U.S., Brazilian and Indonesian Governors Urge Their Presidents to Include Forest Protection in Climate Change Policies
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and 10 other governors from the United States, Brazil and Indonesia are sending a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urging them to include forest protection in international and national climate change policies, according to Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5910GJ20091002).
The state governors represent California, Illinois, Wisconsin in the United States; Acre, Amapa, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Para in Brazil; and Aceh, East Kalimantan and Papua in Indonesia. They signed the letter during the Governors' Global Climate Summit 2 taking place in Los Angeles.
"It is a vital sign of leadership that California -- which has the world's seventh largest economy -- and states with half of the world's remaining tropical forests have joined forces to make living forests worth more than dead ones," said Steve Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy at Environmental Defense Fund. "Including forests in U.S. emissions control efforts will help achieve greater overall reductions at lower costs than would be possible without it."
The 11 states agreed on basic principles to allow reduced deforestation and degradation (REDD) to be used in the United States to meet targets for reducing global warming gas emissions. The principles establish a template for what may become the first compliance-grade REDD assets. The Waxman-Markey climate bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June includes provisions for the use of REDD in a national carbon market.
"REDD is one of the key issues on the agenda at the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December," concluded Schwartzman. "Many countries participating in the negotiations intend to agree on REDD policies, which could help developed and developing countries break the logjam holding up progress in the broader negotiation."
Deforestation accounts for 15-20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so forest preservation is vital in combating climate change. California and representatives from Brazil and Indonesia signed memos of understanding at last year's global climate summit. The memos called for using REDD strategies and projects that could help meet national and global emissions reductions goals, while sustaining local communities.
About Environmental Defense Fund
A leading national nonprofit organization, Environmental Defense Fund represents more than 700,000 members. Since 1967, Environmental Defense Fund has linked science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships to create breakthrough solutions to the most serious environmental problems. For more information, visit www.edf.org. Contacts: Lori Sinsley, (415) 308-6970 (m), lsinsley@edf.org Stephan Schwartzman, (202) 746-9201 (m), sschwartzman@edf.org
SOURCE Environmental Defense Fund
Carbon
+7 9 votes
ANALYSIS - Carbon firm highlights risk, appetite of forest credits
by Reuters News on 11 September 2009, 10:41 AM 2 comments , 1668 views Categories: Most Discussed, Analysis, Reuters News
* Firm hopes to sell A$1.6 billion in forest credits
* But market for such carbon credits small and uncertain
* Analysts point to delivery risk from forest carbon projects
By David Fogarty, Climate Change Correspondent, Asia
SINGAPORE, Sept 11 (Reuters) - An Australian firm hoping to broker A$1.6 billion in carbon credit sales from saving tropical forests highlights the promise and peril of a U.N.-backed scheme that rewards projects for curbing deforestation.
Carbon Planet, in presentations to investors, says it has contracted 100 million carbon offsets over five years from projects in Papua New Guinea and 60 million over five years from Indonesia at an average of A$10 ($8.5) each offset, or credit.
That equates to 160 million tonnes of carbon dioxide saved from being emitted by keeping the forests standing.
None of the 25 projects in PNG and 8 in Indonesia have yielded credits although the company, a carbon services provider, hopes credits will start to flow soon and says it has buyers.
But brokers and analysts say there is no appetite currently for that volume of "avoided deforestation" credits on the global voluntary carbon market, which is driven by demand from corporates wanting to offset their carbon emissions.
Demand worth potentially billions of dollars annually would only come from future national emissions trading schemes such as in the United States and Australia and an eventual global scheme backed by the United Nations, called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).
Analysts say giving large credit flow forecasts from REDD projects before they are audited or validated is fraught with risk if projects do not yield as many credits as forecast.
In addition, REDD's final design has not been decided by the U.N., it is unclear how the scheme will be included in national schemes or if early REDD projects will be included in the U.N. framework.
"People are contracting REDD as though it's on the verge of becoming a compliance market," said Martijn Wilder, head of Baker & McKenzie's global climate change and emissions trading practice, referring to markets that would allow REDD credits to meet mandatory emissions curbs in rich nations.
The United Nations hopes REDD will be included in a broader climate pact the world body wants to be agreed in December during a major meeting in Copenhagen. The idea is for a global REDD credit market to formally begin in 2013.
"We are using much more conservative figures when we are talking to our investors," said Darius Sarshar from New Forests, which is developing a large REDD project in Papua, Indonesia.
In Indonesia, there are an estimated 20 projects at various stages of development, the World Bank says.
"However, such engagement remains speculative, extremely expensive and has numerous challenges," said Wilder.
COMPLEXITY
This is particularly the case given the early stage of development of REDD and the complexity and time needed to develop REDD projects in developing countries.
"In terms of the forecast market demand of voluntary credits, it is by no way even up to the volumes that I've seen promoted as imminent from REDD projects," said Chris Halliwell, a senior emissions broker for TFS Green in Melbourne, Australia.
"There seems to be a mark-to-market valuation but not really supply and demand analysis."
REDD holds the promise of unlocking billions of dollars in annual revenue to developing nations from carbon offset sales to wealthy countries.
The scheme is designed to curb deforestation and restore the world's tropical forests so they can soak up growing amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
But REDD projects must provide funds for local communities, prove they are designed to address local causes of deforestation, ensure they are long-term and be able to accurately calculate how much carbon the forest will lock away over several decades.
Such complex calculations take time. Proving who actually owns the carbon stock in a given area is also crucial.
Carbon Planet's projections seem daring if only because the entire value of the world's voluntary carbon market was US$705 million in 2008, up from US$335 million in 2007, according to "State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2009" by Ecosystem Marketplace and analysts New Carbon Finance.
Of this, global sales of "avoided deforestation" credits were just one percent of turnover.
Carbon Planet Founder Dave Sag told Reuters the A$600 million in revenues over five years from Indonesia was "based on a very conservative estimated yield of 12 million tonnes per annum".
"I understand that people have concerns about our projections. Anyone would given the scale of them. But the numbers to us do not seem unrealistic."
TOUGH STANDARDS
Sag said the projects would meet tough yardsticks -- such as the respected Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and Climate, Community and Biodiversity Project Design Standards -- and the firm was looking more to future compliance markets.
"That's why we are busting a gut to make sure that these projects are produced properly."
But large markets that will accept large volumes of REDD credits are several years away. And many developing nations have yet to develop rules governing REDD, adding to uncertainty.
Another REDD project developer in Indonesia said it was crucial to prove to investors that protecting an area of forest actually curbs deforestation and therefore emissions.
"You are basically doing projects and drafting legal agreements in the absence of any rules," said Wilder.
"From our point of view, doing a REDD project is similar to other long-term infrastructure projects in the sense that the legal foundations have to be beyond reproach," he added.
Sag says REDD credits will soon start to flow from its projects, starting later this year with 10 million VCS-standard credits from Kamula Doso rainforest in Papua New Guinea.
The company has signed a deal with a firm called Nupan, which represents the 52 land-owner groups in the 800,000 ha (2 million acres) reserve who are the legal owners of the "carbon stock".
He denies Carbon Planet is playing fast and loose with its projections, saying investors want to know the numbers.
"I am the confident the credits will start walking out the door pretty soon. We have buyers lined up."
(Additional reporting by Sunanda Creagh in JAKARTA; Editing by Michael Urquhart) ((david.fogarty@thomsonreuters.com; +65 6403 5662; Reuters Messaging: david.fogarty.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: CARBON FORESTS/DEMAND
Carbon
+1 1 vote
FACTBOX-Climate change costs, offers to pay
by Reuters News on 07 October 2009, 17:49 PM 0 comments , 6 views Categories: Reuters News
(Updates World Bank and IEA estimates)
Oct 7 (Reuters) - Countries are deadlocked on how to share the cost of fighting climate change in U.N.-led talks meant to agree a new climate pact in Copenhagen in December.
Delegates from about 180 countries are meeting in Bangkok to try and drive momentum towards a deal. [ID:nSP457708]
Climate costs are calculated as the money needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and also prepare for more droughts and floods -- called "mitigation" and "adaptation" respectively.
Mexico reiterated on Wednesday its plan for a global fund, with individual donations calculated according to countries' wealth and contribution to global warming. [ID:nSP388133]
Estimates follow of the size of funds needed, proposals on how to raise these, and offers so far.
HOW MUCH MONEY NEEDED
1. Mitigation
* $525 billion per year extra energy investment 2010-2030 for tough carbon cuts -- International Energy Agency
* that total would be reduced to $95 billion per year after including fuel savings -- IEA [ID:nL6231420]
* 530-810 billion euros ($778-1,189 billion) per year extra investment 2020-2030 -- McKinsey
2. Adaptation
* $100-150 billion per year by 2030 globally for early weather warnings, flood prevention, irrigation -- International Institute for Environment and Development
* $75-100 billion per year from 2010-2050 -- World Bank
3. How much rich should pay developing countries
* 100 billion euros ($147 billion) per year by 2020 -- European Commission [ID:nLA157955]
* $140 billion per year by 2020 -- Greenpeace
PROPOSALS ON HOW TO RAISE MONEY
1. Norwegian proposal
* Set quotas of greenhouse gas emissions permits for rich nations for 2013-2020 of which 2 percent would be sold to them to raise funds
* Could raise $15-25 billion per year
2. Mexican proposal
* Raise an international fund from all nations, based on their responsibility for causing climate change, national wealth and population
* Could initially raise $10 billion per year
3. European Commission proposal
* Expansion of carbon markets whereby rich countries earn rights to pollute by paying for emissions cuts in the South
* Could raise up to 38 billion euros per year
4. Least Developed Countries' proposal -- Levy on international jet and shipping fuels.
* Could raise $28 billion per year
CLIMATE FUNDS ALREADY ON THE TABLE 1. Germany -- Is raising about 120 million euros per year in climate funds for developing countries from selling pollution permits to industry
2. Global adaptation fund -- Raised from a 2 percent levy on the global carbon market. Valued at just 83 million euros so far
3. World Bank's climate investment funds for developing nations -- pledges of over $6.1 billion from rich countries
4. Norway funds to slow deforestation -- Will provide up to 3 billion crowns ($510 million) a year to combat deforestation. Has committed 700 million ($119 million) to an Amazon fund -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ ((For a TAKE A LOOK on the politics, economics and markets of climate change click on [nCLIMATE])) (Reporting by Gerard Wynn) ((gerard.wynn@reuters.com; +44 207 542 2302))
Keywords: CLIMATE/COSTS
Carbon
0 0 votes
RPT-U.S. energy bill needs carbon cap-Obama aide
by Reuters News on 07 October 2009, 19:24 PM 0 comments , 3 views Categories: Reuters News
(Repeats to fix typo in headline)
* White House's Browner urges cap-and-trade system
* US must do more than just support renewable energy
* Will "manage in Copenhagen" if no energy bill finalized
By Ayesha Rascoe
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - It would be a "big mistake" for the U.S. Congress to approve an energy bill this year without placing a cap on greenhouse emissions, the White House's top climate and energy adviser said on Wednesday.
"We think that would be a big mistake," Carol Browner told business leaders at a clean energy forum. "I think you have to keep these programs coordinated because they do impact with each other."
With climate change legislation facing a tough road to passage in the Senate, some lawmakers have suggested the chamber should instead focus on moving less controversial legislation that would just support renewable energy.
Both the House and Senate bills center around a cap-and-trade system that limits carbon emissions. Companies would need permits for every ton of carbon pollution they release into the atmosphere. Utilities and factories that don't use all their permits could trade, or sell them, to companies that need more. [ID:nCLIMATE]
Browner played down the significance of having a climate change bill approved by both chambers and signed into law before international climate negotiations begin in Copenhagen in December to try to hammer out an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto protocol on fighting climate change.
"We will manage in Copenhagen wherever we are in the process," Browner said.
The House passed legislation earlier this year that would limit greenhouse emissions by requiring companies to acquire permits for the carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere. [ID:nN26325128]
After several delays, Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer last week unveiled their climate bill that calls for a 20 percent reduction in smokestack emissions by 2020 from 2005 levels. [ID:nN30212120]
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he hopes to combine the climate bill with a comprehensive energy package approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee earlier this year.
But some moderate Senate Democrats have said they would prefer to simply pass the energy package, which would require utilities to generate more electricity from renewable sources and allow more oil and gas drilling off Florida's Gulf coast.
Any climate legislation in the Senate likely faces an uphill battle, as lawmakers from heavy industrial states in both parties have raised concerns about burdening companies with additional energy costs.
Lawmakers must also contend with a crowded legislative calendar, that also includes healthcare and financial reform.
(Editing by Lisa Shumaker) ((ayesha.rascoe@thomsonreuters.com; +1 202 310 5683; Reuters Messaging: ayesha.rascoe.reuters.com@reuters.net)) ((For help: Click "Contact Us" in your desk top, click here [HELP] or call 1-800-738-8377 for Reuters Products and 1-888-463-3383 for Thomson products; For client training: training.americas@thomsonreuters.com ; +1 646-223-5546)) Keywords: USA CLIMATE/ENERGY
Carbon CalendarTM - Regulatory
28 September - 9 October 2009
7th Session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action and 9th Session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties to the Protocol.
Official negotiations on the implementation of the Bali roadmap and the development of a post-2012 system.
Bangkok, Thailand
5 October 2009
U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee holds hearings on proposed cap-and-trade bill.
The EPW is expected to hold hearings all week into proposed cap-and-trade legislation.
Washington, D.C.
6 October 2009
European Parliament considers carbon leakage regulations.
The Parliament's environment committee will consider the Commission's draft list of those sectors vulnerable to carbon leakage as proposed by the European Commission.
Brussels, Belgium
7 October 2009
California AB 32 cap-and-trade meeting.
The Economic and Allocation Advisory Committee meets to discuss allocation of allowances in a state-wide cap-and-trade scheme.
San Francisco, USA
7-9 October 2009
ICAO meeting on aviation and climate change
The meeting will review the Programme of Action recommended by the Group on International Aviation and Climate Change (GIACC) for action by the aviation sector on climate change.
Montreal, Canada
10 October 2009
EU Working Party on International Environment Issues (WPIEI) meeting on climate change.
Meeting to discuss the outcome of the UNFCCC negotiations in Bangkok.
Bangkok, Thailand
11-12 October 2009
Seventh meeting of the Enforcement Branch of the UNFCCC Compliance Committee
Bangkok, Thailand
12 October 2009
Seventh meeting of the Facilitative Branch of the UNFCCC Compliance Committee
Bangkok, Thailand
12 October 2009
U.S. Senate starts "mark-up" of proposed climate legislation.
The Environment & Public Works Committee and other lead committees are scheduled to start "mark-up" of proposed c limate legislation this week.
Washington, D.C.
13 October 2009
Sixth Meeting of the Plenary of the UNFCCC Compliance Committee
Bangkok, Thailand
14-15 October 2009
International Energy Agency ministerial Meeting
The meeting will discuss global energy and environmental challenges, and will review the 2009 edition of the IEA World Energy Outlook, which is being published early to allow itrs consideration in advance of the Copenhagen talks.
Paris, France
Rabu, 07 Oktober 2009
Carbon news - clipping
Harapan rainforest raises hope amid overexploitation
Jon Afrizal , The Jakarta Post , Jambi Fri, 09/25/2009 12:19 PM National
Sumatra's low-plain forests are fast diminishing, currently measuring only 400,000 hectares. The main cause of the deforestation rampant illegal logging and clear-cutting, and if this prevails, experts warn, low-plain forests in Sumatra will likely be completely wiped out by 2010.
The Harapan rainforest, spanning 101,355 hectares and located in Jambi and South Sumatra provinces, is part of the remaining low-plain forests on the island.
It straddles the four regencies of Batanghari, Muarojambi and Sarolangun in Jambi, and Musi Banyuasin in South Sumatra.
The area is currently being reforested to replenish the damaged forests, formerly a timber concession.
"We're currently repairing the damaged ecosystem," said Harapan rainforest agency intern head Yusuf Cahyadin recently.
As part of the reforestation efforts, the agency will issue an outright cessation on logging in the area, or at least a 20-year moratorium.
This, Yusuf said, will allow the forest to be densely wooded once again.
The ban will not affect local communities that live off the forest, particularly the Anak Dalam and Bathin IX tribes that use non-timber products such as rattan and resin.
Communities living near the forest will also stand to benefit, Yusuf says, by growing rubber, for instance.
"We're currently initiating a community-based forest through an agreement between forest caretakers and local residents, in the hopes that they can also protect the forest," he said.
He added 30 percent of the forest has been damaged through clear-cutting, particularly for oil palm plantations.
"Oil palms are not suited to the forest," he pointed out.
In Jambi province, the problem of clear-cutting of forests for farmland has been underway now on a large scale.
Jambi has a total area of 5,100,000 hectares; around half of that, or 2,482,315 hectares, are forested areas, stretching from the Kerinci Seblat National Park in the west, to the Berbak National Park in the east.
"Forests function as water catchment areas as well as homes for wildlife and plant species," said Arief Munandar, head of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment's (Walhi) Jambi branch.
However, the area's natural bounty has gone to waste under poor forest management that has hastened the rate of environmental destruction, Arief said.
He added the widespread deforestation can be blamed on the Forestry Ministry's policies, which favor investment over conservation.
The ministry has issued permitted a host of state and private companies to clear large swaths of forest to make way for hectare upon unending hectare of oil palms and rubber trees.
The total current timber concession area in the province is 487,249 hectares, while the area of forest cleared for oil palm estates is 403,467 hectares.
