepare for rituals and get older. Now he looked at them from a different point of view. Nolvo thought not only about financial opportunities, but also about the opportunity to participate in an international project. “It is necessary to save the life of the whole world,” he thought. Returning home, Nolvo explained the idea to his wife.

2. Beautiful plan, in theory

Hearing the first time about the REDD + program, people are usually impressed. This acronym means "reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation." This is the UN plan to engage forests in combating climate change: measuring their contribution to stabilizing the atmosphere and then paying this contribution.

The idea itself is great. Three trillion trees grow on Earth, and all of them are perfectly adapted to pump carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Each year, forests and swamps absorb about 1.6 out of 10 gigatonnes of gas emissions that occur through human fault. Of course, we destroy these ecosystems at terrifying speeds. Such processes as deforestation, drainage of swamps, burning of shrubs, intended for cleaning agricultural areas, emit from 10 to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. In an era of climate change, forest destruction is the worst thing we can do. This process takes one of the best hopes of gaining control over the damage done to the medium, and turns it against us. On the Guinean pidgin, this is called “double-screw” [double buggerup].

REDD + promises to fix it. Since these ecosystems are of great value - forests are a cheap, but surprising technology for extracting and storing carbon - which means you have to pay for them. In developing countries where untouched wilderness remains, scientists need to calculate how much carbon it absorbs and stores, and governments and communities need to be encouraged to try to conserve this nature and not turn it into asphalt or arable land. On our worn and warming up planet, a growing tree should cost as much as sawed.

The calculation technologies are, of course, quite complex, but, if you think about it, they are quite accessible to scientists and bureaucrats of the 21st century: satellites and ground stations for tracking forest destruction, carbon markets, compensation payments and international assistance in transferring funds from rich countries that pollute the atmosphere, to poor countries saving trees. This vision of the future has been constantly reflected in UN reports since REDD was proposed in 2005. Each of the 51 countries, from Ethiopia to Ecuador, spent $ 6 million to prepare for this program. It is promised that about $ 7 billion will be spent to develop the program, and REDD will be one of the elements that negotiators want to include in the discussion program at the Paris climate summit. [The article was written before the summit, and, apparently, the organizers turned on this program in the summit - approx. transl.]

If the program works, the benefits will be amazing. Carbon dioxide emissions will decrease, and forests will remain. 77% of the world's bird population lives in forests, they supply water to one third of the largest cities in the world, and 60 million Aboriginal people live among the most vulnerable communities on Earth. Money will flow from all sides, and new types of forest economies will emerge, based on living creatures and biodiversity, and not on desert landscapes. Sociologists sometimes call climate change an “immoral problem” because of the huge number of harmful components that mutually reinforce each other. On paper, the REDD + project sometimes looks like an immoral solution to a problem, despite all the good things it can bring with it.

And this is one of his weak points. Some theories do not work in practice, and almost from the very beginning, the REDD + project has been criticized for its impracticality, financial vagueness, and deviations from the main priority of humanity - limiting fossil fuel consumption. In some circles, the scheme exposes all the flaws of the UN approach to combating climate change: a theoretical, multifaceted, cumbersome, instead of something more casual and mundane, like the daily struggle for land and resources that quickly alienates us from the hope of a healthy planet.

“This is crazy,” says Chris Lang [Chris Lang], a blogger who has been covering the program since 2008, “from all possible sides.” The question is whether this should look like a real solution to the problem of climate change. Nobody said it was easy.

3. Birth of REDD

The craziest thing about the program is that they invented it in PNG. In the town of Wewak. Not on the day Frank Nolvo arrived, but several years before that, in the spring of 2003. One afternoon, the former prime minister, father of the country's independence, Great Leader Sir Michael Somare , was walking along the beach with a charismatic management student named Kevin Conrad.

Konrad was over 30, he was the son of American missionaries and grew up near the village of Hayfield in the Sepik area. As he likes to say, he was born under a tree, and Somare has known since he was a boy. After graduating from school, Konrad went to study in California, worked in the NASA jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena and in investment banks, and then entered the service at Angco, the largest exporter of coffee in PNG. He now receives an MBA in London and New York and informally works as a consultant for Somar.

