Paying People To Do Nothing

I know it sounds a little crazy - but I met a guy who is planning to do just that in Queensland. The idea is simply that you pay land owners not to clear their land and buy the carbon credits off them for not doing it. Mark Jackson (not Jacko) has done a lot of work with farmers and landowners in Queensland in the last couple of years - calculating their carbon stores, working with them and lawyers to draft appropriate land use agreements and selling their credits to companies who want to buy them. The outcome of this transaction is that the company who buys the credits then owns the plant life on the property for a given period; with appropriate safeguards and legal remedies should a future owner look to subsequently clear the land. I understand he is very close to announcing this publically.
The reason for the existence of this project was a clause in the Kyoto agreement signed back in 1997 which allowed developed countries with net land clearance emissions in the baseline year (1990 from memory) to claim avoided land clearing as a valid emission reduction. Australia was the only developed country that was a net land clearer in 1990. And for this reason Australia might meet its 108% of 1990 emissions target in 2012, but that is a discussion for another post.
Now while this is a little dodgy - the fact that the Australian government never ratified the treaty is probably dodgier. And the ramifications of the work that Mark is doing in Queensland is quite positive. This kind of project gives a clear direction to developing countries such as Brazil, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica - where avoided land clearance could give them a cheap source of emission reduction in the post-Kyoto carbon market. This would also be great for some of the other harder to measure aspects of avoided land clearance such as the halt in the loss of biodiversity in these regions.
However, as many of these regions are rainforest that are extremely carbon rich and the farmers who own this land are often very poor - this could become a very cheap source of carbon credits. Developed countries could then buy these cheap credits to offset their emissions from fossil fuel energy use and delay spending on more expensive measures such as renewable energy development (currently Kyoto-ratified developed countries can source emission reduction units from developing countries from projects such as methane capture and flaring, hydro electricity and wind-farms). This is one of the many issues to be ironed out before we reach a post-Kyoto agreement.