Tanzania’s Eastern Arc’s evergreen forests provide carbon sequestration that the world benefits, yet it’s local communities alone who shoulder the costs of keeping the forests standing.
“ have some of the oldest forests on the planet that have been through many climate cycles, and as forests get isolated on these different ‘sky islands’ they generate an enormous diversity of species,” said study lead author Phil Platts, an environmental scientist and director of U.K.-based carbon ratings agency BeZero Carbon.
“We constructed two pathways which ran those two scenarios: conservation or complete conversion, through time and across space,” Platts told Mongabay. “You difference the two, basically, and you see which value or cost lands with which stakeholders over time.”The benefits to the international community total $10.1 billion over a 20-year period, according to the study’s projections.
The researchers conducted surveys of thousands of the Eastern Arc’s farmers, charcoal producers, pit sawyers, hoteliers, and forest reserve managers. Rainfall held and released by the forests of the Eastern Arc is vital for the drinking water supply of millions of people living downstream. Image by Marije Schaafsma.
International investments could support farmers to transition from the forest back into the agricultural landscape, while retaining their earning power, she said. An earlier study by Platts using historical land-cover maps estimates that forest cover across the Eastern Arc has declined by more than 70%, or nearly 3 million hectares , since 1908. A more recent study of his estimated that just over 430,000 hectares of forest cover remained.
“If we think about goals, such as protecting 30% of the planet, such goals come at a high price, and we need to think very carefully about who should pay that,” Schaafsma said, in reference to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s “30 by 30” framework to protect 30% of the planet’s most biodiverse terrestrial, inland water, marine and coastal areas by 2030.
The voluntary carbon market, which could play a big part in investments into places like the Eastern Arc, is a case in point. Platts, the study’s lead author, said that this year prices for carbon credits from forest conservation have been trading at a global average of $8 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. In many parts of the Eastern Arc, these prices would generate far less than locals can earn from farming or making charcoal.
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