Notes from Bangkok
Bangkok, Day 5: Breaking News: Forests do not naturally grow in straight lines 1
Posted 3:25 AM on 2 Oct 2009by Margaret Swink
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Forest negotiations recently have been featuring a lot of talk about something called “sustainable forest management,” or in climate policy parlance, SFM. Because it contains the word “sustainable,” this term conjures up images of nice standing forests, perhaps occasionally harvested by indigenous peoples to make “sustainable” furniture or artisanal paper for those of us in the United States. However, here in Bangkok, SFM is at the heart of a fierce debate over what the fundamental shape of the climate change treaty will be. Environmentalists are lining up against industry interests in a debate over the inclusion of SFM in the treaty language. Who ultimately wins will determine whether or not the climate change treaty will actually reduce the 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions that stem from forests by providing support to keep tropical forests standing; or will the treaty incentivize a massive logging boom that will focus on maintaining so-called carbon stocks (the industry word for forests) – allowing corrupt elites in tropical countries to continue business-as-usual exploitation of natural resources. Part of the problem with SFM is that it’s unclear what the term actually means. Peter Wood of Global Witness, co-author of a new report on the subject, told me that, “SFM the most abused word in forestry. It’s been used and abused to describe some of the nicest forestry in the world to some of the most damaging forestry in the world. And there is nothing you can do to prove or disprove the term.”Born in 1992 at another UN environmental conference, SFM was made purposely ambiguous as part of an effort to broker a forest policy compromise. In the intervening years, the logging industry has embraced the term, using it as a justification to clear-cut of thousands of hectares by leaving a few clumps standing, or to greenwash the conversion of ancient forests into tree plantations.“SFM is a European model of nice neat rows of trees that will be managed like a crop,” continues Wood. “We’re talking about the difference between antiques and Ikea.” That difference between “managed” stands of trees and natural forests makes a huge difference in terms of carbon accounting. According to an earlier Global Witness report, even the most benign forms of commercial logging can release up to 80 tons of carbon per hectare. Logged forests are also more susceptible to forest fires. During the El Niño events in the late 1990s, 60 percent of logged forests in Indonesian Borneo went up in smoke, sending massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Only 6 percent of primary forest burned. In the short-term, SFM may bring more profits, but it certainly won’t be sustainable. Allowing SFM into the climate change treaty opens up the possibility that money meant to protect forests and reduce emissions might actually end up subsidizing forest destruction and thus, increased carbon emissions. It will also certainly result in a loss of biodiversity as habitats are destroyed and cultures are lost, along with the natural forests that have housed them for generations. This would be a betrayal of the original intention of the UN climate process, and a tragedy for forest peoples around the world.
Carbon
+4 4 votes
Only 10 days left for climate deal, UN's Ban says
by Reuters News on 03 October 2009, 19:58 PM 1 comment , 223 views Categories: Reuters News
* 10 negotiating days left, in Thailand and Spain - Ban
* Proposal considered for more talks on financing in Nov
* Says deal cannot be done without United States
By John Acher
COPENHAGEN, Oct 3 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday negotiators had just 10 days left to secure a global climate deal and governments must not be hindered by domestic troubles.
The United Nations hopes to bring 190 governments together in early December in Copenhagen to finalise a deal on greenhouse gas emissions to replace provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012.
"There are just 10 negotiating days left until we come to Copenhagen," Ban said, referring apparently to the remaining days of Sept. 28 to Oct. 9 climate talks under way in Bangkok and to a Nov. 2-6 meeting in Barcelona.
"In 10 days we need to decide what needs to be done for our future," he said in a speech at Copenhagen University.
"We are not there yet. There is still a lot to be done and not much time left," he said during a visit to Denmark's capital to meet Danish officials and speak to an Olympic Congress. [ID:nL373082]
Ban said a proposal to hold extra talks in November on financing for a climate deal was still under consideration.
"I see a value and importance of having that kind of last pressure effort," he said. "But we have to first of all see how these negotiations in Bangkok come out."
Ban said responsibility for reaching a deal rests on governments all of which, he added, face domestic challenges.
"Now is not the time to look at domestic challenges, we must look at global challenges that will impact the whole world," the South Korean secretary-general said.
Ban said success depended on the United States, though he recognised that U.S. President Barack Obama could have difficulty pushing through the necessary legislation in time for the December Copenhagen meeting.
"It is true, a fact of life, that without U.S. participation, this deal cannot be done," Ban said when asked what the world should do if the United States did not join.
The United States stayed outside the Kyoto Protocol when it was adopted in 1997, but Ban said this time all countries, "without exception", should join.
"We must have a comprehensive deal," he said.
"Now it seems it may be difficult for President Obama to come with strong authority (to Copenhagen) because this bill is still in the Senate.
"They might not be able to do that by the end of this year, but that should not give the United States an excuse not to do it."
((Editing by Alison Williams; john.acher@reuters.com; +45 2630 9650; Reuters Messaging: john.acher.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: CLIMATE UN/BAN
Carbon
+1 1 vote
FACTBOX - Key issues on the table at Bangkok climate talks
by Reuters News on 28 September 2009, 12:55 PM 0 comments , 60 views Categories: Reuters News, Factboxes
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Delegates at U.N. climate talks in Bangkok are trying to whittle down a complex negotiating text that will form the basis of a broader global pact to curb the pace of climate change.
The two-week talks are crucial because negotiators have very little time to trim the options and alternative wording proposals in the 180-page text with just over two months to go before a Dec. 7-18 climate meeting in Copenhagen.
The United Nations has set the Copenhagen gathering as the deadline to try to reach a broad agreement on a replacement pact for the Kyoto Protocol.
Following are some of the main issues being discussed in Bangkok.
FINANCING
This is the glue that will hold any new pact together. Developing nations are demanding rich countries offer new and substantial annual funds to help them adapt to climate change and to help them green their economies without sacrificing growth.
Failure by rich nations to implement immediate, far-reaching actions to cut their emissions would only increase the need for poorer countries to adapt to the impact of climate change and therefore increase costs, the text says.
Poorer nations as well small-island states are seen as the most vulnerable to greater extremes of weather, rising seas and changes in rainfall patterns.
Estimates for long-term financing are in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year but as yet no firm amounts have been pledged in the negotiations by individual countries. That is expected to come in the final hours of the Copenhagen talks.
Nor is it clear how much of the money will be public funds or come from revenue generated by carbon markets or other sources.
The rules governing the allocation of funds have also not yet been decided, nor have governments agreed to beef up existing institutions or create new ones to manage the money and low-carbon programmes.
STRUCTURE FOR ALL NATIONS
Any post-Kyoto agreement will need to include steps by big developing nations such as India and China to curb emissions and to help them acquire technology to substantially cut emissions.
But developing nations won't accept binding emissions targets and have instead pledged to take a range of voluntary steps mandated by their governments, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes.
Negotiators in Bangkok will be focused on designing what they call a legal framework or architecture that will encourage developing nations to sign up.
Kyoto backs economy-wide emissions reduction efforts for rich nations but many developing nations say they won't sign up to such steps in a broader climate pact.
Some nations have proposed a flexible arrangement that allows all nations to set verifiable national action plans to curb emissions. These could be entered into a registry that lists low-carbon strategies.
The idea would be to structure a climate pact that would allow easy amendment of national actions to fight global warming to take into account increased efforts over time.
DEFORESTATION AND DEGRADATION
There's growing interest among many nations to create a scheme that rewards developing nations for saving their forests, which soak up vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide.
The U.N.-backed reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) scheme has not yet been integrated into the next climate pact and the number of credits the scheme could generate annually and the value of the credits remain unclear.
A market-based scheme could potentially generate billions of dollars in annual funds for poorer nations from the sales of carbon credits.
Issues surrounding the rules governing the design and monitoring of REDD projects also remain unclear.
(Editing by Dean Yates) ((david.fogarty@thomsonreuters.com; +65 6403 5662; Reuters Messaging: david.fogarty.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Carbon
+1 1 vote
MF Global Weekly CDM & VER Market Summary 28th September - 4th October 2009
by Gareth Turner on 05 October 2009, 12:35 PM 0 comments , 62 views Categories: Newsletters, Market CommentaryTopics: mf global energy
VER demand remains consistent following a week of industry conferences. Higher pricing and the lack of issuance of exotic credits are promoting interest in recent vintage Indian RE VCUs currently $3.50/$4.50 bid/offered. Exotic VCUs are transacting at $1/2 premiums but are suffering from uncertainty over delivery timelines, new methodology approval and final volume size.
Gold Standard demand is improving with small clips of issued credits €7.50/8 bid/offered.
CAR CRTs maintain their domination of the US voluntary space aided by domestic climate legislation. Expanding methodology ranges and improved likelihood of inclusion are fuelling speculative trading with orders focusing on 200-400K tonne clips over 5 years strips 2009+ transacting at $6.50/$7.50 levels. VCU demand in the US continues to centre on forestry projects from outside of South America.
CCX CFIs bottomed out Friday at $0.10 cents having traded as low as $0.05 cents midweek in heavy volume. Market commentators attributed the drop in levels to the US climate bills failure to mention CFIs under early action offsets. The spread narrowed focusing on 2007-2009 vintages with a considerable total weekly volume of 1,659,100 tonnes exchanged. Privately negotiated transactions totaled 501 CFIs (50,100 tonnes)
50,000 tonnes US Ag Soil traded $0.75100 tonnes US RE traded $0.80
The Dec 09 secondary CER contract closed at €11.75, down around €0.23 from the previous week. Carbon traded sideways in line mirroring energy and oil levels with participants unwilling to take positions due to continued uncertainty following last weeks EU NAP court decision.
The US Senate released the initial draft of its Climate Bill last week calling for industries that emit 25,000 tonnes of C02 or more p.a. to reduce emissions 20% below 2005 levels by the year 2020. The cap and trade bill known as Boxer-Kerry will apply to roughly 7,500 entities that are responsible for 75% of US CO2 emissions. The bill will permit 2 billion offsets p.a. to help emitters meet their pollution targets. 75% of the offsets are to come from domestic projects while the other 25% can come from international projects. Should there be a shortfall of offsets, the bill would accept an additional 750 million international credits. An updated version of the bill that will detail the allowance portion of the program and how revenue raised from auctioning of allowances will be applied is expected in late October. In announcing the bill, Kerry stated he expects a floor vote before Copenhagen, however there appears to be virtually no republican support for the bill, and it is remains unclear if the legislation can come together before year end.
CDM pipeline delays leading to a 2.5% reduction in CER supply have been forecast by UNEP Risoe. The research organisation estimates 1.212 billion CERs will be issued by the end of 2012, 31 million fewer than previously projected, largely due to the suspension of verifiers, an increase in rejections and fewer project registrations. Demand for CERs has caused backwardation with €0.40c premiums being paid for 2009 contracts over 2010 with companies having pre sold expected issuances not yet delivered. Of the 1834 projects registered only 566 have been issued credits with the entire pipeline consisting of 4,673 CDM projects. 581 projects have been rejected by verifiers, 122 by the UN EB while 40 have been withdrawn.
The US Boxer-Kerry climate bill will include landfill gas and CCS projects in the offset scheme which were omitted from Waxman-Markey. Additionally, the following project types will be admitted: non landfill projects involving collection, combustion or avoidance of emissions from organic waste streams, afforestation/reforestation of acreage not forested as of Jan 1, 2009, forest management that results in increase in carbon stores, recycling and waste minimization projects, agricultural, grassland and rangeland sequestration, and land use change and forestry activities. Eligible projects in the Boxer-Kerry bill would start after January 1, 2009, however there is a provision for early action credits (from projects started after January 1, 2001) provided they were issued by a regulatory/voluntary GHG emissions program established under state or tribal law.
VER StatisticsSource: APX; CCX; CAR; Markit
APX GS Registry: 122 (+0) Projects ListedAPX VCS 70 (+0) Projects with Issued VCUsMarkit VCS Registry 56 VCS (+1) Public View ProjectsCCX CFI weekly volume 1,659.1kt (-1,482.3kt)CAR: 70 (+4) Projects Listed; 1.65Mt CRT issued
CDM StatisticsSource: UNFCCC
Total Issued CERs: 333.2Mt Issuances: 1287Total CERs Requested: 2.64Mt Host countries: 58Registered Projects: 1836 (+5) Requests: 71
Australia
’s carbon credit registry opened last week providing an account platform for firms to transfer UN backed offsets. The government established a National Authority within the Department of Climate Change. The NA’s role will be to manage and approve Kyoto protocols abroad for Australian firms to invest in CDM and JI projects. Australia will not host JI project until post 2012 with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong hailing the development as a ‘milestone’. In further developments the head of the opposition Malcolm Turnbull stated he would step down if his party failed to support emissions trading. In a change of stance, with the Liberals having voted down the first passage of the CRPS in August, Turnbull is pushing for backing of an amended scheme. If defeated a second time it could trigger a double dissolution early election with polls showing the Labour government surging ahead in the polls.
To request live project pricing information or to discuss any of the above, please contact Grattan MacGiffin gmacgiffin@mfglobal.com or Gareth Turner gturner@mfglobal.com in London on +44 20 7144 5780; Mary Haskins in New York mhaskins@mfglobal.com or Akshat Jaswal in Singapore ajaswal@mfglobal.com.sg
October 2, 2009, 11:45 am
Who Will Regulate U.S. Carbon Markets?
By Kate Galbraith
If the United States is going to set up a cap-and-trade system similar to the one in Europe in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who will regulate the new carbon market?
That question has yet to be settled.
As written in the Senate climate bill introduced on Wednesday, the job would go to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an organization that currently oversees the commodity futures and option markets in the United States.
In the House climate bill, passed in June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would assume the main responsibilities — with the C.F.T.C. handling only the trading of carbon “derivatives.”
In Europe, which has the world’s largest active carbon-trading market, the European Commission oversees the system, with considerable input from national governments on the allocation of emission allowances.
Also up in the air is the regulatory authority over offsets.
Offsets are emissions-reduction projects — planting trees or capturing methane from pigpens, for example — that companies can invest in to counteract the greenhouse gases they emit elsewhere.
The House bill, after an aggressive, last-minute push from agricultural interests and the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, Collin Peterson, handed the authority for farm offsets to the Department of Agriculture, which is perceived as friendly toward farm interests. The original authority had rested with the Environmental Protection Agency, a prospect that struck fear into farmers.
The Senate bill leaves offset regulation to the president. “This is a typical way for legislation to not pick a jurisdictional battle,” said Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy.
According to an article in ClimateWire, the Senate bill “also establishes a new office of offsets integrity within the Justice Department” to make sure that the offsets are actually helping the environment.
The matter of carbon-trading regulation could end up being settled by other financial-services legislation that is currently in House and Senate committees.
Dirk Forrister, a managing director of Natsource, an environmental asset management company, stated a preference for a single regulator (as opposed to the split jurisdiction between F.E.R.C. and the C.F.T.C. proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill.)
And, ultimately, the C.F.T.C. would be a better choice, he said.
Whereas F.E.R.C. is experienced in overseeing monopoly behavior and interstate power and gas transmission, “governing financial instruments is really more the history of the C.F.T.C.,” Mr. Forrister said.
Jon Afrizal , The Jakarta Post , Jambi Fri, 09/25/2009 12:19 PM National
Sumatra's low-plain forests are fast diminishing, currently measuring only 400,000 hectares. The main cause of the deforestation rampant illegal logging and clear-cutting, and if this prevails, experts warn, low-plain forests in Sumatra will likely be completely wiped out by 2010.
The Harapan rainforest, spanning 101,355 hectares and located in Jambi and South Sumatra provinces, is part of the remaining low-plain forests on the island.
It straddles the four regencies of Batanghari, Muarojambi and Sarolangun in Jambi, and Musi Banyuasin in South Sumatra.
The area is currently being reforested to replenish the damaged forests, formerly a timber concession.
"We're currently repairing the damaged ecosystem," said Harapan rainforest agency intern head Yusuf Cahyadin recently.
As part of the reforestation efforts, the agency will issue an outright cessation on logging in the area, or at least a 20-year moratorium.
This, Yusuf said, will allow the forest to be densely wooded once again.
The ban will not affect local communities that live off the forest, particularly the Anak Dalam and Bathin IX tribes that use non-timber products such as rattan and resin.
Communities living near the forest will also stand to benefit, Yusuf says, by growing rubber, for instance.
"We're currently initiating a community-based forest through an agreement between forest caretakers and local residents, in the hopes that they can also protect the forest," he said.
He added 30 percent of the forest has been damaged through clear-cutting, particularly for oil palm plantations.
"Oil palms are not suited to the forest," he pointed out.
In Jambi province, the problem of clear-cutting of forests for farmland has been underway now on a large scale.
Jambi has a total area of 5,100,000 hectares; around half of that, or 2,482,315 hectares, are forested areas, stretching from the Kerinci Seblat National Park in the west, to the Berbak National Park in the east.
"Forests function as water catchment areas as well as homes for wildlife and plant species," said Arief Munandar, head of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment's (Walhi) Jambi branch.
However, the area's natural bounty has gone to waste under poor forest management that has hastened the rate of environmental destruction, Arief said.
He added the widespread deforestation can be blamed on the Forestry Ministry's policies, which favor investment over conservation.
The ministry has issued permitted a host of state and private companies to clear large swaths of forest to make way for hectare upon unending hectare of oil palms and rubber trees.
The total current timber concession area in the province is 487,249 hectares, while the area of forest cleared for oil palm estates is 403,467 hectares.
