Investing in the Environmental Services of Australian Forests

There is a growing recognition that forests have a key role to play in addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st century – global climate change, the conservation of biodiversity, and the reversal of land and water resource degradation. Yet forests continue to be lost and degraded, and opportunities for reforestation to address these key environmental issues are unrealized, largely because the value of environmental services provided by forests are not remunerated (Brand, 2001). However, the multilateral international negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have provided a major opportunity to price and trade an important environmental service from forests: carbon sequestration.