There is an interesting article in the environmental section of the FT regarding paying countries to keep the rainforest they have, rather than selling out to logging firms. It does seem like a very viable option. The president of Guyana has been asking the UK government to pay for his rainforests as a way to off set the carbon that our country pollutes the rest of the world with.

Preserving the rainforests is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to cut emissions.. Stanley Fink, former CEO of the hedge fund Man Group

I think we would all tend to agree. It largely doesn’t matter where the money comes from, so long as it isn’t procured or generated through the direct degradation of the rainforest itself. I think varying people have varying views on this. Some would view this as ‘tainted money’ others would say ‘the only problem with tainted money is their taint enough of it!’

‘Send lawyers, guns and money’ or so the 1978 Warren Zevon lyrics go. I don’t think we need lawyers or guns, it’s just the money we need. Dan Janzen talked on this blog about exactly this point. There is no silver bullet to rainforest conservation. The fact is, if conservationists don’t purchase the land then the land owners will sell to the loggers to make their investment pay.

Prince Charles seems to agree as well.

Can big business buy the rainforests? And indeed, why should they?

Here at Children’s Tropical Forest we’ve taken a step to making our website operation carbon neutral by teaming up with NS Design for the supply of our web hosting.

NS Design use data centres owned by Coreix the first UK data centre to become carbon neutral.

On March 26th, 2007 Coreix became the first UK based managed hosting services company to take the crucial step to make their operations more environmentally friendly. On behalf of all their clients Coreix is voluntarily offsetting all the CO2 emissions caused by its data centre and are the first UK data centre to do so. Coreix contributions have been used to help purchase the Rodas property, a 45 hectare extension to the Buenaventura Reserve managed by Fundación Jocotoco in the foothills of the Andes in south-western Ecuador.

But it isn’t just through the use of Coreix data centres that NSDesign are making their products greener, they also do work in the UK with Tree Appeal, a tree planting scheme. As NS Design explain…

As an ethical business we care about the environment, and recently became one of the few web service companies to become carbon neutral, by completely offsetting our carbon footprint.

Our partnership with Tree Appeal allows us to do even more – by pledging to plant a native broad leaf tree for every customer who purchases our new “Green Web Hosting Plan”. They’ll also get an official certificate (digital of course!) thanking them for their contribution, as well as links to specific environmental websites and carbon calculators.

Data centres have a huge environmental impact due to the massive amount of electricity they consume to power the servers and the climate control needed to keep everything cool.

As this article from Tech Republic illustrates..

Here’s one of the interesting things about all of these new data centers that are going up in rural areas — their energy consumption. For example, Microsoft’s new data center will consume 48 megawatts of power, or enough to power about 40,000 homes. According the US Census Bureau, for 2005 all of Grant County, Washington (which includes Quincy) contained only 30,605 housing units. That means that Microsoft’s new data center will consume about 30% more energy than all of the people in the entire county combined.

We can all do our bit and choosing our suppliers based on their environmental credentials is a good place to start.

For more information on carbon reduction, check out Zero Carbonista as well.

We asked Dan Janzen, President of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, how they identify the people who currently own the rainforest that they purchase for conservation. See what he has to say.

The land purchases (more than 300 in the history of the formation of ACG, and see the GDFCF site for the specific example of Rincon Rainforest) are extremely varied in their nature and ownerships. The owners range from original frontier colonists to middle-class absentee landlords to wealthy corporations to foreign investors, and about every imaginable combination and in-between. They all have one trait – they are happy to sell their land for something approximating market value in order to buy something ‘better’ – land, store, delivery truck, investment bonds, vacation in Europe, relative support, and about everything else you can think of. This move “up” is their personal evaluation of their situation.

Another variable that has been important has been the occasional case, usually with long-time resident families, of “I am happy to sell it for inclusion in a national park” (with the silent implication of I would not sell it to a developer or THAT neighbor).

The actual process of land purchase is sociologically complex, but boils down to what any neighbor does if he wants to buy the neighbors farm. You talk, think, discuss, offer, counteroffer, etc. for weeks to months to years, and in the end, it is commonplace for the fund transfer to be in portions (because ACG and GDFCF does not have enough donor funds to buy the entire property outright) and to allow 6 months to a year for removal of livestock resident on parts of the property.

Almost always we purchase an entire property, because the person has long since moved off the land and simply wishes to cash in and use the funds elsewhere. All properties purchased are surveyed (for area and location), titled, and registered in the national land register, and owned by the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (a US and Costa Rican registered charity) until passed as a “finished” ACG Sector to the government (in the meantime they are managed jointly by GDFCF and ACG).

As for what appear to be high land prices, one has to remember that Costa Rica, for all its low financial resources, very much approximates a developed country in terms of goods, services, health, education, government stability, and land ownership. Ask yourself what a hectare of old growth forest on private land a two hour drive from an international airport in UK or California would cost, and then the Sector A land prices are bargain basement (and climbing yet more rapidly as agro-industry becomes the major competitor and yet another road is paved).

But with this greater cost also comes enormously greater social stability for the purchase and its permanent incorporation into national park status. In those countries where tropical forest can still be purchased for a quarter to half the cost of Sector A lands, the management and stress costs, both in dollars and sweat equity, will have to yet be paid over the years to come. In Costa Rica they have already been paid.

So how do people come to own large tracts of rainforest?

If the owner is international, they bought it from a Costa Rican, almost invariably. The Costa Rican who owns it today bought it from someone else, and all the land around here (Rincon Forest) is owned by a historical chain containing 5-10 owners back to colonial times. ACG contains the second oldest European ranch in Costa Rica, established about 1580. Think on that date. There have been 40+ owners for Santa Rosa since then. The specific Sector A area was initially a few huge land holdings obtained by colonists in the 1800′s and early 1900′s as part of government programs for rural development, and these have gradually been fractured and sold off in parcels as they were also (often) logged or otherwise converted to agroscape, where they are now. The indigenous holdings here vaporized with the first several hundred years of European occupation.