Notes from Bangkok
Bangkok, Day 5: Breaking News: Forests do not naturally grow in straight lines 1
Posted 3:25 AM on 2 Oct 2009by Margaret Swink
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Forest negotiations recently have been featuring a lot of talk about something called “sustainable forest management,” or in climate policy parlance, SFM. Because it contains the word “sustainable,” this term conjures up images of nice standing forests, perhaps occasionally harvested by indigenous peoples to make “sustainable” furniture or artisanal paper for those of us in the United States. However, here in Bangkok, SFM is at the heart of a fierce debate over what the fundamental shape of the climate change treaty will be. Environmentalists are lining up against industry interests in a debate over the inclusion of SFM in the treaty language. Who ultimately wins will determine whether or not the climate change treaty will actually reduce the 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions that stem from forests by providing support to keep tropical forests standing; or will the treaty incentivize a massive logging boom that will focus on maintaining so-called carbon stocks (the industry word for forests) – allowing corrupt elites in tropical countries to continue business-as-usual exploitation of natural resources. Part of the problem with SFM is that it’s unclear what the term actually means. Peter Wood of Global Witness, co-author of a new report on the subject, told me that, “SFM the most abused word in forestry. It’s been used and abused to describe some of the nicest forestry in the world to some of the most damaging forestry in the world. And there is nothing you can do to prove or disprove the term.”Born in 1992 at another UN environmental conference, SFM was made purposely ambiguous as part of an effort to broker a forest policy compromise. In the intervening years, the logging industry has embraced the term, using it as a justification to clear-cut of thousands of hectares by leaving a few clumps standing, or to greenwash the conversion of ancient forests into tree plantations.“SFM is a European model of nice neat rows of trees that will be managed like a crop,” continues Wood. “We’re talking about the difference between antiques and Ikea.” That difference between “managed” stands of trees and natural forests makes a huge difference in terms of carbon accounting. According to an earlier Global Witness report, even the most benign forms of commercial logging can release up to 80 tons of carbon per hectare. Logged forests are also more susceptible to forest fires. During the El Niño events in the late 1990s, 60 percent of logged forests in Indonesian Borneo went up in smoke, sending massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Only 6 percent of primary forest burned. In the short-term, SFM may bring more profits, but it certainly won’t be sustainable. Allowing SFM into the climate change treaty opens up the possibility that money meant to protect forests and reduce emissions might actually end up subsidizing forest destruction and thus, increased carbon emissions. It will also certainly result in a loss of biodiversity as habitats are destroyed and cultures are lost, along with the natural forests that have housed them for generations. This would be a betrayal of the original intention of the UN climate process, and a tragedy for forest peoples around the world.
Carbon
+4 4 votes
Only 10 days left for climate deal, UN's Ban says
by Reuters News on 03 October 2009, 19:58 PM 1 comment , 223 views Categories: Reuters News
* 10 negotiating days left, in Thailand and Spain - Ban
* Proposal considered for more talks on financing in Nov
* Says deal cannot be done without United States
By John Acher
COPENHAGEN, Oct 3 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday negotiators had just 10 days left to secure a global climate deal and governments must not be hindered by domestic troubles.
The United Nations hopes to bring 190 governments together in early December in Copenhagen to finalise a deal on greenhouse gas emissions to replace provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012.
"There are just 10 negotiating days left until we come to Copenhagen," Ban said, referring apparently to the remaining days of Sept. 28 to Oct. 9 climate talks under way in Bangkok and to a Nov. 2-6 meeting in Barcelona.
"In 10 days we need to decide what needs to be done for our future," he said in a speech at Copenhagen University.
"We are not there yet. There is still a lot to be done and not much time left," he said during a visit to Denmark's capital to meet Danish officials and speak to an Olympic Congress. [ID:nL373082]
Ban said a proposal to hold extra talks in November on financing for a climate deal was still under consideration.
"I see a value and importance of having that kind of last pressure effort," he said. "But we have to first of all see how these negotiations in Bangkok come out."
Ban said responsibility for reaching a deal rests on governments all of which, he added, face domestic challenges.
"Now is not the time to look at domestic challenges, we must look at global challenges that will impact the whole world," the South Korean secretary-general said.
Ban said success depended on the United States, though he recognised that U.S. President Barack Obama could have difficulty pushing through the necessary legislation in time for the December Copenhagen meeting.
"It is true, a fact of life, that without U.S. participation, this deal cannot be done," Ban said when asked what the world should do if the United States did not join.
The United States stayed outside the Kyoto Protocol when it was adopted in 1997, but Ban said this time all countries, "without exception", should join.
"We must have a comprehensive deal," he said.
"Now it seems it may be difficult for President Obama to come with strong authority (to Copenhagen) because this bill is still in the Senate.
"They might not be able to do that by the end of this year, but that should not give the United States an excuse not to do it."
((Editing by Alison Williams; john.acher@reuters.com; +45 2630 9650; Reuters Messaging: john.acher.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: CLIMATE UN/BAN
Carbon
+1 1 vote
FACTBOX - Key issues on the table at Bangkok climate talks
by Reuters News on 28 September 2009, 12:55 PM 0 comments , 60 views Categories: Reuters News, Factboxes
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Delegates at U.N. climate talks in Bangkok are trying to whittle down a complex negotiating text that will form the basis of a broader global pact to curb the pace of climate change.
The two-week talks are crucial because negotiators have very little time to trim the options and alternative wording proposals in the 180-page text with just over two months to go before a Dec. 7-18 climate meeting in Copenhagen.
The United Nations has set the Copenhagen gathering as the deadline to try to reach a broad agreement on a replacement pact for the Kyoto Protocol.
Following are some of the main issues being discussed in Bangkok.
FINANCING
This is the glue that will hold any new pact together. Developing nations are demanding rich countries offer new and substantial annual funds to help them adapt to climate change and to help them green their economies without sacrificing growth.
Failure by rich nations to implement immediate, far-reaching actions to cut their emissions would only increase the need for poorer countries to adapt to the impact of climate change and therefore increase costs, the text says.
Poorer nations as well small-island states are seen as the most vulnerable to greater extremes of weather, rising seas and changes in rainfall patterns.
Estimates for long-term financing are in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year but as yet no firm amounts have been pledged in the negotiations by individual countries. That is expected to come in the final hours of the Copenhagen talks.
Nor is it clear how much of the money will be public funds or come from revenue generated by carbon markets or other sources.
The rules governing the allocation of funds have also not yet been decided, nor have governments agreed to beef up existing institutions or create new ones to manage the money and low-carbon programmes.
STRUCTURE FOR ALL NATIONS
Any post-Kyoto agreement will need to include steps by big developing nations such as India and China to curb emissions and to help them acquire technology to substantially cut emissions.
But developing nations won't accept binding emissions targets and have instead pledged to take a range of voluntary steps mandated by their governments, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes.
Negotiators in Bangkok will be focused on designing what they call a legal framework or architecture that will encourage developing nations to sign up.
Kyoto backs economy-wide emissions reduction efforts for rich nations but many developing nations say they won't sign up to such steps in a broader climate pact.
Some nations have proposed a flexible arrangement that allows all nations to set verifiable national action plans to curb emissions. These could be entered into a registry that lists low-carbon strategies.
The idea would be to structure a climate pact that would allow easy amendment of national actions to fight global warming to take into account increased efforts over time.
DEFORESTATION AND DEGRADATION
There's growing interest among many nations to create a scheme that rewards developing nations for saving their forests, which soak up vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide.
The U.N.-backed reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) scheme has not yet been integrated into the next climate pact and the number of credits the scheme could generate annually and the value of the credits remain unclear.
A market-based scheme could potentially generate billions of dollars in annual funds for poorer nations from the sales of carbon credits.
Issues surrounding the rules governing the design and monitoring of REDD projects also remain unclear.
(Editing by Dean Yates) ((david.fogarty@thomsonreuters.com; +65 6403 5662; Reuters Messaging: david.fogarty.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Carbon
+1 1 vote
MF Global Weekly CDM & VER Market Summary 28th September - 4th October 2009
by Gareth Turner on 05 October 2009, 12:35 PM 0 comments , 62 views Categories: Newsletters, Market CommentaryTopics: mf global energy
VER demand remains consistent following a week of industry conferences. Higher pricing and the lack of issuance of exotic credits are promoting interest in recent vintage Indian RE VCUs currently $3.50/$4.50 bid/offered. Exotic VCUs are transacting at $1/2 premiums but are suffering from uncertainty over delivery timelines, new methodology approval and final volume size.
Gold Standard demand is improving with small clips of issued credits €7.50/8 bid/offered.
CAR CRTs maintain their domination of the US voluntary space aided by domestic climate legislation. Expanding methodology ranges and improved likelihood of inclusion are fuelling speculative trading with orders focusing on 200-400K tonne clips over 5 years strips 2009+ transacting at $6.50/$7.50 levels. VCU demand in the US continues to centre on forestry projects from outside of South America.
CCX CFIs bottomed out Friday at $0.10 cents having traded as low as $0.05 cents midweek in heavy volume. Market commentators attributed the drop in levels to the US climate bills failure to mention CFIs under early action offsets. The spread narrowed focusing on 2007-2009 vintages with a considerable total weekly volume of 1,659,100 tonnes exchanged. Privately negotiated transactions totaled 501 CFIs (50,100 tonnes)
50,000 tonnes US Ag Soil traded $0.75100 tonnes US RE traded $0.80
The Dec 09 secondary CER contract closed at €11.75, down around €0.23 from the previous week. Carbon traded sideways in line mirroring energy and oil levels with participants unwilling to take positions due to continued uncertainty following last weeks EU NAP court decision.
The US Senate released the initial draft of its Climate Bill last week calling for industries that emit 25,000 tonnes of C02 or more p.a. to reduce emissions 20% below 2005 levels by the year 2020. The cap and trade bill known as Boxer-Kerry will apply to roughly 7,500 entities that are responsible for 75% of US CO2 emissions. The bill will permit 2 billion offsets p.a. to help emitters meet their pollution targets. 75% of the offsets are to come from domestic projects while the other 25% can come from international projects. Should there be a shortfall of offsets, the bill would accept an additional 750 million international credits. An updated version of the bill that will detail the allowance portion of the program and how revenue raised from auctioning of allowances will be applied is expected in late October. In announcing the bill, Kerry stated he expects a floor vote before Copenhagen, however there appears to be virtually no republican support for the bill, and it is remains unclear if the legislation can come together before year end.
CDM pipeline delays leading to a 2.5% reduction in CER supply have been forecast by UNEP Risoe. The research organisation estimates 1.212 billion CERs will be issued by the end of 2012, 31 million fewer than previously projected, largely due to the suspension of verifiers, an increase in rejections and fewer project registrations. Demand for CERs has caused backwardation with €0.40c premiums being paid for 2009 contracts over 2010 with companies having pre sold expected issuances not yet delivered. Of the 1834 projects registered only 566 have been issued credits with the entire pipeline consisting of 4,673 CDM projects. 581 projects have been rejected by verifiers, 122 by the UN EB while 40 have been withdrawn.
The US Boxer-Kerry climate bill will include landfill gas and CCS projects in the offset scheme which were omitted from Waxman-Markey. Additionally, the following project types will be admitted: non landfill projects involving collection, combustion or avoidance of emissions from organic waste streams, afforestation/reforestation of acreage not forested as of Jan 1, 2009, forest management that results in increase in carbon stores, recycling and waste minimization projects, agricultural, grassland and rangeland sequestration, and land use change and forestry activities. Eligible projects in the Boxer-Kerry bill would start after January 1, 2009, however there is a provision for early action credits (from projects started after January 1, 2001) provided they were issued by a regulatory/voluntary GHG emissions program established under state or tribal law.
VER StatisticsSource: APX; CCX; CAR; Markit
APX GS Registry: 122 (+0) Projects ListedAPX VCS 70 (+0) Projects with Issued VCUsMarkit VCS Registry 56 VCS (+1) Public View ProjectsCCX CFI weekly volume 1,659.1kt (-1,482.3kt)CAR: 70 (+4) Projects Listed; 1.65Mt CRT issued
CDM StatisticsSource: UNFCCC
Total Issued CERs: 333.2Mt Issuances: 1287Total CERs Requested: 2.64Mt Host countries: 58Registered Projects: 1836 (+5) Requests: 71
Australia
’s carbon credit registry opened last week providing an account platform for firms to transfer UN backed offsets. The government established a National Authority within the Department of Climate Change. The NA’s role will be to manage and approve Kyoto protocols abroad for Australian firms to invest in CDM and JI projects. Australia will not host JI project until post 2012 with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong hailing the development as a ‘milestone’. In further developments the head of the opposition Malcolm Turnbull stated he would step down if his party failed to support emissions trading. In a change of stance, with the Liberals having voted down the first passage of the CRPS in August, Turnbull is pushing for backing of an amended scheme. If defeated a second time it could trigger a double dissolution early election with polls showing the Labour government surging ahead in the polls.
To request live project pricing information or to discuss any of the above, please contact Grattan MacGiffin gmacgiffin@mfglobal.com or Gareth Turner gturner@mfglobal.com in London on +44 20 7144 5780; Mary Haskins in New York mhaskins@mfglobal.com or Akshat Jaswal in Singapore ajaswal@mfglobal.com.sg
October 2, 2009, 11:45 am
Who Will Regulate U.S. Carbon Markets?
By Kate Galbraith
If the United States is going to set up a cap-and-trade system similar to the one in Europe in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who will regulate the new carbon market?
That question has yet to be settled.
As written in the Senate climate bill introduced on Wednesday, the job would go to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an organization that currently oversees the commodity futures and option markets in the United States.
In the House climate bill, passed in June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would assume the main responsibilities — with the C.F.T.C. handling only the trading of carbon “derivatives.”
In Europe, which has the world’s largest active carbon-trading market, the European Commission oversees the system, with considerable input from national governments on the allocation of emission allowances.
Also up in the air is the regulatory authority over offsets.
Offsets are emissions-reduction projects — planting trees or capturing methane from pigpens, for example — that companies can invest in to counteract the greenhouse gases they emit elsewhere.
The House bill, after an aggressive, last-minute push from agricultural interests and the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, Collin Peterson, handed the authority for farm offsets to the Department of Agriculture, which is perceived as friendly toward farm interests. The original authority had rested with the Environmental Protection Agency, a prospect that struck fear into farmers.
The Senate bill leaves offset regulation to the president. “This is a typical way for legislation to not pick a jurisdictional battle,” said Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy.
According to an article in ClimateWire, the Senate bill “also establishes a new office of offsets integrity within the Justice Department” to make sure that the offsets are actually helping the environment.
The matter of carbon-trading regulation could end up being settled by other financial-services legislation that is currently in House and Senate committees.
Dirk Forrister, a managing director of Natsource, an environmental asset management company, stated a preference for a single regulator (as opposed to the split jurisdiction between F.E.R.C. and the C.F.T.C. proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill.)
And, ultimately, the C.F.T.C. would be a better choice, he said.
Whereas F.E.R.C. is experienced in overseeing monopoly behavior and interstate power and gas transmission, “governing financial instruments is really more the history of the C.F.T.C.,” Mr. Forrister said.
Copenhagen issues - clipping
Copenhagen agreement in doubt
By Environment reporter Sarah Clarke for AM
Posted Mon Oct 5, 2009 8:06am AEDT (ABC.Net.Au)
Months before world leaders meet in Copenhagen, rich and poor nations are already discussing their differences. (Library of Congress)
There are growing fears a new global climate agreement will not be reached in Copenhagen in December.
Two months before world leaders meet in the Danish capital to thrash out a new climate deal, rich and poor nations are already discussing their differences.
Delegations from more than 180 countries are meeting in Bangkok, trying to agree on the wording of a key document that will help reduce the planet's carbon pollution.
But the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, Achim Steiner, says the document is being watered down.
"Bangkok really is our second last chance to begin to tie down some of the key elements of an agreement that has to come out in Copenhagen," he said.
"There is a negotiating text which at the moment is far too long, has far too many brackets, and really what Bangkok is meant to provide us with is the political impetus for a breakthrough leading up to Copenhagen."
He says there are two main stalling points.
"One is, can the industrialised world make clear commitments in terms of emissions reduction that are sufficient to address the findings of the scientists and the intergovernmental panel on climate change," he said.
"And that means emissions reductions somewhere around 20 to 40 per cent of CO2 emissions today.
"Also, the aim to stabilise the growth of emissions somewhere between the next eight to 10 years which is really where we have to go if we want to stay below the two degrees Centigrade warming scenario.
"The second area is how can developing countries become part of a global partnership, because even if Europe ceases to emit carbon dioxide tomorrow, we would still be moving forward with global warming."
He says industrialised countries are also struggling with their targets, particularly the United States, so the agreement has to involve all countries.
But he says those that have the greatest legacy, in terms of carbon emissions in the air, have to lead.
"That leadership at the moment seems to be not yet forthcoming, which in turn is making developing countries say, 'Well if you are not willing to take these steps, then please do not ask us to make major changes in our economies right now because we have to follow you'," he said.
Mr Steiner says it is interesting that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US President Barack Obama, who are committed to addressing climate change, are struggling in terms of their domestic political agenda.
"I think we saw Prime Minister Rudd, we saw President Obama in New York at the climate change summit clearly indicating that this is not a matter of having to be convinced," he said.
"It is rather a matter of the political challenges in their respective countries and I think here it is really the public that now becomes the factor X because if the public is willing to support its government in moving forward, then these targets can absolutely be announced and also negotiated towards in Copenhagen.
"But I think the bottom line is unless we see industrialised countries coming forward with more credible targets, we will probably struggle to have an agreement, with 190 nations, emerge out of Copenhagen in December."
US climate bill not likely this year, says Obama adviser
Carol Browner's bleak view deepens concerns negotiations will fail to produce meaningful agreement in Copenhagen
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Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 October 2009 18.45 BST (guardian.co.uk)
Article history
Carol Browner speaking in Washington. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The White House has said for the first time that it does not expect to see a climate change bill this year, removing one of the key elements for reaching an international agreement to avoid catastrophic global warming.
In a seminar in Washington, Barack Obama's main energy adviser, Carol Browner, gave the clearest indication to date that the administration did not expect the Senate to vote on a climate change bill before an international meeting in Copenhagen in December.
Browner spoke barely 48 hours after Senate Democrats staged a campaign-style rally in support of a climate change bill that seeks to cut US emissions by 20% on 2005 levels by 2020.
"Obviously, we'd like to be through the process, but that's not going to happen," Browner told a conference hosted by the Atlantic magazine on Friday. "I think we would all agree the likelihood that you'd have a bill signed by the president on comprehensive energy by the time we go in December is not likely."
Browner's bleak assessment deepens concerns that negotiations, already deadlocked, will fail to produce a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen. It also threatens to further dampen the prospects for a bill that was struggling for support among conservative and rustbelt Democrats.
The UN has cast the Copenhagen meeting as a last chance for countries to reach an agreement to avoid the most disastrous effects of warming. Negotiators – including the state department's climate change envoy – admit it will be far harder to reach such a deal unless America, historically the world's biggest polluter, shows it is willing to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions.