On that day, the great leader reflected on the forests. The country has the third largest jungle in the world, after Congo and Amazon. This is a lively amusement park for biological diversity: the abode of 19,000 different plant species, woody kangaroos and cassowary, 2-meter flightless birds. But the trees themselves are also valuable, and for decades the corrupt deforestation industry has been operating in the country. In 1987, the state commission described these companies as “roam the countryside with the aplomb of the thieves' barons, bribe politicians and leaders, create a social imbalance and ignore the laws”.

Sixteen years later, the report wrote that “the barons of thieves are as active as ever,” and the international community demanded that Somare act. Having estimated that 70% of the export of wood from APG goes illegally, the World Bank offered the state a loan of $ 17 million to stop the work of the industry. True, the state received much more deductions from industry, up to $ 50 million a year, and considered this money to be critical for the development of the country.

On the beach, Wevaka Somara described the problem to a young adviser. “Sir Michael said,“ I agree in principle with the proposal of the World Bank, ”recalls Conrad. But PNG cannot afford to refuse logging under such conditions. The country is poor, people earn an average of £ 4 per day. Somare gave Conrad the task of coming up with another way to get money from the forest.

Conrad worked on the solution for two years. He had no knowledge of deforestation or climate science or economic development, but he quickly learned. He read about “payments for ecosystem services” - an idea tested in Costa Rica when land owners were rewarded for supporting waterways or bird habitats in good condition. He learned about the carbon market in which companies supported pollution prevention schemes by reselling emission allowances in international markets. Konrad reflected on the incredible amount of carbon stored in the APG forests, spread over an area of ​​370,000 sq.km. - on an area larger than Italy. He pushed through the gigantic text of the “UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,” and came up with the idea: can PNG receive money for saving forests? Can it sell millions of tons of carbon emissions as carbon quotas that will remain in the trees if they are not cut down?

Konrad needed money, and he set out to turn the standard way of thinking about helping and saving. Living on the Sepik River, he met foreign non-state companies that promoted wildlife conservation ideas, but did not offer money to the people who lived there. “It upset me. They asked people to continue living in poverty, although those had international class property. ” In November 2005, with the blessing of Somare and during the maintenance of Costa Rica, Conrad submitted an 11-page proposal at the UN Summit on Climate Change, held in Montreal.


Kevin Conrad

The essence, as well as the timeliness of Conrad's idea came to the forefront. The trick was to calculate the financial implications of climate change and to develop market mechanisms for solving the problem. In 2006, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change , a 700-page review prepared by economist Nicholas Stern for the British government, called the restriction of deforestation as "a very cost-effective way" of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Soon, REDD received its acronym and began to gain support in the UNFCCC. The World Bank joined the project, and in 2008 a report prepared for the British government by Johan Eliasch , a Swedish entrepreneur and environmental specialist, predicted that a well-designed REDD system could reduce global deforestation by 75% by 2030 year

The REDD program had political advantages that allowed it to stand out among the controversies over climate change. The UNFCCC program has not been developing all these years, since developing countries have accused industrialized countries of undermining the health of the planet and demanded hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation. Rich countries talked about observations, according to which two thirds of greenhouse gases come from developing countries, and therefore did not show a desire to part with money until everyone agreed to cut the emission of gases.

REDD avoided this impasse. The idea was that poor countries like APG would be happy to cut gas emissions by saving forests in exchange for compensation. (About 70% of gas emissions in APG come from deforestation). According to Conrad, it changed everything. REDD’s commercial bluntness threatened to cut the knot that was arranged by the main negotiators. "The United States did not need this, they needed the status quo, in which they wanted to do nothing."

Konrad serves as a personification of his dynamic and versatile idea. It is difficult to describe: it works in New York, but represents PNG; nice, feels well in the spotlight, knows the language of markets and technologies and the “paradigm shift”, while telling modest stories about life on the Sepik River. In 2007, he was quoted in the news when he shamed the Bush administration for obstructing progress at the Bali climate change summit. “If you don’t want to be a leader,” Konrad told thousands of delegates, “get out of the way.” The way the tiny PNG opposed the United States made him a hero in the negotiations.

