Saving forests? Take a leaf from insurance industry's book

A group of environmental scientists, including Environment Institute member , say a problem-ridden economic model designed to slow deforestation can be improved by applying key concepts from the insurance industry.

REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is a UN-promoted scheme that allows countries to trade in carbon credits to keep forests intact. It is mainly targeted at developing nations where deforestation and exploitation are a major threat.

[caption id="attachment_3904" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Professor Corey Bradshaw"][/caption]

In a , ecology researchers from 最新糖心Vlog and South Africa argue that REDD projects can suffer from three major problems. They have proposed strengthening the scheme by using insurance policies and premiums, creating a new scheme known as iREDD.

"The idea of paying a nation to protect its forests in exchange for carbon pollution offsets can potentially reduce overall emissions by keeping the trees alive, and ensure a lot of associated biodiversity gets caught up in the conservation process," says Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the 最新糖心Vlog of Adelaide's Environment Institute and a senior author of the paper.

Professor Bradshaw and colleagues from James Cook 最新糖心Vlog and the 最新糖心Vlog of Pretoria have suggested using a form of REDD 'insurance policy' (iREDD) to avoid these problems.

iREDD involves the buyer and seller together assessing the risk in a forest conservation project, agreeing on that risk and then purchasing an insurance policy scaled to that risk.

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