Is Guyana trying to join the ‘carbon cowboys’ who hoodwink politicians and incautious citizens into paying for what Nature provides at no cost to humanity? Guyana’s natural tropical rainforests are in dynamic equilibrium. What they breathe in and photosynthesis by day, they mostly respire back to the atmosphere by night or lose through natural decay and death. If this was not so, we would have been born into a world covered in super-giant trees. No, trees reach a natural maximum size, they mature, and they die, just like humans. The former President of Colom-bia, Iván Duque Márquez, as reported by Kaieteur News on 27 July (‘Guyana’s forests could be worth as much as its oil, if carbon is fairly priced – former Colom-bian president’), appears to believe that trees in stable natural forest continue to suck in carbon dioxide far in excess of what the trees need for their own growth. It is a disappointing reflection on the low level of understanding by the technicians serving the recent Global Biodiversity Alliance Summit convened in George-town, that the Colombian politician was not disabused. Sale of forest carbon credits is legitimate only if there is a policy and associated activities to add more forest area, or accelerate the growth of trees beyond the natural rates in Guyana. Except for some very small experiments in the 1950s, and by the Dutch-funded Tropenbos Guyana programme in the 1990s, such acceleration has not been attempted in Guyana.
This is not to say that it could not happen here. And likewise the declining biodiversity could be reversed and improved, but it would require science-based policies and real field activities in place of hot air emitted at conferences. And why are we adding yet another biodiversity study centre (through a project with the Yale University Center for Biodiversity and Global Change) instead of making effective the study centre originally created with the Smithsonian Institution at the University of Guyana, and the biodiversity projects with Conservation International Guyana?
And what has Guyana got to show so far? Only the criminally fraudulent scheme through which the forest carbon credits in 2.3 million hectares of titled Amerindian Village Lands were stolen from the Amerindians, contrary to the Amerindian Act 2006, and sold by this government to the oil company Hess Corporation of the USA. Not a shining model for the rest of the world.
Yours truly,
Janette Bulkan
