The Foreign Service Journal, February 2008

ed history and reached deep into the central Amazon. It is thought that this was a preview of what climate change could bring. Thus, maintenance of the Ama- zon rain machine will require enough forest to remain robust in the face of the triple threat of deforestation, El Niño and the 2005 type of drought. While there is no proof at this point, the deforestation threshold level must surely be much closer to 20 percent than 40. The Larger Picture All of this plays into the larger picture of forest and cli- mate change. For internal economic reasons alone, Brazil needs to move from deforestation targets to what some nongovernmental organizations now term “Zero Deforestation.” That is an enormous challenge and sim- ply cannot be undertaken with current resource levels. Were carbon payments for REDD to come into existence (on terms acceptable to or de- signed by Brazil), however, they would constitute a resource of suitable magnitude. This is an interesting, if slightly transform- ed, echo of the old view that the Amazon are the lungs of the world, obligating the world to pay for the oxygen they provide. We now know, of course, that the Amazon is at best only a tiny net producer of oxygen, and that, instead, it is car- bon (in the standing forest and the ability to further sequester CO 2 by existing forest and reforestation) that counts in the climate change equation. The principle is much the same, however. The Amazon provides an important ecosystem service in the global carbon cycle that REDD payments can both F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation was approved in principle at the recent U.N. conference in Bali.