It’s just possible that you’ve heard the UK is unusually cold right now. We’re recording near-record low temperatures night after night, everyone’s stopped working/going to school, and of course we’ve run out of salt and grit for the roads.

And of course people have started to question how we can possibly have such cold weather when the planet is supposed to be getting hotter. One commentator even went so far as to suggest that blind faith in global warming led to councils not having enough grit stockpiled to keep the roads clear.

It doesn’t take much to understand the concept that there is a difference between the climate, which is the underlying trend, and the weather, which is the chaotic seasonal fluctuations around that trend, but for some it’s asking too much.

To put it in its simplest, starkest terms, climate is the signal, weather is the noise.

There are daily (day/night), seasonal, annual and decadal cycles that all interact to produce the weather. But cutting through all of that, the annual mean global temperature is on an upward trend. That’s why glaciers, icesheets and permafrost are melting around the world.

Much journalistic mileage has been made of the apparent fact that the UK is currently colder than Antarctica. Notwithstanding the fact that Antarctica is currently in the middle of its summer, there is another way of looking at this: shouldn’t we be worried that Antarctica is currently hotter than the UK?

A famous example of the application of game theory to behaviour is the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma. Imagine two suspects, held in separate cells. If they both stick with their story (loosely, “I dahn’t nah nuffin’ mate”) the authorities will have no evidence on which to convict and both will go free.

The trouble is that, people being people, trust is a major issue. If one prisoner claims that the other did it, he will be set free with a handsome reward while his partner in crime is sentenced to a lengthy period of incarceration.

So what’s the only rational course of action? Fearful of taking sole blame (and perhaps enticed by the reward), both prisoners must surely denounce each other. The result is that both serve a sentence, repaying their debt to society before being unleashed upon it once more.

This simple little game has spawned an entire discipline of scientific research into understanding how and why individuals, groups, nations, even cells and genes, can possibly cooperate. It’s driven by the observation that cooperation is a widespread phenomenon, so there must be a way to make it stick. Indeed, cooperation is sometimes essential: babies are only borne of the “cooperation” that takes place between their parents – something that for many species must continue for years if the offspring is to survive to adulthood.

The jury is very much out there, but some general themes have emerged. Of these, the importance of the threat of punishment is key. In a world without retribution why would we ever expect to see any form of cooperation? Another is that decisions are often based upon a mutual history: trust can build between frequently interacting partners to the point where risks are minimized. If our two prisoners had worked together for long enough, they might consider it worth the risk of sticking to the story as both will reap the reward of freedom.

But seeing the difficulties around getting just two individuals to rub along, imagine the complexity of getting three to agree. Many of the evolutionary games that result in emergent stable cooperation between pairs fall apart with the introduction of an additional party. It is possible to find scenarios where multiple players cooperate, but the conditions are more stringent, truces more fragile, and cooperation levels are generally lower.

Scaling up to 192, the number of nations that have spent the last two weeks in Copenhagen negotiating the planet’s future, the prospects for any sort of cooperation seem infinitesimally small. And the kind of cooperation we need is going to impart a lot of financial pain on industrialised nations.

The “n-player” problem is often characterised as the “tragedy of the commons”, another pillar of the altruist’s canon. In former, simpler times, people grazed their sheep on common land. Anyone could do so with any number of sheep, and that’s where the problems lay. The land could only support a certain number of sheep before becoming overgrazed, but each individual had the incentive to add another sheep, and another, and another: the larger the flock the greater its worth.

The rational course of action was perverse. By sticking to his equitable share of the pasture’s “carrying capacity”, a commoner’s competitors gained the edge. The only thing to do was follow suit (rather like a sheep would). In time, overgrazing would lead to everyone’s flock going hungry. No one wins, but at least everyone loses. In recent times we’ve seen the same thing happen time and again with the collapse of the world’s fisheries.

The lesson is simple and stark: a sustainable future can be had through cooperation, but the potential costs of unconditional trust are simply too great to risk. The outcome is an inevitable decline to oblivion.

What does this tell us about Copenhagen? Perhaps that we shouldn’t be surprised that the outcome was rather less comprehensive than hoped. But given that all the above theory is old hat in political circles, isn’t it just a little surprising that anyone even so much as raised the expectation that agreement would be made among so many disparate parties?

Climate change mitigation measures require global cooperation: there is little point in taking unilateral action and doing so raises a significant risk of losing out in the global scramble for economic growth. Adaptation, on the other land, is easily carried out unilaterally and could (in fact should) bring competitive advantages in the future.