Browner's comments undercut a campaign by Democratic leaders in the Senate, corporations and environmental organisations to try to build momentum behind the bill. The day before Browner's comments, John Kerry, the former presidential candidate who is one of the sponsors of the cap-and-trade bill, told a conference he remained confident the bill would squeak through the Senate.
Her remarks also raise further doubts about how forcefully the Obama administration is willing to press the Senate for a climate bill in the midst of its struggles over healthcare.
In the last two weeks, diplomats have grown increasingly frustrated with the administration. Negotiators say they understand Obama would have to struggle to get this agenda through the Senate, but say the president has shied away from opportunities to make the case for climate change.
Obama came in for harsh criticism from environmental organisations for failing to urge the Senate to act during a speech to the United Nations summit on climate change late last month. Environmental groups called it a "missed opportunity".
"If there is no serious US legislation in place then we will have delegations arriving and getting increasingly frustrated with nothing happening," said John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador.
DEVELOPMENT:Getting REDDy for Copenhagen Servaas van den Bosch
Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS Some are arguing for a climate deal that encourages farmers like these women in Rundu, Namibia to conserve tree cover.
NAIROBI, Sep 5 (IPS) - "African farmers will play a major part in the solution of climate change mitigation," predicts Dennis Garrity, head of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)."Deforestation contributes to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Counting the loss of trees on agricultural land this number increases to 34 percent," says Global Coordinator of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn Partnership, Peter Minang. For both agroforestry scientists, planting trees on farms on a massive scale will yield more than just timber, fruits and fertiliser. "Agroforestry provides an important carbon sink and takes pressure off remaining tropical forests," Garrity says. "Already 70 percent of Kenya’s wood is grown on farms." On 46 percent of the world’s farmlands - or 1 billion hectares, harboring 500 million people - tree cover exceeds 10 percent, states a newly-released ICRAF study. Reason, according to scientists at the recently-held World Agroforestry Congress in Nairobi, to include agroforests in the negotiations over a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) climate deal at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen this December. "Through agroforestry-mitigation, Africa can tap into the $118 billion carbon market and use the proceeds for crucial adaptation efforts," agrees Minang. "But the continent is divided on what REDD should entail." Whereas the 10 Congo basin countries, united in the Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC), want a deal on forests alone, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) favours a broad AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Use) perspective, proposing a REDD Plus that includes agriculture. "Which makes sense for countries like Kenya that are 80 percent semi-arid," explains Minang. The African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) supports REDD, but is wary of its potential to access markets and wants to include agriculture in a redesigned Clean Development Mechanism. "The problem," says Minang "is that CDMs have not worked in Africa. Only four percent of global CDM projects are on this continent. Of the forty projects involving forests, only four are in Africa and none has passed the registration stage." The African Union, in a concept note for the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) that met in Addis Ababa on Aug. 24, resolved that: "A REDD-Plus mechanism should be designed in such a way as to accommodate different national circumstances and respective capabilities." Some fear Africa’s fragmented position will diminish its chances in Copenhagen. "Africa should go to Copenhagen with a united voice and tell the industrialized countries they have a moral issue on their hands. They should not allow Africa to suffer of a disaster that is not of its own making. Yet, if we are fragmented we will be taken advantage off," Nobel laureate Wangari Mathaai told IPS in Nairobi. But United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) chief Achim Steiner seemed skeptical of a comprehensive climate deal in December. "We are just a hundred days away from Copenhagen and the negotiations are in a state of mutual frustration and lack of progress. I find that very worrying. Looking at the pace and scale of the negotiating process at the moment one would be naïve not be concerned at what can happen in just a few months," Steiner told journalists. "REDD’s not dead. Even if it doesn’t have legs to it coming out of Copenhagen, there’s the market that’s happening outside of Kyoto as well," says Jay Samek, researcher with the Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services of Michigan State University and involved with the institute’s Carbon2Markets initiative. "Carbon is sold for 25 cents a metric tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange in quantities of one Carbon Financial Instrument (CFI), or 100 metric tonnes," says Samek. "Carbon sequestration on one hectare is perhaps 10 metric tonnes a year, so if ten farmers work together to offer one CFI each year to the markets, after 15 years they each get $375. "The big risk involved for buyers of carbon in treed landscapes though is that of permanence," he warns. Although scientists are relatively sure about tropical forests, determining carbon sequestration in the agricultural-forest mosaic of agroforestry projects is a headache, compounded by a variety in farming practices, land reform and economic upheavals. But trees will become a carbon cash crop in the future, argues Rodell Lasco, senior scientist at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) "Right now financial barriers and governance issues make it seem unpractical, but when the countries of the world get their act together and start addressing climate change seriously, agroforestry can very well turn out to be a cheap alternative compared to other options in the West." Samek agrees. "There is a lot of money being invested getting ready for REDD and prices will go up when legislation catches up and companies are forced to cap and trade." In 2007 the Norwegian government pledged two billion dollars for forest conversation projects around the world while insisting that a REDD mechanism should become part of a post-Kyoto climate deal when the protocol lapses in 2012. Samek: "But even on a voluntary basis there is a lot of activity in the markets and many opportunities for companies to make use of it. We are for instance talking to Cadbury’s about a carbon-label on their chocolate, highlighting the mitigating impact cocoa-plantations have and perhaps people are willing to pay extra for it. "It’s really about how to bring the market system into it. As we eliminate the hurdles, it becomes relevant to ask the question if we can set different prices for different forms of mitigation. Can we ask more money for a system that’s not just a plantation, but preserves biodiversity and offers other co-benefits to farmers?" (END/2009)
UN's forest protection scheme at risk from organized crime, experts warn
International police, politicians and conservationists warn that the UN's programme to cut carbon emissions by paying poor countries to preserve their forests is 'open to wide abuse'
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guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 October 2009 17.00 BST
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A logger stands on a trunk after cutting down a tree, near Morere, Papua New Guinea. Interpol says the chances are very high that criminal gangs will seek to take advantage of Redd schemes in African and Asian countries. Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features
A revolutionary UN scheme to cut carbon emissions by paying poorer countries to preserve their forests is a recipe for corruption and will be hijacked by organised crime without safeguards, a Guardian investigation has found.
The UN, the World Bank, the UK and individuals including Prince Charles have strongly backed UN plans to expand the global carbon market to allow countries to trade the carbon stored in forests.
If, as expected, this is agreed at crucial UN climate change talks taking place in Bangkok this week and concluding in Copenhagen in December, up to $30bn a year could be transferred from rich countries to the owners of endangered forests.
But experts on all sides of the debate, from international police to politicians to conservationists, have warned this week that the scheme, called Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (Redd), may be impossible to monitor and may already be leading to fraud. The UN itself accepts there are "high risks".
Interpol, the world's leading policing agency, said this week that the chances were very high that criminal gangs would seek to take advantage of Redd schemes, which will be largely be based in corruption-prone African and Asian countries.
"Alarm bells are ringing. It is simply too big to monitor. The potential for criminality is vast and has not been taken into account by the people who set it up," said Peter Younger, Interpol environment crimes specialist and author of a new report for the World Bank on illegal forestry.
"Organised crime syndicates are eyeing the nascent forest carbon market. I will report to the bank that Redd schemes are open to wide abuse," he said.
The significance of the felling of forests across great swaths of the world cannot be overstated - it is are responsible for about 20% of the globe's entire carbon emissions. With governments anxious to find new ways to meet increasingly stringent national emission targets, a scheme which promises to benefit poor countries, cut emissions cheaply and not require any new technology is highly attractive.
But most of the countries rich in forests are also home to some of the world's most corrupt politicians and uncontrolled logging companies, who stand to make billions of dollars if they can get Redd projects approved.
"Fraud could include claiming credits for forests that do not exist or were not protected or by land grabs. It starts with bribery or intimidation of officials, then there's threats and violence against those people. There's forged documents too," said Younger. "Carbon trading transcends borders. I do not see any input from any law enforcement agency in planning Redd."
Hans Brattskar, director of Norway's forest and climate programme, whose country is financially backing the UN Redd programme, said last night: "It will be extremely difficult to make it work. Law enforcement is vital because the corruption issued are very real. But we have to put in safeguards and we have to try. Redd can save up to 20% of all the world's emissions. Without it, I believe it will be impossible to reach the target of stemming climate change and holding global temperatures to 2C," the level judged acceptable by the European Union.
Last month, Papua New Guinea, one of the countries pushing hardest for Redd to be accepted in the UN climate talks, suspended their climate change minister after allegations that $100m of fake carbon credits had been handed to communities to persuade them to sign up to forest protection schemes.
Last night the UN admitted that Redd schemes were dangerously open to abuse. "Where countries are corrupt the potential for Redd corruption is dangerous. [In Papua New Guinea], people have tried to take advantage of the market in an unacceptable way and carbon cowboys are trying to get the benefits. We can expect more of this as Redd develops," said Tiina Vahanen, a senior officer at UN-Redd.
People setting up Redd schemes also fear that they may be discredited by fraudsters aiming to profit from public money. "The potential for Redd rape and pillage is staggering. Logging companies may turn into carbon companies. All they have to do is count, not cut. It's like giving a mass murderer money," said Rob Dodwell, a British conservationist setting up schemes in Kenya and Cameroon.
The UN estimates that 25% of the world's forestry emissions, or nearly 5% of total global carbon emissions, could be saved by 2015 if rich countries invest $15bn to set up Redd schemes.
So far rich countries have put up $52m to establish nine official pilot Redd schemes in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In addition several hundred private schemes are being set up by bankers, conservation groups, and businesses who plan to offer carbon credits on the voluntary market.
But academics and environment groups with long experience working with the logging industry and indigenous communities said that both government and private schemes are being set up with no guarantees to protect communities who depend on the forests. "Decisions are being rushed, communities are not consulted or compensated and the lure of money from cutting emissions is overiding everything," says Rosalind Reeve of forestry watchdog group Global Witness.
Total forest coverage by country
Alarm over deforestation has grown as world population figures continue their inexorable rise. Our data reveals the extent of forest decline over the last 20 years country by country• Interactive: The world's great remaining forests
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Deforestation removes a vital line of defence against climate change. Photograph: Marcus Lyon/Getty Images
The future of our climate largely depends on essential carbon dioxide-guzzling forests. But those forests are under threat from the significant deforestation that has taken place over the past 20 years because of increasing demand for land - for agriculture, building and for natural resources for timber and paper.
Since 1990, the problem of declining forest cover has been most severe in developing countries which are exploiting their natural resources - such as Indonesia - and often simply can't afford the cost of reforestation, like Guatemala.
Richer countries such as Canada, Switzerland and Croatia managed to keep their number of hectares at a stable number or have enlarged their total forest area in the same period. But globally, the trend is clear: our forests are disappearing rapidly.
Natural disasters don't help. Hurricane-battered Haiti lost 11,000 hectares to storms between 1990 and 2005. When fatal hurricanes hit last year, Haiti had just 7% of its forests left compared to the 80% tree cover Christopher Columbus found when he landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492.
One of the most staggering decreases has been in Brazil. Forest cover plummeted from 520,027 thousand to 477,698 thousand hectares over 15 years - a loss of 42,329 thousand hectares.
• DATA: Total forest area by country; 1990, 2000 and 2005 (forests, grasslands and drylands)
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Forest extent: Total forest area
(Units: Thousand hectares)
Country
1990
2000
2005
Afghanistan
1,309
1,015
867
Albania
789
769
794
Algeria
1,790
2,144
2,277
American Samoa
18
18
18
Andorra
16
16
16
Angola
60,976
59,728
59,104
Antigua and Barbuda
9
9
9
Argentina
35,262
33,770
33,021
Armenia
346
305
283
Aruba
0
0
0
Australia
167,904
164,645
163,678
Austria
3,776
3,838
3,862
Azerbaijan
936
936
936
Bahamas, The
515
515
515
Bahrain
0
0
0
Bangladesh
882
884
871
Barbados
2
2
2
Belarus
7,376
7,848
7,894
Belgium
677
667
667
Belize
1,653
1,653
1,653
Benin
3,322
2,675
2,351
Bermuda
1
1
1
Bhutan
3,035
3,141
3,195
Bolivia
62,795
60,091
58,740
Bosnia and Herzegovina
2,210
2,185
2,185
Botswana
13,718
12,535
11,943
Brazil
520,027
493,213
477,698
British Virgin Islands
4
4
4
Brunei
313
288
278
Bulgaria
3,327
3,375
3,625
Burkina Faso
7,154
6,914
6,794
Burma (Myanmar)
39,219
34,554
32,222
Burundi
289
198
152
Cambodia
12,946
11,541
10,447
Cameroon
24,545
22,345
21,245
Canada
310,134
310,134
310,134
Cape Verde
58
82
84
Cayman Islands
12
12
12
Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
10,222
10,328
10,405
Central African Rep
23,203
22,903
22,755
Chad
13,110
12,317
11,921
Channel Islands
1
1
1
Chile
15,263
15,834
16,121
China
157,141
177,001
197,290
Colombia
61,439
60,963
60,728
Comoros
12
8
5
Congo (Brazzaville)
22,726
22,556
22,471
Congo, Dem Rep
140,531
135,207
133,610
Cook Islands
15
16
16
Costa Rica
2,564
2,376
2,391
Croatia
2,116
2,129
2,135
Cuba
2,058
2,435
2,713
Cyprus
161
173
174
Czech Rep
2,630
2,637
2,648
Denmark
445
486
500
Djibouti
6
6
6
Dominica
50
47
46
Dominican Rep
1,376
1,376
1,376
Ecuador
13,817
11,841
10,853
Egypt
44
59
67
El Salvador
375
324
298
Equatorial Guinea
1,860
1,708
1,632
Eritrea
1,621
1,576
1,554
Estonia
2,163
2,243
2,284
Ethiopia
15,114
13,705
13,000
Faeroe Islands
0
0
0
Falkland Islands
0
0
0
Fiji
979
1,000
1,000
Finland
22,194
22,475
22,500
Former Serbia and Montenegro
2,559
2,649
2,694
France
14,538
15,351
15,554
French Guiana
8,091
8,063
8,063
French Polynesia
105
105
105
Gabon
21,927
21,826
21,775
Gambia
442
461
471
Georgia
2,760
2,760
2,760
Germany
10,741
11,076
11,076
Ghana
7,448
6,094
5,517
Gibraltar
0
0
0
Greece
3,299
3,601
3,752
Greenland
0
0
0
Grenada
4
4
4
Guadeloupe
84
81
80
Guam
26
26
26
Guatemala
4,748
4,208
3,938
Guinea
7,408
6,904
6,724
Guinea-Bissau
2,216
2,120
2,072
Guyana
15,104
15,104
15,104
Haiti
116
109
105
Honduras
7,385
5,430
4,648
Hungary
1,801
1,907
1,976
Iceland
25
38
46
India
63,939
67,554
67,701
Indonesia
116,567
97,852
88,495
Iran
11,075
11,075
11,075
Iraq
804
818
822
Ireland
441
609
669
Isle of Man
3
3
3
Israel
154
164
171
Italy
8,383
9,447
9,979
Jamaica
345
341
339
Japan
24,950
24,876
24,868
Jordan
83
83
83
Kazakhstan
3,422
3,365
3,337
Kenya
3,708
3,582
3,522
Kiribati
2
2
2
Korea, North
8,201
6,821
6,187
Korea, South
6,371
6,300
6,265
Kuwait
3
5
6
Kyrgyzstan
836
858
869
Lao People's Dem Rep
17,314
16,532
16,142
Latvia
2,775
2,885
2,941
Lebanon
121
131
136
Lesotho
5
7
8
Liberia
4,058
3,455
3,154
Libya
217
217
217
Liechtenstein
6
7
7
Lithuania
1,945
2,020
2,099
Luxembourg
86
87
87
Macedonia, FYR
906
906
906
Madagascar
13,692
13,023
12,838
Malawi
3,896
3,567
3,402
Malaysia
22,376
21,591
20,890
Maldives
1
1
1
Mali
14,072
13,072
12,572
Malta
0
0
0
Martinique
46
46
46
Mauritania
415
317
267
Mauritius
39
38
37
Mexico
69,016
65,540
64,238
Micronesia, Fed States
63
63
63
Moldova, Rep
319
326
329
Monaco
0
0
0
Mongolia
11,492
10,665
10,252
Morocco
4,289
4,328
4,364
Mozambique
20,012
19,512
19,262
Namibia
8,762
8,033
7,661
Nauru
0
0
0
Nepal
4,817
3,900
3,636
Netherlands
345
360
365
Netherlands Antilles
1
1
1
New Caledonia
717
717
717
New Zealand
7,720
8,226
8,309
Nicaragua
6,538
5,539
5,189
Niger
1,945
1,328
1,266
Nigeria
17,234
13,137
11,089
Niue
17
15
14
Northern Mariana Islands
35
34
33
Norway
9,130
9,301
9,387
Oman
2
2
2
Pakistan
2,527
2,116
1,902
Palau
38
40
40
Palestinian Territories
9
9
9
Panama
4,376
4,307
4,294
Papua New Guinea
31,523
30,132
29,437
Paraguay
21,157
19,368
18,475
Peru
70,156
69,213
68,742
Philippines
10,574
7,949
7,162
Poland
8,881
9,059
9,192
Portugal
3,099
3,583
3,783
Puerto Rico
404
407
408
Qatar
0
0
0
Reunion
87
87
84
Romania
6,371
6,366
6,370
Russia
808,950
809,268
808,790
Rwanda
318
344
480
Saint Helena
2
2
2
Saint Kitts and Nevis
5
5
5
Saint Pierre and Miquelon
3
3
3
Samoa
130
171
171
San Marino
0
0
0
Sao Tome and Principe
27
27
27
Saudi Arabia
2,728
2,728
2,728
Senegal
9,348
8,898
8,673
Seychelles
40
40
40
Sierra Leone
3,044
2,851
2,754
Singapore
2
2
2
Slovakia
1,922
1,921
1,929
Slovenia
1,188
1,239
1,264
Solomon Islands
2,768
2,371
2,172
Somalia
8,282
7,515
7,131
South Africa
9,203
9,203
9,203
Spain
13,479
16,436
17,915
Sri Lanka
2,350
2,082
1,933
St. Lucia
17
17
17
St. Vincent/Grenadines
9
10
11
Sudan
76,381
70,491
67,546
Suriname
14,776
14,776
14,776
Swaziland
472
518
541
Sweden
27,367
27,474
27,528
Switzerland
1,155
1,199
1,221
Syria
372
432
461
Tajikistan
408
410
410
Tanzania
41,441
37,318
35,257
Thailand
15,965
14,814
14,520
Timor-Leste
966
854
798
Togo
685
486
386
Tonga
4
4
4
Trinidad and Tobago
235
228
226
Tunisia
643
959
1,056
Turkey
9,680
10,052
10,175
Turkmenistan
4,127
4,127
4,127
Turks and Caicos Islands
34
34
34
Uganda
4,924
4,059
3,627
Ukraine
9,274
9,510
9,575
United Arab Emirates
245
310
312
United Kingdom
2,611
2,793
2,845
United States
298,648
302,294
303,089
Uruguay
905
1,409
1,506
Uzbekistan
3,045
3,212
3,295
Vanuatu
440
440
440
Venezuela
52,026
49,151
47,713
Vietnam
9,363
11,725
12,931
Virgin Islands
12
10
10
Western Sahara
1,011
1,011
1,011
Yemen
549
549
549
Zambia
49,124
44,676
42,452
Zimbabwe
22,234
19,105
17,540
By Environment reporter Sarah Clarke for AM
Posted Mon Oct 5, 2009 8:06am AEDT (ABC.Net.Au)
Months before world leaders meet in Copenhagen, rich and poor nations are already discussing their differences. (Library of Congress)
There are growing fears a new global climate agreement will not be reached in Copenhagen in December.
