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The CGD Podcast
Protecting Forests with Global Forest Watch 2.0 – David Wheeler and Nigel Sizer
00:25:24
My guests on this week’s Wonkcast are David Wheeler, senior fellow emeritus at CGD, and Nigel Sizer, director of the Global Forest Project at the World Resources Institute (WRI). They joined me after a presentation for CGD staff of Global Forest...
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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Global Prosperity wonkcast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald and I'm delighted to welcome to the studio today my old friend David Wheeler, now senior Fellow Emeritus here at the center for Global Development and Nigel Sizer, he's the director of the Global Forests Project at the World Resources Institute. We had the pleasure of having you both here recently for an update on Global Forest Watch 2.0, which is a project at the World Resources Institute that draws on, among other things, work, David, that you led here, forest Monitoring for Action, what we call forma, which uses satellite data to give near real time updates on the status of the forests. I must say I learned a lot. It was very exciting and I'm delighted to have you both on the show. Nigel, why don't you start? Why should people care about forests in the context of climate change?
- [01:09]
B
Well, forests are extremely significant when it comes to climate change. Forest loss and degradation of forest accounts for a significant percentage of global greenhouse emissions, somewhere in the range of 10 to 15%, depending on which study you read. So if we're going to reduce emissions, as basically the scientific community says we must, to 90% below current levels, clearly that's one of the things we have to deal with as well as many other things. It's also one of the things that as we deal with it, has many other co benefits as well. Social benefits in terms of things like food security, enabling local communities to be better adapted to climate change, securing local livelihoods, conservation of biodiversity and other ecosystem services like watershed management and so on, all also depend upon maintaining healthy forests around the world.
- [02:05]
A
I've heard it said that unlike other challenges in reducing the emissions of heat, trapping gases, that forests ought to be relatively simple. If you want to reduce emissions from burning coal, you need to change what you're doing and produce power in some other way. If you want to reduce emissions from forest loss, all you have to do is stop doing something. You don't have to do something else instead. But perhaps that's an oversimplification.
- [02:31]
B
Unfortunately it is. I think people were optimistic that this was going to be one of the lowest costs and simple pieces of the solution set for greenhouse gas emissions. What anyone knows who works on forest issues on the ground, is that what you're actually dealing with if you really want to change those dynamics is complex issues of governance. You're dealing with access to resources, property rights, transparency, corruption, dysfunctional institutions, how different ministries coordinate with each other, and so on. So what appears simple on the surface actually is not simple practice.
- [03:16]
A
Give us a quick overview of what the Global Forest Watch program does and will do.
- [03:23]
B
So Global Forest Watch 2.0 is a new initiative that we're launching around June this year that builds on 15 years of work that WRI and many other organizations have been doing trying to track what is happening to forests worldwide. What we can now do with new technology, improved satellite data, enhanced computing power that enables large amounts of data to be processed very quickly and at very low cost, and of course, a tremendously powerful Internet that's out there now, enabling us to share data around the world in an instant. What we can now do basically is bring that technology together and enable everybody around the world to have access to, to very, very up to date information about what is happening to forests everywhere. So, for example, building in part on the work that the center for Global Development has done, we're able to display an updated map, if you like, of the world's forest, showing where clearing is taking place, updated every 16 days. And this is in contrast with what's currently available to decision makers and activists and investors and so on. If you want to know what the state of Indonesia's forest is, or the state of the forests in the Congo or in Canada, you're going to be taken to websites and reports that are presenting data that's typically three to five years out of date or even worse. So with the new technology, we can go from years out of date to updated on almost a daily basis.
- [04:59]
A
Now, David, maybe that's an appropriate point to bring you into the conversation. Tell me about your initial interest in getting involved in providing the forest monitoring for action data. What led you to think that it would be possible to get these every 16 day updates?
- [05:21]
C
Lawrence, it's for me an interesting piece of personal and professional history which really began during my career in the World bank when I led a policy research team that was interested in how you would use public disclosure and public information to improve environmental performance. And we had some very interesting and occasionally successful ventures in trying to do public disclosure in artful ways on the industrial pollution front. And when I got to the center for Global Development having started to work on climate change, it occurred to me and my colleagues that some of the same techniques might be useful on the forest front. But we quickly realized after starting the work that the appropriate data, which had to be timely, were not available. So we set about trying to create the data set that would feed the activity that we wanted to undertake.