One reading of COP15 might therefore be that we shouldn’t expect too much by way of mitigation: it’s only a matter of time before someone points out the fact that money spent mitigating can’t be spent adapting. If the last two weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we haven’t learned much since those medieval commoners first found themselves with nothing for their sheep to eat.

Wishing you all a peaceful 2010.

The pantomime season is approaching fast, and seemingly kicked off with this piece on the BBC’s Countryfile programme last Sunday, in which Tom Heap explored the intriguing question of “why burning trees is better for the environment than many think”.

Subsequent media coverage has quoted the support of a number of conservation bodies, including ourselves, for the Forestry Commission’s desire to harvest two million tonnes of woodfuel a year from the UK’s “undermanaged” woods. Our supporters would rightly question why a woodland conservation charity like the Woodland Trust would wish to see trees felled and burned to produce heat.

The Trust believes that woodfuel can be part of the answer to our renewable energy needs, so long as it’s produced in a sustainable way and in particular so long as its production doesn’t damage biodiversity. Sensitively harvested, locally produced woodfuel can help avoid fossil fuel emissions and provide habitat for wildlife.

We also think that demand for woodfuel could be one of the drivers in encouraging new native woodland planting, which would bring with it a whole host of other benefits from improving air and water quality, locking up carbon and helping woodland wildlife adapt to climate change.

The Forestry Commission, in its woodfuel strategy for England, is keen that woodfuel should come from what it describes as currently “unmanaged” woods. We’re happy with that, so long as management is carried out in a sustainable way consistent with wildlife conservation.

In some cases such an approach could actually bring biodiversity improvements, for example when it means restoring ancient woodland or other semi-natural habitats planted with conifers, or restoring coppice management in woods where there are important species dependant on it. That’s why we supported the position statement, drawn up by Wildlife and Countryside Link, that was referred to in the Countryfile programme.

Rest assured, though, that the Woodland Trust will not, as implied in some of the recent media coverage, be seeking to fell two million tonnes of timber from its own woods for woodfuel. In our sites, the conservation needs of the wood are considered first: any timber or firewood produced are merely a consequence of essential conservation management work. Felled trees and branches are often left on site, as deadwood provides invaluable insect habitat as it decays.

So here’s the deal. We are a woodland conservation charity and as such our central aim is the conservation of woodland. We’re not gung-ho about chopping down trees but in these more complex times we fully acknowledge the urgent need to address the drivers of climate change. A big part of the solution is to wean ourselves off fossil fuel and for some woodfuel provides a great alternative. However, management of woods for fuel must sensitively and sustainably carried out and not come at the expense of all the other wonderful things that trees and woods do for us.

In fact, we’d like to go further. We would welcome more emphasis on the creation of new native woodland as part of the development of a domestic woodfuel market. Properly sited and managed native coppice woodland can deliver both sustainable low carbon fuel and wildlife benefits. Meeting the UK Government’s woodland creation “aspirations”, not to mention our own desire to see native woodland cover doubled, will require impetus from a diversity of sources. Low carbon woodfuel has a part to play in both driving woodland creation and moving our society towards a less damaging source of energy.

So on with the pantomime season. If woodfuel is the golden egg, we better look after the goose really well.

Just about any online conversation on climate change, such as today’s story in the Independent that we’re staring at a six degree rise by 2100, rapidly descends into a mud slinging match over the cause of climate change (just look at the comments following the main piece).

In fairness, there probably aren’t that many people out there that deny climate change is really happening. The few high-profile individuals that do are seen by most as the frontsmen of the climate equivalent to the Flat Earth Society: the serious debate isn’t around whether climate change is happening, but what’s causing it.

There is an increasingly vocal group that point to solar activity as the main driver for climate change. The significance of this is that it gets us humans off the hook: if we’re not causing it then it’s just part of the natural way of things and so nothing to worry about. We might still be in for catastrophic changes in species distributions and extinctions, but it’s not our fault and we’re powerless to stop it. Phew.

Contrast that with the suggestion that climate change really is happening because of the fossil carbon and other nasties we’re blasting into the atmosphere. We should do something about it urgently, and that action is going to cost us dear.

Hence the fuss over Copenhagen. Those that buy into the IPCC stance that climate change is driven primarily by human industrial activity see it as a last-gasp chance to put in place the legislative controls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put the brakes on the runaway climate train. The on/off seesawing of recent weeks has certainly lowered expectations of what might and might not be achieved. For the wider public it will no doubt have raised more questions than it answers, particularly in regard to the question of who should pay, and how much, to put things right.