I met him for the first time just at that time. It was a week of tense, sleep-inducing negotiations in Bonn in the wake of the catastrophic summit in Copenhagen in 2009, and it stood out among the others. He looked like a Hollywood actor playing the role of negotiator at a climate summit. He told how the sea rose in Wewak so much that the tree under which he met his girlfriend went under the water and boasted about how his allies - by this time Conrad was running a group called the Coalition of States with Jungle - the circles narrowed around their enemies at the summit. “This is because we know how to achieve results,” he said. On the wreckage of the Copenhagen summit, REDD remained one of the elements that were revived and did not lose their speed of development. In 2010, Norway and Indonesia signed the first significant transaction in the world under the REDD program. Its amount was a billion dollars.

4. Carbon mania

In PNG, not everything went according to plan. Since the first visits of white traders in the 19th century, and the gold rush in the 1930s, the difficulties of the country — the landscape, the jungle, the history of cannibalism — have attracted adventurers and businessmen. Half innocent, half cruel, the country supposedly guaranteed the presence of hidden wealth, and between 2008 and 2009, as many as 90 foreign companies involved in trading carbon credits rushed here to extract the wealth waiting for them among the local trees.

The attention drawn to the problem of Somare and Konrad created a demand with which PNG could not cope. A ministry for climate change and carbon trading was established, and it was immediately overwhelmed with proposals from various REDD implementation plans that it could not cope with. The idea existed only on paper. During his flights to the capital, Port Moresby, Conrad was not left alone. “At once, six or seven different delegations came up to me on the plane and promoted their ideas,” he says.

In the field, meetings of carbon traders and forest clans turned into the exploitation of one another. The PNG Constitution gives many rights to land ownership to local communities, but a third of the population is illiterate. The trendy ideas of carbon mania have reached many PNG residents who are not able to understand the concept of gas trade, which is stored in their trees. People talk about large ships, with huge reservoirs, lining up along the coast to suck forest air. In the markets are sold plastic bags for collecting carbon. Villagers talk about "heavenly money" and are worried that oxygen can run out in PNG. In early 2009, the director of the new climate ministry, Konrad's school friend, Theo Yasause, was dismissed on charges of printing his own carbon quota documents. Later he was imprisoned for shooting a man next to a nightclub. “Moods are out of control,” Conrad admits.

PNG is not the only place where the first experiments with REDD went wrong. In the Amazon, carbon cowboys have been reported to relocate communities from their original places to get money from powerful corporations for greenhouse gas emissions. In Southern Brazil, local residents living alongside the Guaraqueçaba Climate Action Project - a $ 18 million plan funded by General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power - the local Green Police pushed aside from the areas where they hunted, fished and grew gardens.

Non-governmental organizations and governments talked about these horror stories at climate meetings at the UN. Forest campaign organizers, accustomed to working with local landowners, were not much surprised. If you mix money and wood, the locals usually suffer. For critics of the REDD program, its early failures demonstrate its two main problems.

The first is the abstractness of Conrad's ideas. The idea that developing countries should get paid for emissions that would not be consumed if they cut down trees was just a hypothesis. How to measure and price for what did not happen? The concept was rather complicated even for experts on forest use, not to mention those parts of the world where governments are weak, there are disputes about the use of land, and it’s not at all clear what happens in their forests.

The second - REDD has become a red herring. It sounds impressive, requires a tremendous amount of time, money and effort, but in essence it’s just an elegant carbon redistribution scheme in which rich countries will continue to pollute the environment until they can pay the poor for not cutting trees. “The program makes such an impression that you not only struggle with deforestation, but also solve the problem of climate change without resorting to such complex techniques as the abandonment of fossil fuels,” says blogger Lang. “If we do not stop climate change, the forests will still burn.”

