 So RED is an international mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries. Forest emissions represent between 12 and 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. And in 2005, the Coalition of Rainforest countries came to the UN SCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and proposed an international program with support from developed countries to support developing countries reduce emissions from this major source of greenhouse gas emissions in their own countries. Not necessarily, it's not set up as a compensation scheme necessarily. There are some people that are formulating it that way, some groups are trying to formulate it that way. Others are looking at it more as assistance. This is something that developing countries want to accomplish, and they're looking for technical assistance as well as financial assistance from developed countries to be able to do this. One of the technical challenges to implementing RED is determining what your impact is. How much have you reduced your deforestation emissions? In order to do that, you have to be able to quantify carbon in your ecosystems. You have to be able to quantify the transfer of carbon and other greenhouse gases from your ecosystems to the atmosphere. This is technically challenging, particularly in countries where you don't necessarily have forest inventories. They go back over time, so you don't know how has the growing stock in forest changed historically, and then have we actually made a change in the trend from what was, if we project from the past into the future, have we actually made a change in this trend or not, or are we still doing business as usual? We need to be able to quantify this. So it's technically complicated to determine how much area has been deforested, but also, more importantly, how much carbon from the area that's been deforested ends up in the atmosphere. And that's where our work in the peatlands in particular is very important right now. Peatlands are some of the areas in Southeast Asia that are changing the most rapidly, and we know the least about the carbon density. And the reason that it's difficult is because emissions are persistent from peatlands. If you drain peat, you expose what was otherwise protected because flooded peat is anaerobic. There's no oxygen there. The microbes have problems decomposing the peat. Once you drain it, and it becomes an oxic environment, the microbes can decompose the peat. And every year that it's drained, an additional 8, 10, 12 tons of carbon per hectare goes from the peat to the atmosphere. And so what we're trying to do is nail down those numbers and come up with proxies or general numbers or ways of differentiating so that a developing country that wants to implement an inventory and isn't going to go out there and measure the carbon loss in each particular ecosystem can come up with some interesting proxies and say, well, we think we're losing 5 tons for these ecosystems because we're managing it this way. We're losing 10 tons from these ecosystems because we're managing it this way. So we're trying to come up with these numbers that countries can use to better quantify what's the effect of changing forest cover and changing land management in these peatlands on the atmosphere. So mangroves are an interesting case because there's such a rapid rate of deforestation, particularly here in Southeast Asia. We figure we're losing... We've already lost probably about 60 or 70% of the mangroves and we're losing them at 3 to 4% of the remaining mangroves per year. These mangroves have very, very deep sediments that are buried carbon for a long time. And once you remove the vegetation, those sediments begin to erode and that carbon gets re-suspended in the water column in the coastal zones and can oxidize and then be transferred to the atmosphere. So much, much larger stores of carbon than we have in, say, tropical forest in the uplands or what we would normally think of as a tropical rainforest. We have 6, 8, 10 times as much carbon in these mangroves as we have in these types of forests. So there's an awful lot that gets mobilized and then transferred back to the atmosphere. Once you remove the vegetation, start doing other things in these mangroves. It's particularly important to understand the carbon emissions from these because these ecosystems make such a large contribution to the national emissions from Indonesia, from Malaysia, from other countries here in Southeast Asia. If you're going to be able to figure out what is the total emissions and then determine what are the emissions reductions, you have to understand what's happening in these ecosystems. If you don't understand what's happening in these ecosystems, you're missing maybe 20, 30, 40% of the whole story from these countries. A couple of reasons these ecosystems are being cut down because most of the population in these countries lives near the coast and these ecosystems are all lowland coastal areas. The peatlands are sort of the freshwater side, the mangroves are the saltwater side. So there's a lot of people living there and population is growing so there's a lot of pressure on these ecosystems. These ecosystems also traditionally have been wastelands, places where people don't want to go. So people have been farming on the mineral soils and trying to stay away from these ecosystems because they're inhospitable, they're full of mosquitoes, they're full of dangerous animals, there's tigers, there's orangutans, there's a lot of problems trying to work in these areas and they're wet so they're not really pleasant ecosystems to spend a lot of time in. But as population pressure grows and as technologies become available to convert these ecosystems and use them for economic purposes, there's been more and more pressure to move on to these lands. And the other thing with these lands is that there's not a traditional ownership, so there's uncontested ownership. They belong to the state so you can get a concession and go in there and you don't have to fight with other people who might have claims to the land. So the idea behind carbon debt is that once you deforest an area, you've created large emissions. Now if you're going to do activities on that area and try and claim emissions reductions, you actually have to first pay off that debt. The first set of emissions that came about from clearing the forest, from converting those lands to this new land use. These carbon debts can take several decades to several centuries to pay off. In the case of peatlands or mangroves, the amount of carbon that's released by any other activity that you put on that land to try and reduce emissions, it would take you at least 100 to 200, 250 years to repay that carbon debt. So it's a big part of the equation. If you're going to do things to reduce emissions or the impact on the atmosphere, you have to understand what's the total impact of your system on the atmosphere, not just take one part that you care to look at. You have to do a full life cycle analysis and you have to account for the emissions that were created as you converted this ecosystem and created your new ecosystem, not just what you're able to sequester or remove from the atmosphere by this new ecosystem. So for example, in Sumatra there's an awful lot of conversion of peatlands to produce oil palm. The oil from palm can be used as biodiesel and this biodiesel is being sold as a biofuel, it's green, it can help reduce fossil fuel emissions. But the case of peatlands in particular, you have a very large biomass that you remove but then you go on and you emit 8 to 10 tons of carbon per hectare every year that you're producing oil palm on there from the peat decomposition. You have to then balance that against what's the fossil fuel offset. If you don't balance it, you are having a negative impact on the atmosphere while you're telling yourself that you're actually having a positive impact on the atmosphere by not burning fossil fuels. And the atmosphere doesn't really care where the carbon comes from. If it comes from fossil fuels, if it comes from peat, it's still carbon in the atmosphere and you still get the global warming. This research is particularly important for policy makers and for decision makers because understanding the carbon emissions is fundamental to actually having an impact on the atmosphere. If you undertake policy processes or make policy decisions and you don't actually quantify what's the impact on your atmosphere, you could have unintended consequences. You could be telling yourself that you're actually having a positive impact when you're not. By doing this research, by putting real numbers on this and understanding the uncertainty around these numbers, because sometimes the uncertainty is even more important than what the number is, you can figure out your level of confidence that what you're doing through your policy processes, what you're doing through your improved practices are having an impact on the atmosphere. Specifically for red, this is going to continue to be important because this is going to help us over the next 7 to 10 years remove the obstacle of greenhouse gas inventories and carbon accounting from all the obstacles that there are to implementing red effectively. This is a technical obstacle that we can solve or make significant progress on in the next 7 to 10 years. Continuing this research is going to be important to address the technical constraint of accounting for your emissions but also targeting your interventions so you get the most bang for the buck. When you invest some money, you're actually investing in the highest emissions reduction possible or the lowest cost emissions reduction possible.