- [06:11]
A
One of the things that interest me in watching you work over the years is that very often you'll look at A problem. You'll say the data that's being used is woefully inadequate to the task. And then you'll kind of go data prospecting. You find data out there that has not previously been accessible or needs to be prepared in some way, and then you bring it to the forefront. The same pattern happened with Forma where you found all this satellite data.
- [06:43]
C
Well, my colleagues and I have always operated on the principle that the relevant information is probably out there somewhere in either public or private hands. And the key to moving forward is to locate the information and then try to negotiate an arrangement with the proprietors in the public interest to reveal the essence of that information that will be useful in a sector like the forests. And in this case, as it turned out, and as my colleagues in the forest side knew quite well, there was such a satellite data set, but it had never been mobilized in this way for this purpose. And so we set about doing that.
- [07:17]
A
We're going to take our first break. When we come back, I want to ask you what you've learned in what I guess is now the second major update of the former report and the implications of that for the work that Nigel and his colleagues are doing at the World Resources Institute. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global Development. We'll be back in a bit. Welcome back, the Global Prosperity Wonkcast. From the center for Global development, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. My guests today are David Wheeler, senior Fellow Emeritus here at CGD and Nigel Sizer from the World Resources Institute. David, before I ask about the findings from the new Forma update, there's a piece of the data gathering that I always find incredibly clever, which is basically tropical forests are green and the satellites are picking up colors. So when you want to know if a forest is still there or not, you're looking at a change in the color. Is that the case?
- [08:35]
C
That really is the case, Lawrence. Broadly speaking, it's quite amazing to see the information that is actually gathered by the satellites that NASA and other institutions have in orbit all the time. They're constantly sending down troves of data which are useful not only for forest analysis, but a tremendous number of other kinds of analysis that relate to changing landscapes. And in this particular case it is changes in the color spectrum as those relate to forest change that provide the key for mobilizing the data.
- [09:07]
A
During the presentation last week here you put up some really alarming slides showing the alerts generated by the system, including in so called or presumably protected areas in some of the very Large national parks in tropical countries where you could see incursions with industrial scale logging along rivers. When I looked at the report which we've now posted on the website, I said, I think we need a title for this. And it was bad news for the Pantropics and everybody else was, I think, along the lines of what I suggested. And you said, yeah, that's absolutely right.
- [09:48]
C
You know, I think it's most useful to think about forest clearing as a problem in development economics because the forest changes as markets change. People clear land not for its own sake, but as an investment because they intend to convert that land to other economic uses. And we were all quite hopeful two or three years ago when we first began the FORMA project, because we saw forest clearing starting to decline in a lot of countries. That was in 2009, 2010, and we were quite hopeful that we were looking at a trend. But of course, we were looking at the early stages of the global economic crisis where demand for many products contracted and that changed people's perspective about the economic desirability of clearing the forest. Unfortunately, since then, as you said, the global economy is recovering and forest clearing has come right back as a response to increased demand for forest products.
- [10:39]
A
Nigel, what does this news mean for your efforts at the World Resources Institute, that of you and your colleagues and your friends and allies and supporters in the developing world. Are you going to be able to make a dent in a problem of this size using Global Forest Watch 2.0?
- [10:58]
B
Well, time will tell. We're just beginning this journey, but we are confident that Global Forestwatch 2.0 has the potential to be a game changer. It fundamentally addresses a key component of governance, which is transparency, access to information, enabling people to communicate with each other around an agreed set of consistent information about what's going on. If you come to what David was just saying, using former and the work that he has developed that we're integrating into the system, we are now able to see, as they emerge, new global patterns of forest loss. Up to this point, we would have picked that up potentially several years after the fact. So development agencies, governments, business, civil society and others can shift their strategies and mobilize in different ways as they see, for example, that while Brazil's rates of forest loss may be dropping dramatically, in many of the countries around Brazil, those rates may be increasing dramatically and the two may well be connected. And why is that? And how is that happening? How is that linked to the broader economy? How is it linked to patterns of investment and demand for commodities? And what can be done about each of those different pieces of the problem, and there are solutions to each of those pieces of the problem. So as you get a clearer picture of what's going on and why it's happening, I think you have a better chance of addressing it. If you don't know what's going on or why, you've got a very slim chance of actually being able to do something about it.