In December 2010, REDD was renamed REDD +. Instead of a one-sided approach, associated only with reducing emissions and trading in quotas, the program has a more holistic view of the value of forests and the lives of the people living in them. Now, through the program, it has become possible to finance “non-carbon benefits” and “opportunities to create income and wealth”.

Konrad felt that he was increasingly becoming isolated in the international arena. His previous activity was presented as willfulness and arrogance. And although the basis of the idea of ​​REDD ++ is to pay states for the preservation of their trees, he does not like the gradual spreading of the program. “All this leads only to driving round dances and singing songs in the woods,” he says to me. “This is outrageous.” Carbon mania in PNG has not bypassed him. In 2012, Conrad was dismissed from his post as climatic ambassador. Since then, he represents Panama.

At home, on the Sepik River, Frank Nolvo did not suspect anything like this. After the meeting in Wewak, he discussed the sale of quotas with the residents of Kagiru, and then with other districts. In 2011, the clans signed a deal and entrusted Hooper, an Australian developer, to sell quotas on their behalf. After the chaotic events that occurred several years earlier, the PNG government gave the go-ahead to five pilot projects in the country, of which Hooper’s plan, known as April Salumei, was the most elaborate. Including the Nolvo area, the project covered 6000 sq. Km.

Scientists from New Zealand flew in to count the carbon in the trees. At first, Nolvo thought that someone would come with containers and something would be taken away. But then he realized that the trade takes place in some market in another place. “I knew that after the sale of carbon, we would start getting money,” he told me. I thought it would take some time. ” And he began to wait and hope.

And in general, this same thing has to be dealt with by all the other REDD + participants: wait, hope, and doubt whether this amazing idea will work. Before my trip to PNG last month, during which I watched the program being deployed at its birthplace, David Nassbaum, director of the British branch of WWF, reminded me of the promise contained in Conrad's original idea. “The bottom line is that we maintain an unlimited reservoir for storing coal, helping to stop climate change and provide a livelihood for a large number of people. If you do everything right, then a lot of people will win. ” On the other hand, there are unrealizable ideas, and such ideas do not help anyone.

5. Call for cutting

In Port Moresby, I landed at dawn on Friday. Smoke flowed between the iron roofs of a small settlement located across the street from the hotel where I was staying. The night before there was a mess. Residents of mountains cheated on the market and someone poked an umbrella. The scuffle has grown, and as a result several houses have burned down.

I listened to all this, a little shocked, a little stunned by the difference in time zones, and I realized that I was looking at a couple of hills that rose far away. Port Moresby is a collection of diverse settlements, not just one big city. Unfinished quarters stand in the midst of bare brown slopes. They were cleared of anything that might be like trees. This is because each resident of APG consumes about 1.8 cubic meters of firewood per year - approximately the same amount was used in Europe before we began to burn coal.

It is easiest to forget, living in a country without forests, that people cut down trees to improve their living conditions. “The transformation of millions of acres of forest into arable land was without a doubt the greatest achievement of our ancestors,” Oliver Reckham wrote in his history of British agriculture in 1986. And he did not mean the Romans, the Saxons or the industrial revolution. More than half of the British forests, with all their hemp and the rest, disappeared even before 500 BC. The forests are great, but not compatible with what they like to do in human communities. In the 1990s, the Scottish geographer Alexander Mater came up with the phrase "forest transition" to describe how states cut down trees, understood that they cut down all the trees, and began to slowly plant them back.

PNG has not yet passed the phase of the forest transition. According to the International Center for Forest Research, it is in the second step, known as the “frontier conditions”, where the development of events begins to accelerate. According to government data, about 15 million hectares of the remaining 37 million hectares are already prepared for logging. But all is not lost. Satellite data shows that 80% of the country’s forest is growing. From the airplane window, the country looks like a big green carpet.

This is what makes the country an ideal test site for REDD + and for a broader vision of a “green economy” in UN terms, when developing countries avoid the pernicious way of burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which almost everyone went through. “If it works somewhere, then surely it should work in PNG,” Roy Trivedi, the UN staff coordinator, told me. “PNH is one of a very small number of countries in the world where you can make a choice about a model of further development that differs from the standard one.”