Two months before world leaders meet in the Danish capital to thrash out a new climate deal, rich and poor nations are already discussing their differences.
Delegations from more than 180 countries are meeting in Bangkok, trying to agree on the wording of a key document that will help reduce the planet's carbon pollution.
But the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, Achim Steiner, says the document is being watered down.
"Bangkok really is our second last chance to begin to tie down some of the key elements of an agreement that has to come out in Copenhagen," he said.
"There is a negotiating text which at the moment is far too long, has far too many brackets, and really what Bangkok is meant to provide us with is the political impetus for a breakthrough leading up to Copenhagen."
He says there are two main stalling points.
"One is, can the industrialised world make clear commitments in terms of emissions reduction that are sufficient to address the findings of the scientists and the intergovernmental panel on climate change," he said.
"And that means emissions reductions somewhere around 20 to 40 per cent of CO2 emissions today.
"Also, the aim to stabilise the growth of emissions somewhere between the next eight to 10 years which is really where we have to go if we want to stay below the two degrees Centigrade warming scenario.
"The second area is how can developing countries become part of a global partnership, because even if Europe ceases to emit carbon dioxide tomorrow, we would still be moving forward with global warming."
He says industrialised countries are also struggling with their targets, particularly the United States, so the agreement has to involve all countries.
But he says those that have the greatest legacy, in terms of carbon emissions in the air, have to lead.
"That leadership at the moment seems to be not yet forthcoming, which in turn is making developing countries say, 'Well if you are not willing to take these steps, then please do not ask us to make major changes in our economies right now because we have to follow you'," he said.
Mr Steiner says it is interesting that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US President Barack Obama, who are committed to addressing climate change, are struggling in terms of their domestic political agenda.
"I think we saw Prime Minister Rudd, we saw President Obama in New York at the climate change summit clearly indicating that this is not a matter of having to be convinced," he said.
"It is rather a matter of the political challenges in their respective countries and I think here it is really the public that now becomes the factor X because if the public is willing to support its government in moving forward, then these targets can absolutely be announced and also negotiated towards in Copenhagen.
"But I think the bottom line is unless we see industrialised countries coming forward with more credible targets, we will probably struggle to have an agreement, with 190 nations, emerge out of Copenhagen in December."
US climate bill not likely this year, says Obama adviser
Carol Browner's bleak view deepens concerns negotiations will fail to produce meaningful agreement in Copenhagen
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Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 October 2009 18.45 BST (guardian.co.uk)
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Carol Browner speaking in Washington. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The White House has said for the first time that it does not expect to see a climate change bill this year, removing one of the key elements for reaching an international agreement to avoid catastrophic global warming.
In a seminar in Washington, Barack Obama's main energy adviser, Carol Browner, gave the clearest indication to date that the administration did not expect the Senate to vote on a climate change bill before an international meeting in Copenhagen in December.
Browner spoke barely 48 hours after Senate Democrats staged a campaign-style rally in support of a climate change bill that seeks to cut US emissions by 20% on 2005 levels by 2020.
"Obviously, we'd like to be through the process, but that's not going to happen," Browner told a conference hosted by the Atlantic magazine on Friday. "I think we would all agree the likelihood that you'd have a bill signed by the president on comprehensive energy by the time we go in December is not likely."
Browner's bleak assessment deepens concerns that negotiations, already deadlocked, will fail to produce a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen. It also threatens to further dampen the prospects for a bill that was struggling for support among conservative and rustbelt Democrats.
The UN has cast the Copenhagen meeting as a last chance for countries to reach an agreement to avoid the most disastrous effects of warming. Negotiators – including the state department's climate change envoy – admit it will be far harder to reach such a deal unless America, historically the world's biggest polluter, shows it is willing to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions.
Browner's comments undercut a campaign by Democratic leaders in the Senate, corporations and environmental organisations to try to build momentum behind the bill. The day before Browner's comments, John Kerry, the former presidential candidate who is one of the sponsors of the cap-and-trade bill, told a conference he remained confident the bill would squeak through the Senate.
Her remarks also raise further doubts about how forcefully the Obama administration is willing to press the Senate for a climate bill in the midst of its struggles over healthcare.
In the last two weeks, diplomats have grown increasingly frustrated with the administration. Negotiators say they understand Obama would have to struggle to get this agenda through the Senate, but say the president has shied away from opportunities to make the case for climate change.
Obama came in for harsh criticism from environmental organisations for failing to urge the Senate to act during a speech to the United Nations summit on climate change late last month. Environmental groups called it a "missed opportunity".
"If there is no serious US legislation in place then we will have delegations arriving and getting increasingly frustrated with nothing happening," said John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador.
DEVELOPMENT:Getting REDDy for Copenhagen Servaas van den Bosch
Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS Some are arguing for a climate deal that encourages farmers like these women in Rundu, Namibia to conserve tree cover.
NAIROBI, Sep 5 (IPS) - "African farmers will play a major part in the solution of climate change mitigation," predicts Dennis Garrity, head of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)."Deforestation contributes to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Counting the loss of trees on agricultural land this number increases to 34 percent," says Global Coordinator of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn Partnership, Peter Minang. For both agroforestry scientists, planting trees on farms on a massive scale will yield more than just timber, fruits and fertiliser. "Agroforestry provides an important carbon sink and takes pressure off remaining tropical forests," Garrity says. "Already 70 percent of Kenya’s wood is grown on farms." On 46 percent of the world’s farmlands - or 1 billion hectares, harboring 500 million people - tree cover exceeds 10 percent, states a newly-released ICRAF study. Reason, according to scientists at the recently-held World Agroforestry Congress in Nairobi, to include agroforests in the negotiations over a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) climate deal at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen this December. "Through agroforestry-mitigation, Africa can tap into the $118 billion carbon market and use the proceeds for crucial adaptation efforts," agrees Minang. "But the continent is divided on what REDD should entail." Whereas the 10 Congo basin countries, united in the Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC), want a deal on forests alone, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) favours a broad AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Use) perspective, proposing a REDD Plus that includes agriculture. "Which makes sense for countries like Kenya that are 80 percent semi-arid," explains Minang. The African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) supports REDD, but is wary of its potential to access markets and wants to include agriculture in a redesigned Clean Development Mechanism. "The problem," says Minang "is that CDMs have not worked in Africa. Only four percent of global CDM projects are on this continent. Of the forty projects involving forests, only four are in Africa and none has passed the registration stage." The African Union, in a concept note for the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) that met in Addis Ababa on Aug. 24, resolved that: "A REDD-Plus mechanism should be designed in such a way as to accommodate different national circumstances and respective capabilities." Some fear Africa’s fragmented position will diminish its chances in Copenhagen. "Africa should go to Copenhagen with a united voice and tell the industrialized countries they have a moral issue on their hands. They should not allow Africa to suffer of a disaster that is not of its own making. Yet, if we are fragmented we will be taken advantage off," Nobel laureate Wangari Mathaai told IPS in Nairobi. But United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) chief Achim Steiner seemed skeptical of a comprehensive climate deal in December. "We are just a hundred days away from Copenhagen and the negotiations are in a state of mutual frustration and lack of progress. I find that very worrying. Looking at the pace and scale of the negotiating process at the moment one would be naïve not be concerned at what can happen in just a few months," Steiner told journalists. "REDD’s not dead. Even if it doesn’t have legs to it coming out of Copenhagen, there’s the market that’s happening outside of Kyoto as well," says Jay Samek, researcher with the Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services of Michigan State University and involved with the institute’s Carbon2Markets initiative. "Carbon is sold for 25 cents a metric tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange in quantities of one Carbon Financial Instrument (CFI), or 100 metric tonnes," says Samek. "Carbon sequestration on one hectare is perhaps 10 metric tonnes a year, so if ten farmers work together to offer one CFI each year to the markets, after 15 years they each get $375. "The big risk involved for buyers of carbon in treed landscapes though is that of permanence," he warns. Although scientists are relatively sure about tropical forests, determining carbon sequestration in the agricultural-forest mosaic of agroforestry projects is a headache, compounded by a variety in farming practices, land reform and economic upheavals. But trees will become a carbon cash crop in the future, argues Rodell Lasco, senior scientist at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) "Right now financial barriers and governance issues make it seem unpractical, but when the countries of the world get their act together and start addressing climate change seriously, agroforestry can very well turn out to be a cheap alternative compared to other options in the West." Samek agrees. "There is a lot of money being invested getting ready for REDD and prices will go up when legislation catches up and companies are forced to cap and trade." In 2007 the Norwegian government pledged two billion dollars for forest conversation projects around the world while insisting that a REDD mechanism should become part of a post-Kyoto climate deal when the protocol lapses in 2012. Samek: "But even on a voluntary basis there is a lot of activity in the markets and many opportunities for companies to make use of it. We are for instance talking to Cadbury’s about a carbon-label on their chocolate, highlighting the mitigating impact cocoa-plantations have and perhaps people are willing to pay extra for it. "It’s really about how to bring the market system into it. As we eliminate the hurdles, it becomes relevant to ask the question if we can set different prices for different forms of mitigation. Can we ask more money for a system that’s not just a plantation, but preserves biodiversity and offers other co-benefits to farmers?" (END/2009)
UN's forest protection scheme at risk from organized crime, experts warn
International police, politicians and conservationists warn that the UN's programme to cut carbon emissions by paying poor countries to preserve their forests is 'open to wide abuse'
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John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 October 2009 17.00 BST
Article history
A logger stands on a trunk after cutting down a tree, near Morere, Papua New Guinea. Interpol says the chances are very high that criminal gangs will seek to take advantage of Redd schemes in African and Asian countries. Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features
A revolutionary UN scheme to cut carbon emissions by paying poorer countries to preserve their forests is a recipe for corruption and will be hijacked by organised crime without safeguards, a Guardian investigation has found.
The UN, the World Bank, the UK and individuals including Prince Charles have strongly backed UN plans to expand the global carbon market to allow countries to trade the carbon stored in forests.
If, as expected, this is agreed at crucial UN climate change talks taking place in Bangkok this week and concluding in Copenhagen in December, up to $30bn a year could be transferred from rich countries to the owners of endangered forests.
But experts on all sides of the debate, from international police to politicians to conservationists, have warned this week that the scheme, called Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (Redd), may be impossible to monitor and may already be leading to fraud. The UN itself accepts there are "high risks".
Interpol, the world's leading policing agency, said this week that the chances were very high that criminal gangs would seek to take advantage of Redd schemes, which will be largely be based in corruption-prone African and Asian countries.
"Alarm bells are ringing. It is simply too big to monitor. The potential for criminality is vast and has not been taken into account by the people who set it up," said Peter Younger, Interpol environment crimes specialist and author of a new report for the World Bank on illegal forestry.
"Organised crime syndicates are eyeing the nascent forest carbon market. I will report to the bank that Redd schemes are open to wide abuse," he said.
The significance of the felling of forests across great swaths of the world cannot be overstated - it is are responsible for about 20% of the globe's entire carbon emissions. With governments anxious to find new ways to meet increasingly stringent national emission targets, a scheme which promises to benefit poor countries, cut emissions cheaply and not require any new technology is highly attractive.
But most of the countries rich in forests are also home to some of the world's most corrupt politicians and uncontrolled logging companies, who stand to make billions of dollars if they can get Redd projects approved.
"Fraud could include claiming credits for forests that do not exist or were not protected or by land grabs. It starts with bribery or intimidation of officials, then there's threats and violence against those people. There's forged documents too," said Younger. "Carbon trading transcends borders. I do not see any input from any law enforcement agency in planning Redd."
Hans Brattskar, director of Norway's forest and climate programme, whose country is financially backing the UN Redd programme, said last night: "It will be extremely difficult to make it work. Law enforcement is vital because the corruption issued are very real. But we have to put in safeguards and we have to try. Redd can save up to 20% of all the world's emissions. Without it, I believe it will be impossible to reach the target of stemming climate change and holding global temperatures to 2C," the level judged acceptable by the European Union.
Last month, Papua New Guinea, one of the countries pushing hardest for Redd to be accepted in the UN climate talks, suspended their climate change minister after allegations that $100m of fake carbon credits had been handed to communities to persuade them to sign up to forest protection schemes.
Last night the UN admitted that Redd schemes were dangerously open to abuse. "Where countries are corrupt the potential for Redd corruption is dangerous. [In Papua New Guinea], people have tried to take advantage of the market in an unacceptable way and carbon cowboys are trying to get the benefits. We can expect more of this as Redd develops," said Tiina Vahanen, a senior officer at UN-Redd.
People setting up Redd schemes also fear that they may be discredited by fraudsters aiming to profit from public money. "The potential for Redd rape and pillage is staggering. Logging companies may turn into carbon companies. All they have to do is count, not cut. It's like giving a mass murderer money," said Rob Dodwell, a British conservationist setting up schemes in Kenya and Cameroon.
The UN estimates that 25% of the world's forestry emissions, or nearly 5% of total global carbon emissions, could be saved by 2015 if rich countries invest $15bn to set up Redd schemes.
So far rich countries have put up $52m to establish nine official pilot Redd schemes in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In addition several hundred private schemes are being set up by bankers, conservation groups, and businesses who plan to offer carbon credits on the voluntary market.
But academics and environment groups with long experience working with the logging industry and indigenous communities said that both government and private schemes are being set up with no guarantees to protect communities who depend on the forests. "Decisions are being rushed, communities are not consulted or compensated and the lure of money from cutting emissions is overiding everything," says Rosalind Reeve of forestry watchdog group Global Witness.
Total forest coverage by country
Alarm over deforestation has grown as world population figures continue their inexorable rise. Our data reveals the extent of forest decline over the last 20 years country by country• Interactive: The world's great remaining forests
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Deforestation removes a vital line of defence against climate change. Photograph: Marcus Lyon/Getty Images
The future of our climate largely depends on essential carbon dioxide-guzzling forests. But those forests are under threat from the significant deforestation that has taken place over the past 20 years because of increasing demand for land - for agriculture, building and for natural resources for timber and paper.
Since 1990, the problem of declining forest cover has been most severe in developing countries which are exploiting their natural resources - such as Indonesia - and often simply can't afford the cost of reforestation, like Guatemala.
Richer countries such as Canada, Switzerland and Croatia managed to keep their number of hectares at a stable number or have enlarged their total forest area in the same period. But globally, the trend is clear: our forests are disappearing rapidly.
Natural disasters don't help. Hurricane-battered Haiti lost 11,000 hectares to storms between 1990 and 2005. When fatal hurricanes hit last year, Haiti had just 7% of its forests left compared to the 80% tree cover Christopher Columbus found when he landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492.
One of the most staggering decreases has been in Brazil. Forest cover plummeted from 520,027 thousand to 477,698 thousand hectares over 15 years - a loss of 42,329 thousand hectares.