Something else is happening, too. There’s a palpable sense that people are latching onto denial of a human cause for global warming with some relief. The projections are still scary, but at least we don’t have to deal with the fact that we caused it and, perhaps more importantly, don’t have to suffer the financial and social burdens of constraining climate change to “safe levels”.

Indeed, recent surveys suggest a groundswell of denialism. But what’s driving it? Is it really that so many people have scrupulously analyzed the evidence for and against human-mediated global warming and concluded that, in their scientific opinion, we have no guilt to bear? Or is it that despite there being a substantial body of expert knowledge that clearly shows how our activities do heat the atmosphere, accepting responsibility for it is just too hard to do?

The more zealous campaigners such as Al Gore (whose financial interest in carbon trading hasn’t helped) have probably raised awareness and scepticism in equal measure. But climate change shouldn’t be a matter of opinion driven by celebrity and personality. It should be about assessing the evidence in a dispassionate way and seeking the optimal course of future action, no matter how far it deviates from business as usual.

We should also be aware of the difference between accepting responsibility for climate change and the need to act to protect biodiversity, irrespective of “blame”. The UK is an impoverished place when it comes to trees and woods, and humans were undoubtedly the cause of its deforestation. In an increasingly uncertain future any action taken now to reinforce habitat connectivity will surely be to the benefit of all. And if it turns out that our greenhouse gas emissions are indeed the driver for climate change, we won’t have to apologise to our children for failing to act.

The UK Government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, published in July this year, makes the case for the creation of 10,000 hectares of new woodland a year for the next fifteen years. And that’s just for England: Scotland already has a similar target. If achieved, the English contribution alone could draw an estimated 50 million tonnes out of the atmosphere by 2050.

Only it’s not really a target. It’s an aspiration, an altogether different thing. I still aspire to climbing Mount Everest but as a target it would be a lost cause. We would be right to question the commitment of the Government to achieving this level of woodland creation – which requires a ten fold increase in activity – when it won’t even make clear the intent.

And then there’s the question of how to fund this step change. According to the LCTP, it needs to be “privately financed”, by which the corporate sector is probably the intended focus. These are the guys who don’t do anything, not even Corporate Social Responsibility, for nothing.

So how, and why, is this money going to suddenly appear? Some could come from controls on development. Housing developers, for example, could have a proportion of woodland creation imposed on them as part of the planning application. Section 106 money – set aside to compensate for at least some of the environmental damage that development inevitably brings, could be directed towards woodland creation projects, which would deliver a range of benefits above and beyond the locking up of carbon.

But why would a high street bank, for example, choose to direct some of its still vast profits into the pathetically modest coffers required to bring about new areas of woodland for people to enjoy? The answer must be the bottom line: money.

Until very recently, the only way to gain access to corporate funds for woodland creation was through the CSR route, engaging employees to come and plant trees in the local community, in turn delivering a healthy, happy workforce and binding local values and sense of worth together more strongly. But in recent years there has been another, altogether more businesslike alternative: Carbon.

It goes like this. Companies do things, sometimes very bad things, that result in greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure from above (Govt) and below (customers) have meant that companies vie to appear in the best, greenest, light, showing the outside world that they are cleaning up their acts. Reducing the company environmental impact – often rephrased as its carbon impact – is now a central activity.

There are two ways to achieve this, reduce or offset. Obviously we need to do both with the emphasis very much on the first – take responsibility, ask “what can I do to make things better?” – yet offsetting has a crucial part to play. Offsetting, which by definition means taking actions to mitigate emissions in a place where they didn’t happen, has rightly been scrutinized to the nth degree over the years. But in a more savvy world, high quality offsetting is still needed as a complement to on site emissions reductions. The key is to make sure the emissions reductions/savings truly are equivalent and that they really happen.

It’s unfortunate, then, that woodland creation in the UK can’t “officially” be sold as an offset, according to the Government. The problem is that all tree planting is tallied towards UK targets reported under the Kyoto Protocol. Selling carbon credits would thus amount to double counting. This presumptive possession of carbon rights seems unfair, but them’s the rules.