But the rest of the countries have their own interest in this matter. If PNG manages to preserve the largest jungles in the Pacific region, it will be good for the entire planet. But what will she donate in the process? 85% of the population in PNG lives in rural areas. One of the main reasons for deforestation is the small farmland, from which a growing population is fed. The country needs modern agriculture and roads. One of the problems of the concept of REDD + and “green economies” is to imagine how a country can become prosperous and industrial if it is limited in clearing and drying land. Even activists advocating for the preservation of the environment cannot explain this. “Any development opportunities in the country, even if they lead to the need to cut down several trees, need to be implemented,” said Thomas Pak, chairman of the Eco-Forest Forum,the country's leading brand for forest non-governmental organizations.

The historical balance between deforestation and economic development is the biggest obstacle to REDD +. The international logging industry knows this, and their opposition to the program makes them extremely unexpected allies with forest defenders, who also don’t like this program. Bob Tate, a wiry Aussie, manages the PNG Forest Industry Association, which represents logging companies controlled from Malaysia. He warned me about slander when I turned on my voice recorder and then said: "Kevin Conrad is the greatest fraudster in the history of this country." Tate described REDD + as an “endless donor project” that would prevent PNH from realizing its economic potential.

"All local people can return to their forest and live in poverty, and we will give them a little pocket money," he says. “That's the way the UN does this program.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the bad reputation of the logging industry in PNG, and still the hopes of many isolated communities are connected with it, since the only way to get a road, a bridge, a school and a small income is deductions. The main reason for the successful launch of REDD + by Stephen Hooper on the Sepik River - and the source of opportunities to reduce emissions - was the fact that most communities agreed to deforestation in 1996. In conversations with government officials, I felt that they saw an unpleasant and undesirable connection between deforestation and progress. Cutting down is an unsightly process, but a real one. And there are quite a lot of bribes in the process. Somehow I ended up at the headquarters of the PNG Ministry of Forest Industry, which employs 800 officials. They do not have enough cars and gasoline to watch the whole country.“Everybody hates logging companies,” one of the top officials told me. - But what is our alternative? And besides, our ministers like Malaysians. ”

6. Carbon in the trees

It was because of this development dilemma that Kevin Conrad came up with REDD. Ten years later, he stands firmly on the fact that the only option to make the program work is the one that will give people the same income as felled trees. And how much carbon is in the trees? And how much can it cost? One morning, in search of answers to these questions, I flew to Madang, another city on the north coast of the country.

George Weiblen, a botanist from the University of Minnesota, met me at the airport. Weyblen, 46, has studied trees in PNH since his first visit to the country as a surprised and frightened graduate student in the early 1990s. Together with their research partner, Czech entomologist Vojtech Novotny, they were attacked by commercial offers during a carbon mania five years ago. They rejected offers and have since remained outside the policy of REDD +. At the same time, they possess some of the most detailed data on trees ever collected in APG, including the amount of carbon contained in them.

In 2010, Weiblen and Novotny planned a study of 50 hectares of jungle 100 km west of Madang, as part of a network study conducted by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. For the next three years, researchers — mostly local villagers — counted, measured, and recorded the trunks of each tree in a site that was thicker than 1 cm. They counted 288,204 trunks and over 500 tree species in a 5 km x 1 km area. - about 10 times more tree species than grows in Britain. “The amount of data just turned out to be beyond my comprehension,” says Weiblen.

Last month, Weiblen traveled to inspect the site. Working in PNG is associated with wasting time and money on food, fuel, water, and safety necessary for life (this year three people attacked Weyblen’s car with a homemade catapult). A couple of hours we dealt with affairs in Madang, buying rice, sun lotions and food for the camp. At some point, we parked at the market where they sell betel - a tonic product that is common in PNH, which became the source of the cholera epidemic several years ago. I asked Weiblen how many Minnesota students wanted to come to work on his project. "To those whose eyes are burning," he said, "I am particularly suspicious."

