Cofan Rangers have halted deforestation within the 1,000,000+ acres of territory they patrol while nearby forests are being destroyed at a rate of more than 0.5% per year.

There is increasing global awareness that maintaining healthy forests in the world's greatest biodiversity hotspots clearly has a real monetary value to society, but putting an exact number on that value can be a real challenge.

If we were to add it up, the real value of the Cofan Park Guard program would be the sum of the economic values resulting from their contribution to:

• $ Biodiversity conservation
• $ Endangered species protection
• $ Watershed protection
• $ Erosion prevention
• $ Cultural preservation
• $ Prevented CO2 emissions

Of course, the calculation of each one of these values harbors its own international, decades-long, scientific, political and economic debate.

While we won't jump headfirst into the details of all of these values in this brief, we'll at least provide a basic idea of the number of zeros involved by taking a look at the final category: Prevented CO2 emissions by reducing deforestation.

Carbon is a hot topic these days as the planet heats up, glaciers and polar regions melt, and concerned humans scamper about trying to figure out how to get the CO2 and other greenhouse gases we've been pumping into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution back into the earth.

This new goal has resulted in a commercial market value for CO2, usually expressed as $/metric ton of CO2 equivalent.  The basic idea of market-based trading systems is that everyone starts with a certain number of credits based on their historic emissions, if you want to emit more CO2, you buy credits from other people.  If you don't emit CO2, you can sell your credits to others.  Emissions trading markets already exist at the level of large-scale businesses and utilities and voluntary carbon markets exist at the level of individuals and smaller environmentally-conscious businesses (Learn More about emissions trading).

Scientists calculate that almost 20% of the CO2 emissions on the planet come from deforestation and forest degradation (see below for details).  That is a lot of carbon and it places those who manage huge tracts of forest, like the Cofan, in an interesting position.

The Cofan Territories include over one million acres of intact forests in Northern Ecuador

Realizing its potential role in the carbon game, the Cofan Survival Fund has partnered with multiple organizations to understand just how big a player it is and how it all works.  After over a year of research, the Cofan now have an answer to the question: "What is the economic value of the carbon that the Cofan keep in the forests every year by preventing deforestation?"

Arriving at this number required serious science involving specialized scientific and economic teams for satellite image analysis, field measurements, literature reviews, crunching numbers, and arriving to a consensus about the calculations made and their resulting estimates.

The institutions involved in funding and undertaking the Cofan carbon work to date include:

• The Nature Conservancy
• The Global Conservation Fund - Conservation International
• USAID - The United States Agency for International Development
• University of California, Santa Barbara.  The Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara
• GeoPlaDes - A Geographic Information Systems Consulting Firm
• EcoDecision - An Environmental Economics Consulting Group

Funds invested in this important work total over $450,000 to date.

Below follows a basic summary of our results. Full reports are available at the bottom of the page.

Here's the Cofan carbon story, simplified and bulleted to make it easy to follow along:

• Deforestation and forest degradation on the planet account for 18.2% of global green house gas emissions in the form of CO2:

Click the image for a larger version and data citation references. Deforestation (Under "land-use change") is represented by the color green.

1996

The deforested area (shown in red) expanded massively during a 10 year period.  The striated pattern is created as deforestation follows road construction.  The Cofan Territory remained forested.

• Of course, the calculation is not that straightforward... since there are many different forest types in the Cofan territories and each would release a different amount of CO2 if deforested... also, each portion of their territory would be deforested at a different rate depending on its proximity to roads, population centers, etc... so things get complicated, but are still manageable.  So, the scientists went to work accounting for all that variability.

Below is the map showing all the ecosystem types in Northern Ecuador.  Click the map to enlarge.

Below is the resulting map of deforestation between (a) 1990 and (b) 2008 for all of Northern Ecuador. Map (c) shows the cumulative area that was deforested in blue. Click the figure to enlarge.

Join our Campaign for 5000 - Become a Sustaining Member of our Cofan Rangers and offset your own carbon emissions!