Only that’s not quite the full story. A legal mechanism exists by which the Government could enable the generation of tradable carbon credits from domestic forestry. By retiring the appropriate number of “Assigned Amount Units” (AAUs) the double counting issue would go away. With carbon credit generation on the cards, there would be a financial incentive for people to plant trees or fund woodland creation projects. The outcome would surely be a higher level of reforestation, something that we, and the Government, all want.

Viana’s presentation outlined the successes of the project, which has seen a switch in governmental policy from handing out free chainsaws towards a cultural value of seeing standing trees as being worth more than felled ones.

Money is raised – in part through partnership with a credit card company — and distributed to local people in the form of various grants. Families are allocated an individual monthly allowance, and additional funds are handed over to communities and for specific community-driven projects.

The result has been a greater emphasis on forest products, although all economic development (so long as it’s legal and doesn’t produce smoke!) is supported. The idea is that control is handed to indigenous communities: they decide upon their own future.

An interesting sidenote was the observation that these forest-dwelling people were already well aware of climate change, not from reading about it in the press but through their own direct observations. They believe the sun is now lower (it’s hotter during the middle of the day) and that storms are fiercer (judged by the number of times they are faced with rebuilding damaged homes).

Viala argued for the inclusion of Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) in the upcoming Copehagen summit, though not necessarily as part of the Joint Implementation/Clean Development Mechanism. Instead it should be a separate entity, standing outside of mechanisms such as the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).

He went on to claim that many of the technical objections to REDD have been addressed. The Amazonas scheme is partly self-funding and is building an endowment fund to secure its long term future. Further funding could be achieved through the sale of carbon offsets to Annex 1 countries, but Viala was keen to point out that it should be used as an easy way out for the worst polluters. The price of carbon could be protected by restricting the number of credits available — something that seems to have escaped the designers of the ETS. One option would be for countries wishing to buy offsets to increase their carbon reduction committments, then offset the increased amount — an outcome Viala described as a win-win situation.

On the ground, the Amazonas project seems to be working, with a huge decrease in deforestation since its inception. However, the question of displacement looms large: how can old-growth tropical forest destruction be stopped without a drop in the demand that industrialised nations place upon it?

There’s a grain of truth in some of them, such as the notion that food miles aren’t a bombproof proxy for the carbon footprint of a product. Indeed, we’ve touched on the same subject. Similarly, it’s true to say that an ancient woodland isn’t sequestering carbon at the same rate as a fast growing, young plantation of, say, eucalyptus trees.

But to suggest that we should cut those ancient woodlands down and plant fast growing species there instead displays a lack of understanding that for a journalist at a leading daily beggars belief. Adapting to future climate change is not just about reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s about helping wildlife and people deal with the changes to which we are already irrevocably committed.

Ancient woodlands might not be significant carbon sinks (although they do continue to sequester carbon indefinitely) but they are massive carbon stores, accounting for an estimated 1445 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the UK alone (compared with annual GHG emissions of 554 million tonnes). Undisturbed soils store carbon over a much longer period than commercial forestry allows. From an emissions perspective alone, trashing our ancient woodlands would be nothing short of disastrous.

Our ancient woods represent a tiny fragment of the UK’s land area. They are under almost continual threat from “development” — be it roads or runways — and a significant part of the Trust’s work (indeed, why we were founded in the first place) is focused on defending what precious little of these pre-industrial ecosystems we have left. They provide a true haven for wildlife, and many species could not exist anywhere else. Even hinting at the notion of destroying them, especially in the name of emissions reduction, is irresponsible and an abuse of journalistic and editorial influence.

In short, the Independent should be ashamed of itself.

—

Ecobuild — the “world’s biggest event dedicated to sustainable design, construction and the built environment” — is currently in full swing at London’s Earl’s Court. There are many admirable goings on (we were particularly drawn to the comments made at yesterday’s seminar on the future of urban trees), but if you think it’s all like this, think again.

One exhibitor, whose anonymity will be respected, takes old uPVC double glazed units and makes them into… new uPVC units. Sort of. What actually happens is that the glass goes to landfill (it’s not even ground up for aggregate — something to do with the boron content that was beyond our and, frankly, the exhibitor’s understanding). Next the uPVC frame is ground up into little pieces.

Then it’s ground up into even smaller pieces.

Then it’s ground into really tiny pieces.

Finally, it’s all squashed back into thin black strips.

And those thin black strips get used to line the inside of the frames of new uPVC units, of which the majority of materials still come from virgin sources.

There was one obvious question: “What are the GHG emissions arising from this recyling process, compared with just making the whole lot from new?”

