Environment and development – more than carbon capture (but that too!)

A study suggests that an agro-forestry project in Panama collects less carbon than it had originally hoped to. Though it should not be the responsibility of people – like those of Panama and Madagascar – who live in carbon sinks to collect carbon for the rest of the world, MfM and Malagasy people are doing so, even as they and we remember that there is more to development and environmental protection than carbon collection alone.

A PANAMA agroforestry project is revealing that MfM’s multi-layered approach to environmental protection and livelihoods may be more effective than those with a single focus.

Research in Ecological Solutions and Evidence Agroforestry versus native timber versus enrichment planting evaluates a ‘carbon capture’ programme in the eastern Panamanian rainforest.

The main findings of the study are that, some ten years into the 14-year project, it has resulted in a level of carbon capture greater than ‘the average for global carbon offset projects’ but lower than some other methods, including replanting forests with the original plants, or with selected plants designed to help fast regrowth.

It makes clear that agroforestry is far preferable option to doing nothing or of course to clearing areas of forest for other activities – a genuine temptation, sometimes a seeming necessity, to men, women and children living on or below the global poverty line.

But the study notes that the programme missed its carbon offset target, suggesting that reasons for this include the continued burning of wood, as well as forest fires which are a result of climate change for which, as with the Malagasy people, Panamanian people are among the world’s least responsible, even as they are forced to bear some of its worst impacts.

It also suggests that the crop many of the project’s participants chose to generate extra income – coffee – may not have been the best choice if the targeted outcome was carbon capture.

But some of its other findings were also important.

The project’s participants made clear decisions based upon which plants would help the return of native animal, bird and other plant species, which resulted in their local environment returning to close to its former levels of biodiversity and vibrancy, and simultaneously, their efforts improved soil quality, and enabled them to grow corn, rice and bananas, which would have been impossible before they began.

In part, one must judge a project on what it sets out to achieve, but one must also not forget the positive things it can do outside of them.

Madagascar and Panama share some common experience. Here, men, women and children face food shortage and poverty – 79.7 per cent of Malagasy people live on the global poverty baseline of £1.73 per day, or less – and these can drive people to attempt to remove parts of the forest to ‘free’ more land for food production.

Equally, as in Panama, Malagasy people are facing catastrophic results of a climate crisis they did not create – including loss of soil due to extraordinary heavy rain and floods, and droughts harming crops.

And both countries are in fact carbon sinks, meaning that not only are neither contributing to the climate crisis, they are actually two of only four states whose activities actively reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Money for Madagascar works, in our Resilient Forests and Livelihoods (RFL) programme, to help Malagasy people gain the skills and the equipment they need to increase food production, and incomes from other activities, and simultaneously protect their unique environment.

We know that although ‘collecting carbon’ is an admirable aim, and that our work does contribute to that goal, there is much more to work in the world’s vital ecological hotspots than that alone.

Our work has helped plant and animal species including blue coua birds, brown lemurs and many others return to regions from which they had been absent for decades.

Simultaneously, as part of the Solar United Madagascar consortium, helping Malagasy people learn about and access solar energy, we are helping reduce the amount of wood deliberately burnt by people in remote communities, not connected to the power grid. Our work reduces carbon outputs even in a country which already absorbs more carbon than it emits.

We know that our work does help increase carbon-storage through forest regrowth, and we help Malagasy people access and make choices that enable the agro-forestry they practice contribute further to this process.

It should not be the responsibility of Malagasy – or indeed Panamanian – people to ‘collect carbon’ other states are spewing into the atmosphere.

But even so, Malagasy people are proving, every day, that development and the environment need not clash and compete – that they can complement each other.

They are proving that there is more to ecological promotion and protection than carbon capture, even as they contribute to that, too.

And their work benefits not only themselves, their country and its unique and remarkable environment, but also every person, animal and plant, everywhere on the planet.

Our programmes work, and you can learn more with us, including how to help, here.