 Dan, I know that you've been working recently and speaking about the global land crisis. Could you just outline for us in general terms what the issues are and how this crisis is developing and unfolding now? I think if we look at something like the rising prices of commodities, which have really come up in recent years, we hear about them through food riots, through hunger, and what's behind that rise. And I think there are a number of things going on. And some of that, you know, basically the rise in demand for land-based production, including food, but also fuel, biofuels, and fiber, and feed for animal ration. That demand is growing faster than the demand in supply. And it's growing faster in large part because of the emerging economies which are moving closer to American or European-type lifestyles, and per capita consumption is getting a lot greater. The rise in supply, though, is limited because we're not getting the yield increases that we used to for several decades. We're sort of playing out the end of the Green Revolution and some of those gains. But there's also behind this a land shortage. You know, we're really running out for agricultural, room for agricultural expansion in the temperate zone. And that means that the remaining potential for expansion is largely in the tropics. So agriculture is running into species and culturally and carbon-rich forests that we refer to as the land crisis. And can you speak a little bit about what might be some possible solutions? Is red something that we should think of as leading toward a solution? When we look at the land crisis, the global land crisis, it seems that one thing that's missing is a shared agenda of change that cuts across the many constituencies that have a stake in this crisis. It ranges all the way from those who are focused on rural poverty alleviation to those focused on food security to those focused on water scarcity and aquacifer depletion to those focused on biodiversity loss and the loss of ecosystem services. Every one of those constituencies, if you would, is very concerned about fixing the global land crisis. And yet there is no shared agenda of change. In fact, I think red is an example of how, you know, something arises to fix one aspect of the land crisis, which is growing greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. And some of the other groups don't really see their agenda addressed by something like red. And so maybe that's a mistake we made with red. We defined the agenda too narrowly. We didn't really bring in the full range of people who are very, very concerned by climate change. Red of course is at a real crossroads. I think the expectations going into Copenhagen were not met. We all know that, that we didn't get to the global climate deal that would have basically created a single price signal for carbon that could have potentially led to a unified market for carbon that could have provided a very robust, long-term positive incentive for those regions in the world, those governments, those private actors that are actually lowering emissions from either deforestation, from forest degradation, or increasing uptake of carbon through growing new forests. So we're now in a very fragmented world as the hope for having this global treaty diminishes. I think we have to think very pragmatically about how this is going to move forward. I think it's clear that the 40-plus nations that are moving forward at some level with red is a sign that there's a real interest in this. I'd say that that interest is primarily one of red as a funding mechanism. It tends to stay within one secretary or ministry within the government. It's not a broadly shared agenda. It's sort of a prize to have some red funds come in. We need to go from that to where it really becomes the basis of the first step towards a new model of rural development, where we take the prospect of long-term funding for those nations that are either reducing their emissions or increasing their uptake of carbon as the foundation for this new development model that really gets to the water issues, the poverty alleviation issues, the food security issues, biodiversity, et cetera, that we need to address if we're really going to have a chance of preventing the worst and the most damaging aspects of the land crisis as we move forward. I think one of the real bright spots in red today that sort of expresses this plurality that we're moving into, you know, this fragmented series of advances is something called the Governor's Climate and Forest Task Force, which just met this week in central Kalimantan, brought together 15 governments, including California, which actually has a cap-and-trade policy that hopefully within a year or so we'll start to actually link up the potential for international offsets from industries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases in California and have to lower those greenhouse gases to comply with the new legislation with these tropical governments at the state and province level. It's a process that's three years old, and there's a lot of social capital. The relationships between the governments is strong. There's a lot of trust there. There's the possibility for the flexibility so that a central Kalimantan or an Ache or an Acre in Brazil can really design a rural development strategy that fits their own peculiar cultural and economic and political circumstances. It's something that's been harder, I think, with sort of the big UN framework. And I think another piece of the solution is really