Hey, I'll be the judge of what's cool and what isn't

Last month Cool Green Science (the Nature Conservancy's blog, argued for a “free carbon-trading area of the Americas”—funneling a part of the revenue from a U.S. cap-and-trade system to Latin American forest conservation, and creating new carbon sinks in the process.

Now they have have estimated what 1% of such revenue could buy in terms of protected-area conservation in Brazil or Costa Rica (Part 2):

I began with an arbitrary assumption: that just 1 percent of anticipated revenue from Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade scheme would be dedicated to climate-change related projects in Latin America.

At an anticipated $647 billion over a decade in revenues overall, 1 percent works out at $647 million a year. What would $647 million a year buy you in Latin America, if you only spent it on things relevant to climate change?

...

$647 million would be enough to buy around 8,000 square miles of rainforest — about the size of New Jersey.

That’s actually a little misleading, since once you’ve bought the rainforest you still need to protect it and provide income and employment to the people who live there.  Usually we would calculate around 80 percent for capital costs of land acquisition, and 20 percent to fund permanent running costs — so let’s cut that to 6,400 square miles of protected Amazon rainforest a year. Over a decade, that’s still an area the size of South Dakota. Not bad for 1 percent.