- [12:33]
A
I'm interested that you mentioned Brazil, because in the charts that David produced with the color coding of the alerts, it's pretty clear that Brazil has a lot more green dots than other countries. And there's maybe a sort of a chicken and egg question here in that. My understanding from you and David is that Brazil has long had a pretty good monitoring system in place. They do have the information to know where incursions are happening to the forest and they can respond. Do they have that data capability because they care, or are they responding because they have the data? Once we, you and David, provide similar quality data to other countries, are they going to become more like Brazil, or did Brazil decide to do this and therefore they put the data in place?
- [13:24]
B
Our clear sense is it's a combination of the two. So certainly some NGOs, and I'd particularly highlight the work of Imazon, who are our partner there with Global Forest Watch 2.0, have pioneered ensuring that data is available in the public sphere. And pressure on government has resulted from that. At the same time, and before that, even to some extent, the Brazilian government itself took steps to invest substantial resources in their own satellite and monitoring systems so that they could see what was going on. They're now much better at releasing that data into the public sphere than they were. And we've also seen, I think, a clear shift in leadership with people moving up over the last 20 years in the Brazilian administration into very senior positions who are very, very serious about addressing these problems. So despite some recent concerns and issues around legislation in Brazil, which some of your listeners might be aware of, the long term trend is, I think, a serious level of leadership and commitment on this issue. So the two have worked together in Brazil. In other countries it might be more difficult, but I think getting the information out there perhaps helps catalyze that process. That's our hope for sure. And there's evidence to support that, including from David's own work with pollution and emissions from pollution.
- [14:52]
A
We're going to take our second break. When we come back for the final piece of the show, I want to turn to the question of whether it's possible for funders in the north to make payments to tropical countries to encourage the conservation of tropical forests. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global Development. We'll be back in just a bit.
- [15:26]
B
Sam.
- [15:55]
A
Welcome back to the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global development, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. My guest today, Nigel Sizer of the World Resources Institute and David Wheeler, Senior Fellow Emeritus here at cgd. When we thought we were going to have a global carbon price, it looked like there might be cap and trade in the United States. There was a lot of thinking that entities in the north that wanted to reduce their emissions might find that one way to do that was to offset their emissions by paying to protect forests in the South. Since then, that price did not materialize. The price of carbon, there is no global price. The price appears to be very low in Europe. Nonetheless, there continues to be interest by funders in the south, particularly from the Norwegians in pain to protect forests in the south. And there's a program, the United nations, reduced deforestation and degradation, goes by the name redd +david what do you see as the prospects of using this information about forest clearing to underpin a sort of pay for performance, pay for results approach where some funders in the north, whether it's with a global carbon price or just because of philanthropic motives, would pay to protect forests in the South?
- [17:21]
C
My own experience suggests that these kinds of financial incentives are always unexpectedly powerful because they put the financial decision on the desks of people who make decisions every day in government and the private sector, and in the case of the forest sector and what we call a forest conservation performance rating. The way we think about that is basically the way you think about evaluation in education. You establish a performance benchmark in education, you assign grades to different levels of performance relative to that benchmark. And for our program, we apply similar principles. We color code different performance levels and then the financial incentive part would come from financially rewarding performance which is above the norm, above the benchmark, and at the same time not rewarding performance which is below the benchmark. In some cases, you might even imagine charging some fee for performance below the benchmark, although that would be more difficult financially and in principle, that should provide incentives for improved performance. And I have to say, in all these environmental sectors where I have worked around the world, every time that has been tried, it has actually worked quite well.
- [18:31]
A
My understanding is that the payments that are being made now are the results of quite detailed and protracted negotiations, for example, between Norway and I guess Brazil, Guyana and Indonesia, if I'm not mistaken, or three of the countries that have been involved in that process. There's an alternative approach which I believe you have talked about, that is basically an open offer. Talk to us about the idea of making an open offer as opposed to negotiating freestanding individual agreements.