something that's taking place in the markets where with no connection to red, big industries, buyers of land-based production are basically seeing a lot of reputational risk if that production comes at the cost of tropical forests. They have moved to really want to exclude from their supply chains soy or palm oil or sugar, cotton. Now there's a process for beef that is part of that frontier expansion, and that's created a very interesting set of standards buy-in from the private sector that wants sort of a zero deforestation supply chain. And so I think there might be a big opportunity to merge those two. Are you, you started off speaking about sort of problems with food supply, you know, food prices. Could you just speak a little bit to how, what the connections might be between these possible solutions that certain red processes could offer, and how, and what role they might play in actually in moving us forward in the food security issues as well. Uh-huh. Yeah, right now I think there's a risk of a positive feedback, a vicious cycle between rising food prices, which means deep forest conversion to agriculture becomes more profitable, and that really weakens red. And as red grows weaker and the political will behind red diminishes, that feeds back making, you know, opening the floodgates for more deforestation. We're seeing the potential for that in Brazil right now in the Amazon region. I think here in Indonesia with palm oil is sort of another vivid example of the potential for that vicious cycle. Red could though be part of a virtuous cycle in which red today has not been very effective at engaging farmers. Uh, the round table transformation of the market, which is basically saying give us a more sustainable supply chain, that's what the market is saying, has engaged farmers. They're worried that they won't be able to sell to some of these markets. And there's programs today that are helping small holders around the world, for example, come into compliance with these new markets that could breathe life into red. So as these producers comply, there's experience that their yields come up, the efficiency of their production systems gets better, so the food security for those regions could start to get better. And that reinforces red, and then red provides really the performance-based funding in the long run that can help cover the costs of that compliance. So I think red, although it's tended to really focus on keeping really the mechanism and how you monitor it, and we spent a lot of time on that, an important time. Those are really big issues. We have yet to really effectively connect red with, you know, how these supply chains, these agricultural regions are beginning to change, to respond to changing market conditions. And I think in that is a lot of potential for beginning to secure food supplies. You voiced a good deal of optimism about red, and especially following this recent meeting in Palancaraya. Could you say a bit about what you're looking forward to in Durban? Is there something that we should be particularly looking forward to or particularly focused on as we move towards the next UN meeting in Durban? I think that the COPS, the conferences of the parties, provide a really important role of convening, of giving a chance for everyone to once a year come together and share perspectives on where things go. I think that we all want to see the UN deal succeed eventually, but maybe coming into Durban we really need to look very pragmatically at the fact that it's going to be a few years, maybe 10 years, who knows. And I think that we need to open up the debate and to look at some of the other initiatives that really are getting us towards mitigation of climate change in a way that's really helping agricultural communities and other stakeholders begin to adapt to climate change. So I think it's very fortuitous that it's in South Africa, and that six months later will have Rio Plus 20. I think there is the potential, despite the crumbling economies in Europe and globally, it's a real moment of pulling these different constituencies together to say we have a common cause here. Whether or not the COP is structured to achieve that, I'm not sure. But I think it'll be a really useful debate. And low expectations, I think, on major advances on the actual post-Cure to protocol deal. But who knows, maybe there will be some surprises. The leadership, I think, it's clear now has shifted away from Europe, away from the United States, certainly away from the United States to Brazil, and it has a very interesting emission reduction policy in its own commitment, and it's not asking really the world to fund that. It's moving towards that itself. China has begun to design its own climate change mitigation program with its own cap and trade. You see leadership coming from really the emerging economies, I think, more so than the industrialized nations. We're going to see a more prominent role for the governors, these subnational processes that have sort of been below the radar. They came out a little bit in Cancun, and I think now the governors are ready to show the world what they've been doing more. You mentioned Brazil, and of course Brazil's gotten a good deal of attention recently because of changes in deforestation rates, and it appears to be a real success in lowering rates of deforestation. Do you think this can be sustained? Are you confident that it can be? Brazil has really done something that ten years ago I think everyone would have said would be impossible, that is