Seeing Peru’s forests through the trees – Features – Al Jazeera English.
Puerto Maldonado, Peru – In an Amazonian timber yard bordering Bolivia and Brazil, Nelson Kroll names stacks of rough-hewn hardwoods, pointing out shihuahuaco and pumaquiro species freshly felled from select tracts of the Madreacre logging concession.
“In this campaign we’ve cut 39,000 cubic metres of round timber, which is about one tree every two hectares,” Kroll, head of the sustainable tree farm, told Al Jazeera.
But lining the floors of European and American households isn’t the private-public partnership’s only source of income. Madreacre earns up to $200,000 a year in carbon credits through emissions captured by its forest. The company gets paid to leave trees in the ground.
The concession is one of more than 40 Peruvian national projects involved in the UN initiative called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD+. Set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2005, the mechanism aims to cut emissions from deforestation in developing countries and promote sustainable forest management.
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