- [19:05]
C
This one's really quite simple in principle. The underlying idea is that we would like to make rapid progress toward very low levels of forest clearing. So the idea here is that for each country you would establish a timeline toward very low forest clearing in some future date, for example, in 2025 or 2050. And then over time you would watch progress toward that final goal. And to the extent that a country was performing at a level which would keep it on trend toward that final objective, you would provide open ended financial rewards for that. And if that weren't the case, then you wouldn't. And so over time, countries would then become used to the idea that if they stayed on track and performed as needed in their own governance structures and forest monitoring instructions to achieve this end, there would be compensation to people who have suffered losses from holding their forests intact that could be offered.
- [20:01]
A
So I wouldn't, if I'm the finance minister of a tropical country, need to enter into negotiations or in fact maybe even be aware of it at the end of the year or the end of the quarter, I might get notification that I did well this quarter or did well this year and therefore there's been, you know, there's a transfer available or there's money that I can collect for this. I imagine that I might suddenly start paying more attention to forests if that happened.
- [20:29]
C
If the sums were large, I think you would. The philosophy here is utter transparency. That is, the objectives are clear, they're publicly announced, the measurements are public and the financing is public. And so it's an open ended offer to all governments that have forest clearing problems and they could respond or not voluntarily. But in any case it could, if the sums were substantial, provide a very large inducement for improved performance.
- [20:56]
A
Nigel I want to bring it back to the Global Forest Watch 2.0 and it's in fact something David was mentioning during the break. What's the role of corporate sector and corporate incentives? We hear these pledges that Dunkin Donuts is going to stop using palm oil grown on cleared forest land. Is that stuff just window dressing or can that actually make a difference?
- [21:16]
B
It's serious stuff. And what's powerful here is that a company like Dunkin Donuts and there are several others actually much bigger than Dunkin Donuts that have made similar commitments. Companies like Walmart, Nestle, Unilever have said by such and such a date, we don't want deforestation occurring in the places where we're sourcing certain commodities. With Global Forest Watch, we can help them measure that, and we can help everybody listening to this and everybody out there see how well they're doing. So hold their feet to the fire. So these are very serious and measurable and monitorable commitments. And as time goes by, we'll be able to do a better and better job at seeing how they're doing.
- [21:57]
A
David, let's say that all the Fortune 500 corporations cleaned up their act and stopped sourcing things from cleared land. The Chinese are just going to come and vacuum it all up anyway, aren't they? I mean, but let's put this in a wider context. China's demand for commodities, its demand for wood is so big. Is a pledge by McDonald's going to have any big impact in the grand scheme of things?
- [22:24]
C
Well, I guess, Lawrence, there are two sides to that. The first is on the corporate side because Chinese firms are increasingly internationalized and increasingly subject to the same pressures that other firms experience. But, but on the political side, I think there's an important point here, and that is when hundreds of multinational corporations which are headquartered in the US And Western Europe and Japan and other developed countries suddenly begin performing appropriately on the environment, they begin backing political measures which will level the playing field by requiring others to also behave appropriately. And so that's an important leading indicator. When they step into this arena, those who might be inclined to behave otherwise will pay careful note because they will know that inevitably there will be political pressure for them to conform.
- [23:09]
A
I think I'm going to end it on that hopeful note. It's a field in which it's easy to be discouraged. I want to encourage our listeners to look at the latest report on the CGD website and to watch closely for the upcoming watch of Global Forest Watch 2.0 from the world Resources Institute, Nigel and David. Thanks very much for joining me on the show.
- [23:31]
C
Thanks, Lauren.
- [23:31]
B
Thank you.
- [23:32]
A
This has been the Global Prosperity Wonkcast from the center for Global Development. My guests today, Nigel Sizer of the World Resources Institute and David Wheeler, senior Fellow emeritus here at the center for Global Development. You can find the Wonkast online on itunes and on stitcher. Just search for wonkcast or CGD and subscribe to hear a new interview every week. Until next time, I'm Lawrence McDonald's. Thanks for listening.
- [24:20]
B
Sam.
- [24:49]
C
Sa Sam.