If dangerous climate change is to be avoided, it is vital that important terrestrial carbon sinks such as rainforests are protected. But rainforests are currently vulnerable to a series of threats emanating from climatic change itself, from pollution, and from deliberate deforestation. Understandably, rainforest protection has received considerable political attention, but this has often foundered on the question of how the costs of protection should, if at all, be shared. These include direct costs, as when resources are spent developing alternative non-polluting technologies, or when forests are tended and replanted. They also include opportunity costs, as when an agent, in protecting forests, foregoes the benefits from economic development which might otherwise secured. If progress is to be made, it is a significant and pressing question how these costs ought to be allocated from the point of view of justice. Should the inhabitants of those states in which rainforests happen to be bear the costs of protection alone? Or would this be unjust, given that the benefits that rainforests provide are often enjoyed much more widely? Should the costs themselves be shared more widely? If so, on what basis?
This paper offers an argument, based on the principle of fairness, for international transfers in order to share the direct and opportunity costs of rainforest protection. The argument can be supported by both those who endorse the territorial rights of states over 'their' forests and those who are sceptical about such rights. Significantly, it suggests that as well as the transfers which theorists of global justice have envisaged (whereby those communities advantaged by the possession of valuable resources within their territories are obliged to compensate those without), justice, at least sometimes, demands that communities with precious resources should be compensated by others in order that the costs of protection are fairly shared.