We drove west. After some time, we pulled off the asphalt road and found ourselves on sandy roads, made by logging companies from the 1970s, as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the forests. Weibelen, tall and pedantic, having a habit of suddenly giggling, usually about various troubles, told me about a Polish graduate student who almost fell out of the balloon's nacelle in an insane attempt to examine the crowns of trees. At the entrance to the research camp, we were among the active logging, and saw piles of pale red [quil tree trunks - the most valuable tropical tree in PNG - built along the road. “This is a great product,” said Weiblen. The wood of a single quil tree costs about $ 10,000.

We spent the night in Vanang, the nearest village to the camp, and on the morning went on our way on foot. Wailen, wearing shorts and a green jersey of one of the PNG rugby teams, walked quickly among the roots and vines dangling from the trees. Since this summer, the worst drought since 1997 has come to PNG, occurring due to El Niño. Wailen was struck by the lack of moisture in the air and penetrating through the cover of the sun. Dry leaves fell from the sky. “This is strange,” he said. Every few minutes he stopped to show one of the jungle wonders: the huge trunks of 30-meter tall trees, or a fresh landslide scar covered with a new clematis. Giant butterflies flew past. Weiblen stepped over the stream. “We have very strange leeches living here. Simply put, they feed on the eyes. "

As it turned out, measuring the amount of carbon in the jungle trees is the easiest. You just need to measure the width of the trunk at a height of 130 cm from the ground - a measurement known as DBH (diameter at chest height). Then it must be substituted into the allometric equation, a formula derived by biologists to calculate the size of the remaining living organism, along with the density of the tree for a particular species. In the case of quila (Intsia bijuga), an adult tree with a girth of 50 cm will weigh (as they say botanists, have a biomass above ground level) almost two tons. Half of them will be carbon, which is a ton per tree.

Using data from the study area, Weyblen's team calculated that there are 105 tons of carbon in a hectare of jungle in APG lowlands. The difficulty lies in extrapolating this data to large areas and for a longer time. A study in Vanang showed that the amount of carbon in trees can vary from 50 to 175 tons per hectare over just a few kilometers - and this may encourage quota traders to change numbers in the right direction on a particular forest area. Even less is known about how trees preserve and secrete carbon over the years and decades. For example, PNG jungle is unstable. Because of earthquakes, floods and landslides, their trees die twice as often as in other parts of the world. And although it increases forest biodiversity, it means that it contains less carbon. According to biomass research,PNG jungles can contain almost two times less carbon per hectare than their equivalents in Africa and Asia.

Do they make it less valuable? Less worthy to be saved? One morning, while in camp with Weiblen, I got confused in such matters. On the one hand, the science of measuring the carbon content of trees looks quite simple. Time consuming, but achievable. Aluminum wire with a nameplate was wrapped around every tree trunk I saw around me. On the other hand, measuring and monetizing the carbon cycle in such places seems like a crazy idea - mushrooms breathe, leaves rot, trees breathe, vines do photosynthesis, every imaginable surface is covered with ants, also breathing. Because of the drought, the air smacked of smoke. Thousands of fires burned in the forest, releasing an unknown amount of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Who will pay for it?

I tried to interest Waiblena with these questions, but he looked at me without blinking. “I don't care,” he said. For people living, working, exploring the forest every day, the abstractions and ambitions of REDD + seem too far away. (Wailen, for example, is trying to get local government protection for his research site, and find funding for his next job). And this is a problem.How many years will it take to figure it all out? Trivedi, the local UN coordinator, acknowledged that the REDD + program has been running in PNG for too long. “We can say that impatience is growing,” he said. Something important is happening: next year the first forest inventory will begin in the country. But the program REDD + earns no earlier than ten years. “The theory is correct,” he insists. “But we need to try to give people some results as quickly as possible so that they feel this stimulus and decide to leave their trees.”

7. Arrival of lights

One of the challenges of REDD + is the need to convince people to wait and exercise faith. In the long run, it seems that countries will trade with each other very large emission allowances. In the meantime, entrepreneurs and communities working on REDD + pilot projects want to sell quotas now, in voluntary markets, and wait until the global infrastructure is tightened.

