Aug 21 (Reuters) - The United States lags in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions but is a world leader in developing standards to give credits to forest owners who manage their trees to maximize carbon storage. Here is how forests could be included in a California, U.S. or international system for trading pollution credits: * Globally, forest credits are seen as a way to save threatened tropical forests, but in California, where 95 percent of old growth redwoods are gone, the goal is growing back what's been lost and managing young forests. * Debate over the mechanics of trading forest carbon has obstructed creation of a global system. California voluntary trade in forest credits is spurred by plans to start a regulated carbon trade market in 2012, which would include forest credits. Constantly developing rules for the voluntary market are expected to apply to the regulated one. * Generally forests could be a tradable type of "offset" to greenhouse gas emissions, since they suck up carbon dioxide. Under a cap-and-trade system, polluters face limits on how much they can emit. To meet those limits they can manage their own emissions, buy credits from companies who emit less than their cap, and buy offsets. * Creating a reliable forest offset is complex. The carbon saved must be additional to what would otherwise be, quantifiable, permanent, verifiable and enforceable. Enforceability over decades is fraught in a world where many nations have fuzzy rules of forest ownership, governments rise and fall, and legal systems vary in strength. In California there is a debate about who is responsible when a forest goes up in smoke, for instance -- the forest owner or the credit holder. Consensus is forming around requiring forest owners to keep reserves that collectively form an insurance pool for any forest which is devastated. (Reporting by Peter Henderson, Editing by Alan Elsner)
Tony Blair, former British prime minister and a partner of the environmental organisation The Climate Group, listens to a question during a media conference in Beijing August 20, 2009. China appears ...