to lower deforestation in the Amazon by two-thirds in the course of five years, basically. We've looked at what caused that decline, at least through 2006, and it's clear that it wasn't just the government. The fact that the profitability of converting forests to soybeans went way down, sort of removed a lot of the economic muscle behind the previous surge in deforestation in the early part of the decade, in 2002-2004. But what we've found is that that economic signal is about half of that decline until that point in 2006. But other things like Brazil has increased by 50 percent the area of the Amazon under some form of formal protection, either indigenous lands or parks. That contributed maybe 38 percent. But then there are all these very interesting government interventions and market processes. There's a big moratorium on soy. The slaughter plants basically said following a campaign by Greenpeace that we don't want to buy any more beef that was raised on recently cleared lands. Ranchers and farmers today are very nervous about deforestation. Under Marina Silva and her successors there were a lot of people who went to jail, who received fines. There's a blacklist for those counties. There's a lot of money-seep use that are not doing well in controlling their deforestation. So local governments take great pride in getting off that list, and they get a lot of media coverage. But now I think we're at the critical inflection point, that those low prices have disappeared. There's a lot of economic incentive to further clear forests and put them into soy or cattle pasture. And so now is a critical time to see if those gains will really hold up. Farmers today in Brazil don't really believe that red is ever going to materialize. They've been waiting too long. And even these governments, you know, Mato Grosso and the infamous Blitomage, who won Golden Chainsaw of the year in 2005, left office with a 90 percent reduction in deforestation under his watch. And yet, Mato Grosso grew out its agricultural production. That is, production continued to increase during that period. So that demonstrates that maybe these things can be reconciled, that we can continue to increase food production, especially by expanding production on the immense areas of degraded pasture that are very low in their productivity, as we bring deforestation down even further. Against this, though, is a separate process, which is climate change. What could be, we're not sure, you know, the early signs of a change in climate. In 2010, we had the second drought of the century in five years. And Indigenous people had to replant their crops several times. There was huge issues of fire and the respiratory ailments that go along with basically smoke, dense smoke in your communities. Rivers drying up and people cut off from markets and schools and legal support and hospitals. A real crisis. So on top of this sort of economic cycle, now accommodated sort of more of a low deforestation trajectory, we've got the fact that the whole region is being shocked by droughts and the sort of fires that we saw in the C4 workshop in Pukalpa. You know, we're a lot more burning than had ever been seen, at least in recent times, and really changing the logic of the way farmers do their farming. And so we're coming into a very interesting period and we could be able to manage, we the broader, we could find ways to manage it. But I think that the markets will be a big part of this, as will getting some positive sign to both governments and farmers that red will actually produce some incentives. And these sort of catastrophic droughts and really devastating fires, do you see that as possibly early signs of something that you've written about and that you've sort of shocked the community with about talking about a possible dieback of the Amazon forest, the savantization of large areas of Amazonia? Should we still be really worried about that? Yeah, I think it's interesting, in 2000 in the Hague, the conference of the parties at which forests were basically removed from the climate and the Kyoto Protocol, there was a presentation by Peter Cox from the Hadley Center, which was the first sort of presentation in vivid map form of the forest dieback. And that was about 2080. It was a long way into the future. And what is frightening to me is that I think there is potential for that feedback and I think it's a lot closer than what we thought. We didn't imagine really that the northern tropical anomaly, tropical ocean anomaly, the Atlantic warming that leads us to a much different pattern of drought that we get with Enzo would become so prominent so quickly. And the climate dieback, as predicted by climatologists in the forest dieback, I should say, doesn't really deal with land use and with fire in some of the vicious cycles that can take place when agricultural practices that depend on fire lead to forest fire, which further weakens any tendency to get more towards permanent agroforestry systems or other types of production that do not depend on fire or are fire sensitive. So I think the forest dieback, we may be seeing the early signs of it in our own modeling efforts. We think that by 2030 probably about 50-60% of the forest of the Amazon will be either cleared or damaged by drought or damaged by fire or damaged by logging. And that's pretty close and it has huge implications for climate change because there would be about 20 billion tons of carbon that would go into the atmosphere under that scenario, which is about two years of global emissions.