It wasn’t just a pregnant pause. It was a five-months-overdue-elephant-pregnant pause. Then, the carefully considered, thoroughly researched, technical answer.

“It balances out”.

On the other hand, literally, the Dyson airblade stand was good. The sales rep was totally on the ball, the dryer really works, and the energy costs to users are potentially massive. At the other end of the technological spectrum, Carpenter Oak were doing things of great beauty, and it was a delight to see that Saint-Gobain were giving ash trees away to visitors. Chapeaux!

—

Last stop of the day was a trip to the House of Commons to hear the latest from the excellent All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group. To a packed room, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath OBE — Minister of State for DECC — set out the various virtues of the Carbon Disclosure Project, which has turned its sights on public procurement (where the government buys stuff).

The public sector’s buying power is vast, as the CDP’s report yesterday demonstrates. In the EU it amounts to 16% of gross GDP, so obtaining a snapshot of the supply chain could well lead to massive GHG emissions reductions in the coming years. Finally, some glimmer of hope that the government will lead by example. Now we just need to do something about the PM’s carbon footprint…

Short and sweet — does exactly what it says on the can. Reputed to be directed by the Coen brothers.

A piece in the New York Times yesterday drew attention to the increasing love affair that Americans have for soft toilet tissue and the threat that poses for old growth forests.

Toilet paper can be made from recycled material with ease — it uses less water to convert paper into fibre than it does to mash up wood pulp. But to get the soft, fluffy whiteness that many of us currently prefer requires the use of virgin wood pulp — the fibres are, well, softer, stronger and longer.

A spokesperson from Kimberley Clark — seemingly one of the worst culprits — said that “only” 14 percent of the wood pulp used by the company comes from the Canadian boreal forest.

This isn’t a new issue. Both Greenpeace and the WWF have been campaigning for years against the destruction of forests for the production of toilet paper. What’s changed is the current global economic slump. People have a raised awareness for the benefits of recycling and re-use: now is the time to switch to 100% recycled toilet paper. It might not be quite so luxurious an experience, but it’s a very easy way to prevent destruction of carbon storing old growth forests.

Tree measurements show that African rainforests are locking up carbon faster than ever

While much of the alarm over global deforestation centres on the Amazon rainforest, which continues at a shocking rate, African rainforests receive relatively little attention. Yet a study published today in Nature demonstrates the increasing size of the carbon sink these forests contain: similar to Amazonian forests in per unit area terms.

A large international team of scientists, headed up by Simon Lewis at the University of Leeds, found that across 79 plots in ten African countries, the above-ground carbon storage increased by 0.63 Mg C per hectare per year, between 1968 and 2007. Scaling up to include unmeasured material — roots, small trees, rotting trees and so on — brings the continental increase in carbon storage to 0.34 Pg C (that’s 340 million tonnes of carbon) per year.

The reason for the increase, which mirrors similar findings in the Amazon, is not known, but is likely to be one or both of the following explanations. First, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are effectively fertilising the forests, boosting growth rates and thus increasing the size of the carbon sink. The alternative explanation is that these supposedly pristine forests aren’t quite so ancient as supposed. Past disturbance, whether human mediated or otherwise, would mean that the “intact” forests are in a state of recovery: trees could be growing larger and dying later. How long this process will continue for is for now an open question.

The study highlights the value of the world’s tropical rainforests in soaking up our carbon emissions. The size of the sink dwarfs the greenhouse gases produced from fossil fuel use in the African tropics. Unfortunately, it only just matches the scale of emissions arising from deforestation.

Much of the charcoal imported into the UK every year comes from unsustainable sources

So here’s a thought. The UK Trade statistics show that, of the 50 thousand tonnes or so of charcoal imported in 2008, more than 25 thousand tonnes appear to have originated from sub-Saharan Africa. It takes four tonnes of air dried wood to produce one tonne of high quality charcoal, so round 100 thousand tonnes of African wood were used up last year just to keep our barbecues burning.

Whilst there is much merit in using woodfuel — especially when the alternative is foosil fuel, such as gas — harvesting must be sustainable. UK-produced charcoal is increasingly available, and is widely recognised for its superior burning attributes.

So here’s the easy way to help preserve the tropical forest carbon sinks — when (or if!) the sun shines and you fire up the barbie, make sure you’re cooking on British charcoal!

Bon appetit.

Source: Lewis SL et al (2009) Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests. Nature doi: 10.1038/nature07771

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