• DATA: Total forest area by country; 1990, 2000 and 2005 (forests, grasslands and drylands)
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Forest extent: Total forest area
(Units: Thousand hectares)
Country
1990
2000
2005
Afghanistan
1,309
1,015
867
Albania
789
769
794
Algeria
1,790
2,144
2,277
American Samoa
18
18
18
Andorra
16
16
16
Angola
60,976
59,728
59,104
Antigua and Barbuda
9
9
9
Argentina
35,262
33,770
33,021
Armenia
346
305
283
Aruba
0
0
0
Australia
167,904
164,645
163,678
Austria
3,776
3,838
3,862
Azerbaijan
936
936
936
Bahamas, The
515
515
515
Bahrain
0
0
0
Bangladesh
882
884
871
Barbados
2
2
2
Belarus
7,376
7,848
7,894
Belgium
677
667
667
Belize
1,653
1,653
1,653
Benin
3,322
2,675
2,351
Bermuda
1
1
1
Bhutan
3,035
3,141
3,195
Bolivia
62,795
60,091
58,740
Bosnia and Herzegovina
2,210
2,185
2,185
Botswana
13,718
12,535
11,943
Brazil
520,027
493,213
477,698
British Virgin Islands
4
4
4
Brunei
313
288
278
Bulgaria
3,327
3,375
3,625
Burkina Faso
7,154
6,914
6,794
Burma (Myanmar)
39,219
34,554
32,222
Burundi
289
198
152
Cambodia
12,946
11,541
10,447
Cameroon
24,545
22,345
21,245
Canada
310,134
310,134
310,134
Cape Verde
58
82
84
Cayman Islands
12
12
12
Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
10,222
10,328
10,405
Central African Rep
23,203
22,903
22,755
Chad
13,110
12,317
11,921
Channel Islands
1
1
1
Chile
15,263
15,834
16,121
China
157,141
177,001
197,290
Colombia
61,439
60,963
60,728
Comoros
12
8
5
Congo (Brazzaville)
22,726
22,556
22,471
Congo, Dem Rep
140,531
135,207
133,610
Cook Islands
15
16
16
Costa Rica
2,564
2,376
2,391
Croatia
2,116
2,129
2,135
Cuba
2,058
2,435
2,713
Cyprus
161
173
174
Czech Rep
2,630
2,637
2,648
Denmark
445
486
500
Djibouti
6
6
6
Dominica
50
47
46
Dominican Rep
1,376
1,376
1,376
Ecuador
13,817
11,841
10,853
Egypt
44
59
67
El Salvador
375
324
298
Equatorial Guinea
1,860
1,708
1,632
Eritrea
1,621
1,576
1,554
Estonia
2,163
2,243
2,284
Ethiopia
15,114
13,705
13,000
Faeroe Islands
0
0
0
Falkland Islands
0
0
0
Fiji
979
1,000
1,000
Finland
22,194
22,475
22,500
Former Serbia and Montenegro
2,559
2,649
2,694
France
14,538
15,351
15,554
French Guiana
8,091
8,063
8,063
French Polynesia
105
105
105
Gabon
21,927
21,826
21,775
Gambia
442
461
471
Georgia
2,760
2,760
2,760
Germany
10,741
11,076
11,076
Ghana
7,448
6,094
5,517
Gibraltar
0
0
0
Greece
3,299
3,601
3,752
Greenland
0
0
0
Grenada
4
4
4
Guadeloupe
84
81
80
Guam
26
26
26
Guatemala
4,748
4,208
3,938
Guinea
7,408
6,904
6,724
Guinea-Bissau
2,216
2,120
2,072
Guyana
15,104
15,104
15,104
Haiti
116
109
105
Honduras
7,385
5,430
4,648
Hungary
1,801
1,907
1,976
Iceland
25
38
46
India
63,939
67,554
67,701
Indonesia
116,567
97,852
88,495
Iran
11,075
11,075
11,075
Iraq
804
818
822
Ireland
441
609
669
Isle of Man
3
3
3
Israel
154
164
171
Italy
8,383
9,447
9,979
Jamaica
345
341
339
Japan
24,950
24,876
24,868
Jordan
83
83
83
Kazakhstan
3,422
3,365
3,337
Kenya
3,708
3,582
3,522
Kiribati
2
2
2
Korea, North
8,201
6,821
6,187
Korea, South
6,371
6,300
6,265
Kuwait
3
5
6
Kyrgyzstan
836
858
869
Lao People's Dem Rep
17,314
16,532
16,142
Latvia
2,775
2,885
2,941
Lebanon
121
131
136
Lesotho
5
7
8
Liberia
4,058
3,455
3,154
Libya
217
217
217
Liechtenstein
6
7
7
Lithuania
1,945
2,020
2,099
Luxembourg
86
87
87
Macedonia, FYR
906
906
906
Madagascar
13,692
13,023
12,838
Malawi
3,896
3,567
3,402
Malaysia
22,376
21,591
20,890
Maldives
1
1
1
Mali
14,072
13,072
12,572
Malta
0
0
0
Martinique
46
46
46
Mauritania
415
317
267
Mauritius
39
38
37
Mexico
69,016
65,540
64,238
Micronesia, Fed States
63
63
63
Moldova, Rep
319
326
329
Monaco
0
0
0
Mongolia
11,492
10,665
10,252
Morocco
4,289
4,328
4,364
Mozambique
20,012
19,512
19,262
Namibia
8,762
8,033
7,661
Nauru
0
0
0
Nepal
4,817
3,900
3,636
Netherlands
345
360
365
Netherlands Antilles
1
1
1
New Caledonia
717
717
717
New Zealand
7,720
8,226
8,309
Nicaragua
6,538
5,539
5,189
Niger
1,945
1,328
1,266
Nigeria
17,234
13,137
11,089
Niue
17
15
14
Northern Mariana Islands
35
34
33
Norway
9,130
9,301
9,387
Oman
2
2
2
Pakistan
2,527
2,116
1,902
Palau
38
40
40
Palestinian Territories
9
9
9
Panama
4,376
4,307
4,294
Papua New Guinea
31,523
30,132
29,437
Paraguay
21,157
19,368
18,475
Peru
70,156
69,213
68,742
Philippines
10,574
7,949
7,162
Poland
8,881
9,059
9,192
Portugal
3,099
3,583
3,783
Puerto Rico
404
407
408
Qatar
0
0
0
Reunion
87
87
84
Romania
6,371
6,366
6,370
Russia
808,950
809,268
808,790
Rwanda
318
344
480
Saint Helena
2
2
2
Saint Kitts and Nevis
5
5
5
Saint Pierre and Miquelon
3
3
3
Samoa
130
171
171
San Marino
0
0
0
Sao Tome and Principe
27
27
27
Saudi Arabia
2,728
2,728
2,728
Senegal
9,348
8,898
8,673
Seychelles
40
40
40
Sierra Leone
3,044
2,851
2,754
Singapore
2
2
2
Slovakia
1,922
1,921
1,929
Slovenia
1,188
1,239
1,264
Solomon Islands
2,768
2,371
2,172
Somalia
8,282
7,515
7,131
South Africa
9,203
9,203
9,203
Spain
13,479
16,436
17,915
Sri Lanka
2,350
2,082
1,933
St. Lucia
17
17
17
St. Vincent/Grenadines
9
10
11
Sudan
76,381
70,491
67,546
Suriname
14,776
14,776
14,776
Swaziland
472
518
541
Sweden
27,367
27,474
27,528
Switzerland
1,155
1,199
1,221
Syria
372
432
461
Tajikistan
408
410
410
Tanzania
41,441
37,318
35,257
Thailand
15,965
14,814
14,520
Timor-Leste
966
854
798
Togo
685
486
386
Tonga
4
4
4
Trinidad and Tobago
235
228
226
Tunisia
643
959
1,056
Turkey
9,680
10,052
10,175
Turkmenistan
4,127
4,127
4,127
Turks and Caicos Islands
34
34
34
Uganda
4,924
4,059
3,627
Ukraine
9,274
9,510
9,575
United Arab Emirates
245
310
312
United Kingdom
2,611
2,793
2,845
United States
298,648
302,294
303,089
Uruguay
905
1,409
1,506
Uzbekistan
3,045
3,212
3,295
Vanuatu
440
440
440
Venezuela
52,026
49,151
47,713
Vietnam
9,363
11,725
12,931
Virgin Islands
12
10
10
Western Sahara
1,011
1,011
1,011
Yemen
549
549
549
Zambia
49,124
44,676
42,452
Zimbabwe
22,234
19,105
17,540
A New Dark Age - clipping
A new Dark Age?
We need to do more to prevent the world descending into a new Dark Age as a result of climate change, argues Professor Tim Flannery. Source: ABC TV 14 September 2009.
By Tim Flannery
In the northern summer of 2008 Arctic sea ice covered the second smallest area recorded since the beginning of the satellite era (Source: NASA/GSFC)
In 2006 James Lovelock published a book that bluntly laid before us the consequences of the carbon imbalance. The Revenge of Gaia argues Gaia's climate system is far more sensitive to greenhouse gas pollution than we imagine, and the system is already trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback.
Although there is still time to avert a catastrophe, Lovelock believes humans lack the foresight, wisdom and political energy required to do so. Instead, he predicts, before the 21st century is out our global civilisation will have collapsed and a new Dark Age will have dawned, wherein a few survivors will cling to the few remaining habitable regions, such as Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula.
How probable is it that this bleak vision will come to pass? New scientific data means that in 2009 we are better placed than ever to determine the scale of the threat and its imminence.
The northern fridge
The sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is an ancient feature of our planet. It has glistened brightly into space for at least three million years.
The northern ice acts as a refrigerator that cools the entire planet. During the summer, the sun's rays beat down upon it 24 hours a day, but because the ice is bright, 90 per cent of that energy is deflected back into space.
By 2005 the Arctic ice cap had been melting at a rate of around eight per cent per decade for thirty years. At that rate, it would have taken until 2100 or thereabouts for the ice cap to disappear altogether.
But in the summer of 2005, a dramatic change occurred. The rate of melt accelerated, so that around four times as much ice melted as compared with previous summers.
These changes in the Arctic have left many scientists worried the region is already in the grip of an irreversible transition. During the winter months, the Arctic is now warming four times faster than the global average, while the existing temperature increase year-round already exceeds two degrees Celsius.
What will happen during that first iceless summer? Most likely, not much at all, for it will take several summers' worth of energy to warm the surface of the Arctic sea to a point where dangerous changes are generated further south. But each year thereafter, the ocean at the top of the world will warm inexorably, and the temperature gradient that controls climatic zones across the northern hemisphere will shift.
If we look back to the last time in Earth's history when such a great warming occurred — 55 million years ago — we see an ominously different world.
Back then, lemurs sported in the rainforests of Greenland, while the tropics were covered in a spiny, thin and alien-looking cover of vegetation, which is today entirely extinct. No one knows how quickly the world's climate altered back then, but one cannot help but fear what a similar scale of change might mean for humanity today.
A dying sea
New ramifications of rapid warming are continually being discovered. In 2006 scientists realised that the sea can die as a result of massive global warming. Indeed, it has done so several times during Earth's history, and when it does, it takes most life on land with it.
The most devastating example of oceanic death occurred around 250 million years ago, when 95 per cent of all life perished.
Geologists studying rocks in Western Australia discovered traces of the unique lipids (fatty molecules) made by strange kinds of bacteria known as purple bacteria and green sulphur bacteria.
These bacteria only thrive in waters that are well lit by the sun, yet are low in oxygen and high in hydrogen sulphide. Such conditions exist only in very restricted and unusual environments today, such as the 'jellyfish lakes' of Palau. Yet the story preserved in the rocks reveals that most, if not all, of Earth's oceans resembled this environment 250 million years ago.
Answers in the ice-core
How much time do we have to prove Lovelock wrong? On 31 March 2008, Dr James Hansen and eight of his colleagues provided a new, alarming, though still partial, answer to this question.
They looked back over the increasingly complete ice-core record, which documents the last three-quarters of a million years of Earth's climatic history, and tried to determine how much warming a given amount of atmospheric CO2 pollution would produce, and how long it would take to produce it.
Their most alarming discovery was that, when viewed over the long term, Earth's climate system is about twice as sensitive to CO2 pollution as is shown on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's century-long projections.
This implies that there is already enough greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere to cause two degrees Celsius of warming, bringing about conditions not seen on Earth for two to three million years and constituting, according to the authors, "a degree of warming that would surely yield 'dangerous' climate impacts".
Fortunately for us, some, perhaps half, of that warming is currently masked by other pollutants, known collectively as the agents of global dimming, which reflect sunlight into space, thus cooling Earth.
Today, China, India and other rapidly industrialising economies are releasing these pollutants in ever-increasing quantities. Yet because of their effect on visibility and their serious impact on human health, there's good reason to believe that in the near future such nations will move to curb their release.
Close to the point of no return
In their landmark paper, Hansen and his colleagues make a useful distinction between climatic "tipping points" and "the point of no return."
The climatic tipping point is the point at which the greenhouse-gas concentration reaches a level sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change. The point of no return is reached when that concentration of greenhouse gas has been in place sufficiently long to give rise to an irreversible process.
Humanity is now suspended between a tipping point and a point of no return. We still have a few years before we reach the point of no return, but there is not a second to waste. This is our greatest challenge: to draw the pollution out of the air and save ourselves from Lovelock's new Dark Age.
Professor Tim Flannery is an eminent scientist, writer and former Australian of the Year. He is also chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. This is an edited extract from his book Now or never: a sustainable future for Australia? published in Australia by Black Inc.
We need to do more to prevent the world descending into a new Dark Age as a result of climate change, argues Professor Tim Flannery. Source: ABC TV 14 September 2009.
By Tim Flannery
In the northern summer of 2008 Arctic sea ice covered the second smallest area recorded since the beginning of the satellite era (Source: NASA/GSFC)
In 2006 James Lovelock published a book that bluntly laid before us the consequences of the carbon imbalance. The Revenge of Gaia argues Gaia's climate system is far more sensitive to greenhouse gas pollution than we imagine, and the system is already trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback.
Although there is still time to avert a catastrophe, Lovelock believes humans lack the foresight, wisdom and political energy required to do so. Instead, he predicts, before the 21st century is out our global civilisation will have collapsed and a new Dark Age will have dawned, wherein a few survivors will cling to the few remaining habitable regions, such as Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula.
How probable is it that this bleak vision will come to pass? New scientific data means that in 2009 we are better placed than ever to determine the scale of the threat and its imminence.
The northern fridge
The sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is an ancient feature of our planet. It has glistened brightly into space for at least three million years.
The northern ice acts as a refrigerator that cools the entire planet. During the summer, the sun's rays beat down upon it 24 hours a day, but because the ice is bright, 90 per cent of that energy is deflected back into space.
By 2005 the Arctic ice cap had been melting at a rate of around eight per cent per decade for thirty years. At that rate, it would have taken until 2100 or thereabouts for the ice cap to disappear altogether.
But in the summer of 2005, a dramatic change occurred. The rate of melt accelerated, so that around four times as much ice melted as compared with previous summers.
These changes in the Arctic have left many scientists worried the region is already in the grip of an irreversible transition. During the winter months, the Arctic is now warming four times faster than the global average, while the existing temperature increase year-round already exceeds two degrees Celsius.
What will happen during that first iceless summer? Most likely, not much at all, for it will take several summers' worth of energy to warm the surface of the Arctic sea to a point where dangerous changes are generated further south. But each year thereafter, the ocean at the top of the world will warm inexorably, and the temperature gradient that controls climatic zones across the northern hemisphere will shift.
If we look back to the last time in Earth's history when such a great warming occurred — 55 million years ago — we see an ominously different world.
Back then, lemurs sported in the rainforests of Greenland, while the tropics were covered in a spiny, thin and alien-looking cover of vegetation, which is today entirely extinct. No one knows how quickly the world's climate altered back then, but one cannot help but fear what a similar scale of change might mean for humanity today.
A dying sea
New ramifications of rapid warming are continually being discovered. In 2006 scientists realised that the sea can die as a result of massive global warming. Indeed, it has done so several times during Earth's history, and when it does, it takes most life on land with it.
The most devastating example of oceanic death occurred around 250 million years ago, when 95 per cent of all life perished.
Geologists studying rocks in Western Australia discovered traces of the unique lipids (fatty molecules) made by strange kinds of bacteria known as purple bacteria and green sulphur bacteria.
These bacteria only thrive in waters that are well lit by the sun, yet are low in oxygen and high in hydrogen sulphide. Such conditions exist only in very restricted and unusual environments today, such as the 'jellyfish lakes' of Palau. Yet the story preserved in the rocks reveals that most, if not all, of Earth's oceans resembled this environment 250 million years ago.
Answers in the ice-core
How much time do we have to prove Lovelock wrong? On 31 March 2008, Dr James Hansen and eight of his colleagues provided a new, alarming, though still partial, answer to this question.
They looked back over the increasingly complete ice-core record, which documents the last three-quarters of a million years of Earth's climatic history, and tried to determine how much warming a given amount of atmospheric CO2 pollution would produce, and how long it would take to produce it.
Their most alarming discovery was that, when viewed over the long term, Earth's climate system is about twice as sensitive to CO2 pollution as is shown on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's century-long projections.
This implies that there is already enough greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere to cause two degrees Celsius of warming, bringing about conditions not seen on Earth for two to three million years and constituting, according to the authors, "a degree of warming that would surely yield 'dangerous' climate impacts".
Fortunately for us, some, perhaps half, of that warming is currently masked by other pollutants, known collectively as the agents of global dimming, which reflect sunlight into space, thus cooling Earth.
Today, China, India and other rapidly industrialising economies are releasing these pollutants in ever-increasing quantities. Yet because of their effect on visibility and their serious impact on human health, there's good reason to believe that in the near future such nations will move to curb their release.
Close to the point of no return
In their landmark paper, Hansen and his colleagues make a useful distinction between climatic "tipping points" and "the point of no return."
The climatic tipping point is the point at which the greenhouse-gas concentration reaches a level sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change. The point of no return is reached when that concentration of greenhouse gas has been in place sufficiently long to give rise to an irreversible process.
Humanity is now suspended between a tipping point and a point of no return. We still have a few years before we reach the point of no return, but there is not a second to waste. This is our greatest challenge: to draw the pollution out of the air and save ourselves from Lovelock's new Dark Age.
Professor Tim Flannery is an eminent scientist, writer and former Australian of the Year. He is also chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. This is an edited extract from his book Now or never: a sustainable future for Australia? published in Australia by Black Inc.
Selasa, 28 Juli 2009
REDD is the only scheme in town.
Big REDD 14/07/2009
Mohamad Rayan, clipper
Right now, there's more money to be made cutting tropical forests down than leaving them standing. Environmental policymakers are trying to reverse that equation. Until forty years ago, the Surui people spent their days roaming the Brazilian Amazon with bows and arrows, hunting monkeys and wild pigs. Their only contact with the outside world was with the rubber tappers who occasionally ventured through their territory. Then, beginning in the late 1960s, the Brazilian government laid a 2,000-mile highway through the heart of the jungle. Lured by the promise of cheap, fertile land, thousands of poor farmers boarded buses, rickety pickups, and horse-drawn wagons and bore deep into Surui tribal lands. The results were catastrophic. First the tribe was decimated by disease. Then unscrupulous speculators started hawking fraudulent titles to the land, spawning bloody turf wars between the tribe and settlers. Within a few years, the Surui population dwindled from roughly 2,000 to fewer than 200. Amid the onslaught, neighboring tribes scattered, died off, or sold out to loggers and ranchers. But the bitter suffering and long odds only seemed to sharpen the Suruis resolve and fighting instincts. After ten years of struggle, in 1982, the tribe rose up, armed with clubs and poison arrows, and drove the settlers from their land. Since then, the Surui have been battling to keep new incursions at bay.