In APG, any talk of small projects immediately revives carbon mania. But this did not stop one of the entrepreneurs, as did his project. Stephen Hooper, an Australian quota trader who launched the REDD + project on the Sepik River, joined by Frank Nolvo, sold the first quotas in 2013. The April Salumei project received a license to store 23 million tons of carbon for 38 years. At $ 5 per ton, the current UN price for REDD + transactions, this could turn into $ 115 million.


Frank Nolvo: I'm sitting, and the money is coming. This is a miracle.

So far, Hooper has sold 200,000 tons to companies that exceed emission standards, and received $ 300,000. According to his agreement on sharing profits with land owners, Hooper receives 30%, 60% goes to communities, and 10% to the government. First of all, landowners needed boats. Hooper bought five. Then the head of the community asked for a cash payment of £ 4,500 to spend on health and education. This money disappeared without a trace. “We are not perfect,” Hooper tells me.

Hooper recently returned to the In Wewak Boutique Hotel and distributed mobile phones. The last quota deal was concluded with Qantas, Australia National Bank and Rema 1000 (a supermarket chain in Norway). Hooper wanted people from five districts to photograph their life, so that he then shared these photos with clients. “Maybe someone will find a big snake?” Hooper asked. The chairman nodded and looked at the phones. Nolvo was not there - he was in his district, preparing for the meeting of Hooper and the heads of other regions, in honor of the fact that one of the inhabitants of his village was preparing to receive a supply of lamps, recharged from the sun, paid with money from the project.

Hooper accompanied the REDD + program in PNG almost all the time. First for the money. In 2010, he sold his family home, car, boat, and shares in Quest Minerals, the company he ran. “It was around that time that I realized that there was no pot of gold here,” he said. Since then, Hooper has become a controversial figure in PNG, mainly because he did not want to give up. It seemed to me that he was everywhere at the same time, lobbying ministers, cajoling officials, trying to include the 2 million hectares intended by the country for the project in the description for presentation at the Paris summit. That evening in Wewak, at dinner, I asked one of the five directors of the April Salumei project, Philip Wablasu, to explain to me the principles of selling carbon credits, and he smiled at me in reply: "Steve knows."

The next morning, before dark we set off for Binomo, Nolvo district. We reached the river by noon and boarded two new boats, bought with money from the project. There was little water in the river due to drought, and the air, like in other places, was filled with smoke from fires. “Carbon dioxide,” said Nelson Garabi, one of the directors. The lamps were intended for one of the inhabitants of the village of Igai in Binomo, who, like the others, did not have electricity. When we arrived, Nolvo stood in front of an improvised arch made out of a palm leaf, next to a handwritten sign that said, “Welcome to the land of the inviolable virgin forest, fresh oxygen (O2), a greenhouse gas purifier.” Preparing a ceremonial celebration sing-sing. Men and women from the village donned feathers and painted bright turquoise and yellow dots on the faces.

Nolvo led the procession to the center of Igai, from the river. According to the PNG tradition, the men gathered in the main hall of the village, called house, while the women, children and teenagers stood or sat on the ground. After five years of talking about quota trading, this was the first thing they saw as a result. Speech delivered. “The forest is your home,” persuaded Anton Pakavi, a former school teacher involved in the day-to-day administration of the project. “Forest is your sister. The forest is your brother. ” Nolvo said a few words, but mostly stood and looked around in mute surprise. “I just sit on the spot and the money goes,” he said. “It’s some kind of miracle.”

It is time to turn on the lights. The first four were lit in the church, the frame structure, which only hinted at the building, but was not. It was assumed that children could use lamps to do their homework in the evenings - for the first time in the history of the village. But so far it was not over yet, and at first nothing was visible. People diverged. The man climbed a tree to get coconuts. Then darkness came, as it happens in PNG, with the speed and certainty of something that comes for a long time. And on the hill, thanks to an alchemical mixture of money and trees, four fires shone, fighting darkness.