The tribe has split into four groups, each living in a different corner of their 600,000-acre territory, so they can better guard their turf. They regularly throw chains over logging roads, chase miners out of pits and rivers, and take the government to task for failing to rein in the destruction. So far, their tenacity has paid off: even as development has eaten away at the surrounding landscape, the tribe has managed to preserve their forests and their way of life. Viewed by satellite, their territory is a lone patch of green amid stretches of barren, ocher earth. But the struggle is relentless. In the last decade, the Surui and neighboring tribes have seen eleven tribal elders assassinated.
At one point their chief, Almir Surui, was evacuated by helicopter to the United States because of threats to his life. Behind the brutality is simple economics: in rural Brazil, grinding poverty is the norm, and there is ample money to be made from plundering the forests. Logging alone supports at least thirty timber mills and more than 4,000 jobs in the areas surrounding the Surui territory. This means that, for every trespasser the tribe fends off, thousands more lie in wait. Despite the admonitions of tribal elders, even some members of the Surui tribe have given in and opened their land to loggers in return for cash. Almir Surui is well aware that, given the forces he's up against, poison arrows wont be enough to keep intruders at bay forever. In recent years, the plucky young chief, who wears a traditional feather headdress even when visiting Washington or Rio de Janeiro, has embraced a variety of new tools that would have boggled the minds of his ancestors.
The one-room schoolhouse in his village has been outfitted with broadband Internet and computer terminals that run a high-resolution version of Google Earth, which the Surui use to monitor illegal logging. Working with environmental groups, including Forest Trends and the Amazon Conservation Team, the tribe is also exploring ways to tap into global carbon markets. As a first step, they have hired the heavyweight law firm Baker and McKenzie to parse their claim to the carbon dioxide stored in their part of the Amazon, which, like all tropical forests, absorbs large quantities of this heat-trapping gas. They have also begun laying out methods for measuring the carbon stock, most likely through a combination of high-resolution satellites and on-the-ground observation. In the meantime, an anthropologist has been dispatched to explain to the tribe's rank-and-file what exactly carbon is.
The aim is to get businesses and governments in the developed world to pay the Surui to preserve their forest as part of the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The money would go toward a rigorous, independently certified monitoring and enforcement system, as well as toward building schools and health clinics and reforesting the areas of their land that have been ravaged by loggers. The Surui also plan to use some of the funds to set up sustainable industries, such as shade-grown-coffee plantations and small-scale furniture factories, which would allow them - and, eventually, the surrounding communities - to make a living from standing forests, thereby helping to alleviate the poverty that has fed constant assaults on their territory. The project is part of a bold experiment, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, which is being piloted in countries around the globe.
Though REDD can take many forms, the key idea is that businesses or governments in wealthy countries compensate those in the developing world for preserving their forests, either by paying into a fund or by purchasing credits on carbon markets. Though the concept is not entirely new, it is rapidly gaining traction as the international community comes to grips with the crucial role forests play in regulating greenhouse gases. Not only do our forests absorb and store vast quantities of carbon dioxide in their vegetation through photosynthesis; when theyre destroyed, they also release the gas into the atmosphere. Roughly one-fifth of the world's carbon emissions stems from deforestation and forest degradation. Scientists warn that without measures to keep forests intact, we will stand no chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. REDD is expected to play a key role in the new global climate treaty to take effect after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Similarly, the landmark Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which as of this writing is moving through Congress, would allow polluters to offset a portion of their emissions by sinking money into REDD projects. Although support for these proposals is growing in many quarters, they remain deeply controversial. Backers say they could deliver the same benefits as cutting emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks while improving the lives of poor rural people and protecting vital ecosystems and watersheds. Critics counter that the policy will be costly and complicated to monitor and could undermine the transparency, simplicity, and predictability of carbon markets, dealing a critical blow to the global battle against climate change. The idea of protecting tropical forests as a way of mitigating climate change is by no means new. During negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, President Bill Clinton established a system of incentives, including grants and tax credits, to encourage U.S. businesses to voluntarily reduce their carbon output before mandatory caps were set. Polluters could also get credit for "offsetting" emissions by investing in projects to prevent deforestation, with the result that U.S. power companies poured millions of dollars into protecting at-risk forests in Latin America.
For instance, the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, a preserve of nearly four million acres in the Bolivian Amazon, was established in 1997 using $11 million from U.S. energy companies, such as American Electric Power and BP Amoco. The project is administered by the Bolivian government and environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy, which uses tree counters and satellite data to keep tabs on the health of the forest. So far, it has been a success. Even as logging and agriculture have eaten away at forests elsewhere in Latin America, including those that are nominally protected, Noel Kempff's ecosystem has remained pristine. It is estimated that more than twenty-five million tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be avoided as a result of the project. But these types of forestry projects were relegated to the sidelines with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the first and only global climate treaty, in December 1997.
Though some signatories supported the idea of allowing developing countries to sell credits from forest-preservation projects on the emerging global carbon market, the majority held that large-scale monitoring and verification would be difficult, if not impossible, with existing technical tools. Critics also noted that discrete projects to protect against deforestation couldnt be counted on to reduce overall carbon emissions, since the loggers and ranchers who chop down the forest for their livelihood could shift their activities to nonprotected areas, a phenomenon known as "leakage." Moreover, they argued, there was no way to guarantee that forests set aside as carbon sinks would continue to store heat-trapping gases in the long term, since drought or fire could cause the foliage in protected areas to die back and release stored carbon into the atmosphere. Perhaps more importantly, many environmental groups believed that credits from forest-preservation projects could swamp the carbon market, driving down the price of carbon and allowing polluting industries to continue emitting greenhouse gases without consequence. The few environmentalists who expressed support for REDD during the Kyoto talks became mired in bitter shouting matches with their peers. "It was a pretty lonely battle," recalls Tia Nelson, a longtime REDD supporter and the daughter of the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day.
Ultimately, REDD was excluded from Kyoto, though parties to the agreement could earn carbon offsets by funding reforestation projects (or projects to plant new forests where none existed) in the developing world. However, due to technical stumbling blocks, few of these projects got off the ground. In the absence of meaningful incentives to protect or restore forests, development ate away at these lush ecosystems, including millions of acres of primary forests, which are the richest biologically, the most carbon dense, and the hardest to replace. Nowhere was the devastation more evident than in Brazil and Indonesia, two of the countries with the most extensive tropical forest cover. Between 1997 and 2004, Brazils deforestation rates increased dramatically, peaking at 10,600 square miles a year, an area the size of Massachusetts. In Indonesia, the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998 ushered in a period of chaos, resulting in unprecedented destruction of forests. Loggers and oil palm plantation developers cleared and burned vast areas, and the damage was worsened by one of the strongest el Nio events on record. When the smoke cleared, more than 25,000 square miles had burned in Indonesian Borneo alone, unleashing upward of two billion tons of carbon. All told, since Kyotos exclusion, Brazil and Indonesia have lost more than 160,000 square miles of forest - an area nearly the size of California - with the result that billions of tons of carbon have been released into the atmosphere. In fact, due to deforestation these two countries, which have relatively modest industrial emission, rank just right behind the United States and China as the worlds top emitters of greenhouse gases. Faced with this devastation, scientists and environmental groups began working to solve the technical, political, and ideological woes that have prevented the widespread adoption of REDD. In 2005, six leading Brazilian and American researchers published an essay titled "Tropical Deforestation and the Kyoto Protocol" in the journal Climatic Change, which concluded that it would be impossible to curb global warming without protecting forests.
The authors proposed solutions to some of the technical problems surrounding REDD. Most critically, they suggested that countries participating in REDD schemes commit to reducing deforestation on a national rather than project level, thus addressing the pressing concern about leakage. Meanwhile, new guidelines were emerging, among them the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standards and Voluntary Carbon Standards, which laid out rules for ensuring that REDD projects delivered on promised carbon reductions. At the same time, tools for monitoring deforestation, such as GPS and computer mapping, were becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous. New technologies were also surfacing, among them applications for analyzing high-resolution satellite data, which could spot small gaps in the rainforest canopy and pinpoint areas where even a handful of trees had been felled by loggers. Similarly, Lidar, a laser-based remote-sensing technology, could penetrate the dense layers of foliage, allowing researchers to create three-dimensional maps. In addition to making it easier to monitor deforestation, these developments simplified the process of estimating how much carbon forests were storing, something that previously required venturing into the woods on foot and measuring the girth of tree trunks and the depth of the leaf litter. Another crucial development was the emergence of a negotiation bloc, led by Papua New Guinea. At the time, the tiny island nation was under pressure from the international community to quit felling its tropical forests, but its leaders feared that ferreting out the loggers would devastate its already fragile economy. The dilemma caught the attention of a Columbia University MBA student named Kevin Conrad, who had grown up deep in the Papua New Guinea rainforest. He decided to form an organization to push for a mechanism by which developing countries could be compensated for preserving their forests. Called the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, it came to include more than a dozen tropical countries, among them Costa Rica, a country lauded by the international community for transforming itself from a high deforester to a model of conservation. The coalition made its public debut in December 2005 at the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Montreal, where Conrad offered a proposal for including REDD in the post-Kyoto climate treaty, partly as a means of encouraging poor countries to contribute to the global fight against climate change. Previously, developing nations had refused to commit to targets for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions because, they argued, it would stifle economic growth - a fact that had emerged as a key sticking point in past negotiations. According to Conrad, the proposal initially met opposition from the United States, which feared that if developing countries committed to robust and meaningful reductions of heat-trapping gases, the U.S. would no longer be able to cite their lack of participation as an excuse not to take action. But the United States eventually backed down, and, to the surprise of many observers, the parties agreed to study the proposal - a first step toward its inclusion in a future climate accord. Two years later, representatives from more than 180 nations descended on Bali for another UN climate conference, this one focused on hashing out a road map for negotiating a post-Kyoto climate treaty. When, after twelve days, the parties finally reached an agreement, the United States attempted to block its passage. Conrad issued a direct challenge: "We ask for your leadership, but if for some reason youre not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way." Minutes later the U.S. delegation capitulated, paving the way for the Bali Action Plan, which recognized the critical role tropical forests play in regulating climate and established REDD as a likely component of the post-Kyoto regime. Soon after the meeting, money began pouring into voluntary REDD programs. Norway unveiled its International Climate and Forests Initiative, a plan to commit some $500 million per year to rainforest conservation, while the World Bank announced a $385 million Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) to jumpstart REDD in developing countries, in part by helping them develop the tools and expertise theyll need to administer the program. More recently, Britain and Norway put $160 million toward the Congo Basin Forest Fund to finance forest conservation activities in Central Africa. Britains Prince Charles has made saving rainforests his signature cause by developing the Prince's Rainforest Project to bring business and political leaders around to supporting conservation. His efforts culminated in a historic meeting between heads of state, in advance of the G20 summit in April 2009, to discuss rainforest conservation. Developing countries have also gotten involved, including Brazil, which in 2008 announced the formation of a $21 billion fund to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 70 percent within ten years. The project is expected to cut the nation's carbon emissions by 4.8 billion tons by 2017. (For more information, see Marcelo Leite, "The Brazilian Dilemma.") Meanwhile, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill includes a REDD component. Specifically, the measure would allow U.S. companies to offset six billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by investing in forest conservation projects between now and 2025. These developments are part of a surge of support for REDD, which extends even to once-skeptical environmental groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club, and the growing momentum toward its inclusion in the post-Kyoto climate treaty, the final details of which are meant to be hammered out in Copenhagen this December. Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. delegation in Kyoto, summed up the evolving attitudes of many environmentalists and diplomats in testimony before Congress last year, when he said that continuing to exclude tropical forests from the global efforts to fight climate change "makes no sense scientifically, and it makes no sense politically or economically." Despite this outpouring of enthusiasm, REDD remains controversial. Critics, including some European countries, argue that even with new technologies it will be complicated to monitor. Some environmental groups maintain that allowing polluters to offset their emissions by investing in forestry projects will undermine low-carbon technologies without meaningfully reducing emissions (something REDD supporters say can be avoided by setting strong emissions caps). There are also deep divisions over how to finance REDD projects. Some countries, most notably Brazil, argue that instead of integrating forest-preservation projects into international carbon markets, wealthy nations should reward developing countries that curb deforestation by paying into funds that the developing countries themselves control. Their reasons have partly to do with sovereignty concerns - Brazil doesnt fancy international monitors descending on its forests or weighing in on its land-management policies - and partly to do with the belief that allowing forests into carbon markets would let developed nations off the hook when it comes to cutting their own emissions. "Brazil is not interested in giving industrialized countries cheap carbon credits from protecting the Amazon if they are not going to stop building coal-fired power plants," says William Boyd, a professor of law at the University of Colorado who has worked extensively on REDD policy issues. But some REDD advocates hold that a fund-based system will be subject to political whims of donor nations and wont generate the kind of money needed to reduce deforestation at the scale and pace necessary to meet emission-reduction targets. Another contentious issue is how to measure a nations progress toward curbing deforestation. The most straightforward approach is to compare current or future deforestation rates to historical ones. But this method favors nations with a history of slash and burn, something countries like Costa Rica, which have taken pains to preserve their forests, argue is deeply unfair. This idea is also troubling to the Surui, who fear their REDD project could fail because theyve kept their forests so pristine. To solve this quandary, some rainforest advocates, including Kevin Conrad, have proposed giving nations with a track record of good stewardship credit for early action.
"If we dont provide incentives for countries that have so far maintained their forests, but otherwise have land suitable for conversion, then those forests are going to fall," Conrad explains. But the idea of giving credit for past successes raises eyebrows among those concerned about the integrity of carbon markets. Similarly, for REDD to work, at least some of the money that is generated will have to go to agents of deforestation, such as commercial logging operations. Otherwise, there is no incentive for them to stop destroying forests. But this idea doesnt sit well with many environmentalists. There is also the question of what REDD will mean for the well-being of indigenous people. Despite having occupied lands for years or generations, many forest-dwelling communities still lack formal titles, or even basic rights, to land and resources. Indigenous advocates fear that as REDD makes forests increasingly valuable, even more rights are likely to be wrested from native inhabitants. Groups like the Global Forest Coalition and the World Rainforest Movement paint a nightmare scenario of forced displacement at the hands of carbon speculators. "REDD projects do not help indigenous peoples and forest peoples," says Jihan Gearon of the Indigenous Environmental Network. "In fact they hurt these communities and take away access and rights to forests, traditional territories, and medicines." REDD's supporters counter that, if well designed, the mechanism could actually benefit forest dwellers, by providing funding for services such as health care and education as well as by focusing fresh attention on the plight of indigenous people and their territories. "For decades, capitalists, socialists, private companies, governments, and local operators have blasted into tropical communities, razed forests, and moved on with little concern for the fact that they denuded the land," says John O. Niles, a REDD expert with the Tropical Forest Group, a forest policy think tank. "REDD will put a microscope on these issues. I think a UN-driven system of incentives for keeping forests - a system of oversight with some transparency - and the strong voice of critical observers will lead to more positive outcomes more of the time." Certainly, some voluntary REDD projects have benefited forest dwellers. Among them is the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, which encompasses 1.4 million acres of rainforest in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, an area that until a few years ago was plagued by illegal logging. Foreign businesses or governments can purchase offset credits on the voluntary carbon market, with funds going toward protecting the reserve's lush ecosystem, in part by compensating 6,000 Juma families for preserving their forests. Each family is given a monthly stipend and their villages are provided with solar panels, computers, and money for community services, such as schools and clinics. Monitoring is done by satellite. If the forest is damaged or destroyed, the family that owns the land is dropped from the program and their village put on warning.
The project is still in the early stages, but if successful it could prevent the release of 190 million tons of carbon between now and 2050. To some degree, REDD's effect on forest dwellers will depend on how the policy is structured. Some parties to the UN climate talks have proposed building protections for indigenous people into the REDD program in the post-Kyoto climate treaty. But the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have blocked this provision, a fact that has spawned outrage. Indigenous groups have turned out at UN climate conferences with placards reading, "No Rights, No REDD!" Given the myriad obstacles, will REDD designers be able to develop a workable framework? Many people involved in REDD discussions think so. "I think the chances are very strong that if we get a climate agreement in Copenhagen REDD will be a part of it," says Tracy Johns of the Woods Hole Research Center, a scientific think tank that has researched REDD extensively. "All of the stakeholders that have been involved in the REDD process in recent years - governments, NGOs, the private sector, indigenous peoples - have done a lot of work and made a lot of progress on the issues and challenges. I think in many ways the REDD negotiation process is more advanced than many of the other lines of negotiation that are under way for Copenhagen." This is not to say that the parties to the negotiation, and the civil society groups weighing in from the sidelines, are unaware of the challenges. Even REDD's strongest supporters admit that trying to fulfill all the hopes invested in the policy, while avoiding the possible pitfalls, is a risky proposition. But they support it just the same.
"REDD is being asked to do a lot of things - improving governance, promoting sustainable development, and mitigating climate change - but the potential benefits are so great, its a chance worth taking," explains Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund. This is because REDD is the only existing mechanism that promises to make preserving living forests more lucrative than cutting them down - and only by accomplishing that feat can we hope to stem the tide of deforestation. Put another way, despite its shortcomings, REDD may be our last, best hope of saving the tropical forests, which are so essential to the future health of our planet. Source: click to view source website© Washington Monthly
Mohamad Rayan, clipper
Right now, there's more money to be made cutting tropical forests down than leaving them standing. Environmental policymakers are trying to reverse that equation. Until forty years ago, the Surui people spent their days roaming the Brazilian Amazon with bows and arrows, hunting monkeys and wild pigs. Their only contact with the outside world was with the rubber tappers who occasionally ventured through their territory. Then, beginning in the late 1960s, the Brazilian government laid a 2,000-mile highway through the heart of the jungle. Lured by the promise of cheap, fertile land, thousands of poor farmers boarded buses, rickety pickups, and horse-drawn wagons and bore deep into Surui tribal lands. The results were catastrophic. First the tribe was decimated by disease. Then unscrupulous speculators started hawking fraudulent titles to the land, spawning bloody turf wars between the tribe and settlers. Within a few years, the Surui population dwindled from roughly 2,000 to fewer than 200. Amid the onslaught, neighboring tribes scattered, died off, or sold out to loggers and ranchers. But the bitter suffering and long odds only seemed to sharpen the Suruis resolve and fighting instincts. After ten years of struggle, in 1982, the tribe rose up, armed with clubs and poison arrows, and drove the settlers from their land. Since then, the Surui have been battling to keep new incursions at bay.
The tribe has split into four groups, each living in a different corner of their 600,000-acre territory, so they can better guard their turf. They regularly throw chains over logging roads, chase miners out of pits and rivers, and take the government to task for failing to rein in the destruction. So far, their tenacity has paid off: even as development has eaten away at the surrounding landscape, the tribe has managed to preserve their forests and their way of life. Viewed by satellite, their territory is a lone patch of green amid stretches of barren, ocher earth. But the struggle is relentless. In the last decade, the Surui and neighboring tribes have seen eleven tribal elders assassinated.
At one point their chief, Almir Surui, was evacuated by helicopter to the United States because of threats to his life. Behind the brutality is simple economics: in rural Brazil, grinding poverty is the norm, and there is ample money to be made from plundering the forests. Logging alone supports at least thirty timber mills and more than 4,000 jobs in the areas surrounding the Surui territory. This means that, for every trespasser the tribe fends off, thousands more lie in wait. Despite the admonitions of tribal elders, even some members of the Surui tribe have given in and opened their land to loggers in return for cash. Almir Surui is well aware that, given the forces he's up against, poison arrows wont be enough to keep intruders at bay forever. In recent years, the plucky young chief, who wears a traditional feather headdress even when visiting Washington or Rio de Janeiro, has embraced a variety of new tools that would have boggled the minds of his ancestors.
The one-room schoolhouse in his village has been outfitted with broadband Internet and computer terminals that run a high-resolution version of Google Earth, which the Surui use to monitor illegal logging. Working with environmental groups, including Forest Trends and the Amazon Conservation Team, the tribe is also exploring ways to tap into global carbon markets. As a first step, they have hired the heavyweight law firm Baker and McKenzie to parse their claim to the carbon dioxide stored in their part of the Amazon, which, like all tropical forests, absorbs large quantities of this heat-trapping gas. They have also begun laying out methods for measuring the carbon stock, most likely through a combination of high-resolution satellites and on-the-ground observation. In the meantime, an anthropologist has been dispatched to explain to the tribe's rank-and-file what exactly carbon is.
The aim is to get businesses and governments in the developed world to pay the Surui to preserve their forest as part of the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The money would go toward a rigorous, independently certified monitoring and enforcement system, as well as toward building schools and health clinics and reforesting the areas of their land that have been ravaged by loggers. The Surui also plan to use some of the funds to set up sustainable industries, such as shade-grown-coffee plantations and small-scale furniture factories, which would allow them - and, eventually, the surrounding communities - to make a living from standing forests, thereby helping to alleviate the poverty that has fed constant assaults on their territory. The project is part of a bold experiment, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, which is being piloted in countries around the globe.
Though REDD can take many forms, the key idea is that businesses or governments in wealthy countries compensate those in the developing world for preserving their forests, either by paying into a fund or by purchasing credits on carbon markets. Though the concept is not entirely new, it is rapidly gaining traction as the international community comes to grips with the crucial role forests play in regulating greenhouse gases. Not only do our forests absorb and store vast quantities of carbon dioxide in their vegetation through photosynthesis; when theyre destroyed, they also release the gas into the atmosphere. Roughly one-fifth of the world's carbon emissions stems from deforestation and forest degradation. Scientists warn that without measures to keep forests intact, we will stand no chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. REDD is expected to play a key role in the new global climate treaty to take effect after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Similarly, the landmark Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which as of this writing is moving through Congress, would allow polluters to offset a portion of their emissions by sinking money into REDD projects. Although support for these proposals is growing in many quarters, they remain deeply controversial. Backers say they could deliver the same benefits as cutting emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks while improving the lives of poor rural people and protecting vital ecosystems and watersheds. Critics counter that the policy will be costly and complicated to monitor and could undermine the transparency, simplicity, and predictability of carbon markets, dealing a critical blow to the global battle against climate change. The idea of protecting tropical forests as a way of mitigating climate change is by no means new. During negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, President Bill Clinton established a system of incentives, including grants and tax credits, to encourage U.S. businesses to voluntarily reduce their carbon output before mandatory caps were set. Polluters could also get credit for "offsetting" emissions by investing in projects to prevent deforestation, with the result that U.S. power companies poured millions of dollars into protecting at-risk forests in Latin America.
For instance, the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, a preserve of nearly four million acres in the Bolivian Amazon, was established in 1997 using $11 million from U.S. energy companies, such as American Electric Power and BP Amoco. The project is administered by the Bolivian government and environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy, which uses tree counters and satellite data to keep tabs on the health of the forest. So far, it has been a success. Even as logging and agriculture have eaten away at forests elsewhere in Latin America, including those that are nominally protected, Noel Kempff's ecosystem has remained pristine. It is estimated that more than twenty-five million tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be avoided as a result of the project. But these types of forestry projects were relegated to the sidelines with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the first and only global climate treaty, in December 1997.
Though some signatories supported the idea of allowing developing countries to sell credits from forest-preservation projects on the emerging global carbon market, the majority held that large-scale monitoring and verification would be difficult, if not impossible, with existing technical tools. Critics also noted that discrete projects to protect against deforestation couldnt be counted on to reduce overall carbon emissions, since the loggers and ranchers who chop down the forest for their livelihood could shift their activities to nonprotected areas, a phenomenon known as "leakage." Moreover, they argued, there was no way to guarantee that forests set aside as carbon sinks would continue to store heat-trapping gases in the long term, since drought or fire could cause the foliage in protected areas to die back and release stored carbon into the atmosphere. Perhaps more importantly, many environmental groups believed that credits from forest-preservation projects could swamp the carbon market, driving down the price of carbon and allowing polluting industries to continue emitting greenhouse gases without consequence. The few environmentalists who expressed support for REDD during the Kyoto talks became mired in bitter shouting matches with their peers. "It was a pretty lonely battle," recalls Tia Nelson, a longtime REDD supporter and the daughter of the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day.
Ultimately, REDD was excluded from Kyoto, though parties to the agreement could earn carbon offsets by funding reforestation projects (or projects to plant new forests where none existed) in the developing world. However, due to technical stumbling blocks, few of these projects got off the ground. In the absence of meaningful incentives to protect or restore forests, development ate away at these lush ecosystems, including millions of acres of primary forests, which are the richest biologically, the most carbon dense, and the hardest to replace. Nowhere was the devastation more evident than in Brazil and Indonesia, two of the countries with the most extensive tropical forest cover. Between 1997 and 2004, Brazils deforestation rates increased dramatically, peaking at 10,600 square miles a year, an area the size of Massachusetts. In Indonesia, the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998 ushered in a period of chaos, resulting in unprecedented destruction of forests. Loggers and oil palm plantation developers cleared and burned vast areas, and the damage was worsened by one of the strongest el Nio events on record. When the smoke cleared, more than 25,000 square miles had burned in Indonesian Borneo alone, unleashing upward of two billion tons of carbon. All told, since Kyotos exclusion, Brazil and Indonesia have lost more than 160,000 square miles of forest - an area nearly the size of California - with the result that billions of tons of carbon have been released into the atmosphere. In fact, due to deforestation these two countries, which have relatively modest industrial emission, rank just right behind the United States and China as the worlds top emitters of greenhouse gases. Faced with this devastation, scientists and environmental groups began working to solve the technical, political, and ideological woes that have prevented the widespread adoption of REDD. In 2005, six leading Brazilian and American researchers published an essay titled "Tropical Deforestation and the Kyoto Protocol" in the journal Climatic Change, which concluded that it would be impossible to curb global warming without protecting forests.
The authors proposed solutions to some of the technical problems surrounding REDD. Most critically, they suggested that countries participating in REDD schemes commit to reducing deforestation on a national rather than project level, thus addressing the pressing concern about leakage. Meanwhile, new guidelines were emerging, among them the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standards and Voluntary Carbon Standards, which laid out rules for ensuring that REDD projects delivered on promised carbon reductions. At the same time, tools for monitoring deforestation, such as GPS and computer mapping, were becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous. New technologies were also surfacing, among them applications for analyzing high-resolution satellite data, which could spot small gaps in the rainforest canopy and pinpoint areas where even a handful of trees had been felled by loggers. Similarly, Lidar, a laser-based remote-sensing technology, could penetrate the dense layers of foliage, allowing researchers to create three-dimensional maps. In addition to making it easier to monitor deforestation, these developments simplified the process of estimating how much carbon forests were storing, something that previously required venturing into the woods on foot and measuring the girth of tree trunks and the depth of the leaf litter. Another crucial development was the emergence of a negotiation bloc, led by Papua New Guinea. At the time, the tiny island nation was under pressure from the international community to quit felling its tropical forests, but its leaders feared that ferreting out the loggers would devastate its already fragile economy. The dilemma caught the attention of a Columbia University MBA student named Kevin Conrad, who had grown up deep in the Papua New Guinea rainforest. He decided to form an organization to push for a mechanism by which developing countries could be compensated for preserving their forests. Called the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, it came to include more than a dozen tropical countries, among them Costa Rica, a country lauded by the international community for transforming itself from a high deforester to a model of conservation. The coalition made its public debut in December 2005 at the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Montreal, where Conrad offered a proposal for including REDD in the post-Kyoto climate treaty, partly as a means of encouraging poor countries to contribute to the global fight against climate change. Previously, developing nations had refused to commit to targets for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions because, they argued, it would stifle economic growth - a fact that had emerged as a key sticking point in past negotiations. According to Conrad, the proposal initially met opposition from the United States, which feared that if developing countries committed to robust and meaningful reductions of heat-trapping gases, the U.S. would no longer be able to cite their lack of participation as an excuse not to take action. But the United States eventually backed down, and, to the surprise of many observers, the parties agreed to study the proposal - a first step toward its inclusion in a future climate accord. Two years later, representatives from more than 180 nations descended on Bali for another UN climate conference, this one focused on hashing out a road map for negotiating a post-Kyoto climate treaty. When, after twelve days, the parties finally reached an agreement, the United States attempted to block its passage. Conrad issued a direct challenge: "We ask for your leadership, but if for some reason youre not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way." Minutes later the U.S. delegation capitulated, paving the way for the Bali Action Plan, which recognized the critical role tropical forests play in regulating climate and established REDD as a likely component of the post-Kyoto regime. Soon after the meeting, money began pouring into voluntary REDD programs. Norway unveiled its International Climate and Forests Initiative, a plan to commit some $500 million per year to rainforest conservation, while the World Bank announced a $385 million Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) to jumpstart REDD in developing countries, in part by helping them develop the tools and expertise theyll need to administer the program. More recently, Britain and Norway put $160 million toward the Congo Basin Forest Fund to finance forest conservation activities in Central Africa. Britains Prince Charles has made saving rainforests his signature cause by developing the Prince's Rainforest Project to bring business and political leaders around to supporting conservation. His efforts culminated in a historic meeting between heads of state, in advance of the G20 summit in April 2009, to discuss rainforest conservation. Developing countries have also gotten involved, including Brazil, which in 2008 announced the formation of a $21 billion fund to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 70 percent within ten years. The project is expected to cut the nation's carbon emissions by 4.8 billion tons by 2017. (For more information, see Marcelo Leite, "The Brazilian Dilemma.") Meanwhile, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill includes a REDD component. Specifically, the measure would allow U.S. companies to offset six billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by investing in forest conservation projects between now and 2025. These developments are part of a surge of support for REDD, which extends even to once-skeptical environmental groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club, and the growing momentum toward its inclusion in the post-Kyoto climate treaty, the final details of which are meant to be hammered out in Copenhagen this December. Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. delegation in Kyoto, summed up the evolving attitudes of many environmentalists and diplomats in testimony before Congress last year, when he said that continuing to exclude tropical forests from the global efforts to fight climate change "makes no sense scientifically, and it makes no sense politically or economically." Despite this outpouring of enthusiasm, REDD remains controversial. Critics, including some European countries, argue that even with new technologies it will be complicated to monitor. Some environmental groups maintain that allowing polluters to offset their emissions by investing in forestry projects will undermine low-carbon technologies without meaningfully reducing emissions (something REDD supporters say can be avoided by setting strong emissions caps). There are also deep divisions over how to finance REDD projects. Some countries, most notably Brazil, argue that instead of integrating forest-preservation projects into international carbon markets, wealthy nations should reward developing countries that curb deforestation by paying into funds that the developing countries themselves control. Their reasons have partly to do with sovereignty concerns - Brazil doesnt fancy international monitors descending on its forests or weighing in on its land-management policies - and partly to do with the belief that allowing forests into carbon markets would let developed nations off the hook when it comes to cutting their own emissions. "Brazil is not interested in giving industrialized countries cheap carbon credits from protecting the Amazon if they are not going to stop building coal-fired power plants," says William Boyd, a professor of law at the University of Colorado who has worked extensively on REDD policy issues. But some REDD advocates hold that a fund-based system will be subject to political whims of donor nations and wont generate the kind of money needed to reduce deforestation at the scale and pace necessary to meet emission-reduction targets. Another contentious issue is how to measure a nations progress toward curbing deforestation. The most straightforward approach is to compare current or future deforestation rates to historical ones. But this method favors nations with a history of slash and burn, something countries like Costa Rica, which have taken pains to preserve their forests, argue is deeply unfair. This idea is also troubling to the Surui, who fear their REDD project could fail because theyve kept their forests so pristine. To solve this quandary, some rainforest advocates, including Kevin Conrad, have proposed giving nations with a track record of good stewardship credit for early action.
"If we dont provide incentives for countries that have so far maintained their forests, but otherwise have land suitable for conversion, then those forests are going to fall," Conrad explains. But the idea of giving credit for past successes raises eyebrows among those concerned about the integrity of carbon markets. Similarly, for REDD to work, at least some of the money that is generated will have to go to agents of deforestation, such as commercial logging operations. Otherwise, there is no incentive for them to stop destroying forests. But this idea doesnt sit well with many environmentalists. There is also the question of what REDD will mean for the well-being of indigenous people. Despite having occupied lands for years or generations, many forest-dwelling communities still lack formal titles, or even basic rights, to land and resources. Indigenous advocates fear that as REDD makes forests increasingly valuable, even more rights are likely to be wrested from native inhabitants. Groups like the Global Forest Coalition and the World Rainforest Movement paint a nightmare scenario of forced displacement at the hands of carbon speculators. "REDD projects do not help indigenous peoples and forest peoples," says Jihan Gearon of the Indigenous Environmental Network. "In fact they hurt these communities and take away access and rights to forests, traditional territories, and medicines." REDD's supporters counter that, if well designed, the mechanism could actually benefit forest dwellers, by providing funding for services such as health care and education as well as by focusing fresh attention on the plight of indigenous people and their territories. "For decades, capitalists, socialists, private companies, governments, and local operators have blasted into tropical communities, razed forests, and moved on with little concern for the fact that they denuded the land," says John O. Niles, a REDD expert with the Tropical Forest Group, a forest policy think tank. "REDD will put a microscope on these issues. I think a UN-driven system of incentives for keeping forests - a system of oversight with some transparency - and the strong voice of critical observers will lead to more positive outcomes more of the time." Certainly, some voluntary REDD projects have benefited forest dwellers. Among them is the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, which encompasses 1.4 million acres of rainforest in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, an area that until a few years ago was plagued by illegal logging. Foreign businesses or governments can purchase offset credits on the voluntary carbon market, with funds going toward protecting the reserve's lush ecosystem, in part by compensating 6,000 Juma families for preserving their forests. Each family is given a monthly stipend and their villages are provided with solar panels, computers, and money for community services, such as schools and clinics. Monitoring is done by satellite. If the forest is damaged or destroyed, the family that owns the land is dropped from the program and their village put on warning.
The project is still in the early stages, but if successful it could prevent the release of 190 million tons of carbon between now and 2050. To some degree, REDD's effect on forest dwellers will depend on how the policy is structured. Some parties to the UN climate talks have proposed building protections for indigenous people into the REDD program in the post-Kyoto climate treaty. But the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have blocked this provision, a fact that has spawned outrage. Indigenous groups have turned out at UN climate conferences with placards reading, "No Rights, No REDD!" Given the myriad obstacles, will REDD designers be able to develop a workable framework? Many people involved in REDD discussions think so. "I think the chances are very strong that if we get a climate agreement in Copenhagen REDD will be a part of it," says Tracy Johns of the Woods Hole Research Center, a scientific think tank that has researched REDD extensively. "All of the stakeholders that have been involved in the REDD process in recent years - governments, NGOs, the private sector, indigenous peoples - have done a lot of work and made a lot of progress on the issues and challenges. I think in many ways the REDD negotiation process is more advanced than many of the other lines of negotiation that are under way for Copenhagen." This is not to say that the parties to the negotiation, and the civil society groups weighing in from the sidelines, are unaware of the challenges. Even REDD's strongest supporters admit that trying to fulfill all the hopes invested in the policy, while avoiding the possible pitfalls, is a risky proposition. But they support it just the same.
"REDD is being asked to do a lot of things - improving governance, promoting sustainable development, and mitigating climate change - but the potential benefits are so great, its a chance worth taking," explains Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund. This is because REDD is the only existing mechanism that promises to make preserving living forests more lucrative than cutting them down - and only by accomplishing that feat can we hope to stem the tide of deforestation. Put another way, despite its shortcomings, REDD may be our last, best hope of saving the tropical forests, which are so essential to the future health of our planet. Source: click to view source website© Washington Monthly
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