Rainforest treaty 'fatally flawed'

Climate summit loophole lets palm oil producers cull vital wilderness
Michael McCarthy, The Independent 26 Oct 09;

A vital safeguard to protect the world's rainforests from being cut down has been dropped from a global deforestation treaty due to be signed at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

Under proposals due to be ratified at the summit, countries which cut down rainforests and convert them to plantations of trees such as oil palms would still be able to classify the result as forest and could receive millions of dollars meant for preserving them. An earlier version of the text ruled out such a conversion but has been deleted, and the EU delegation – headed by Britain – has blocked its reinsertion.

Environmentalists say plantations are in no way a substitute for the lost natural forest in terms of wildlife, water production or, crucially, as a store of the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere when forests are destroyed and intensifies climate change.

Now they are calling on Britain to take a lead in restoring the anti-plantations safeguard at the final negotiating session in a week's time, saying that otherwise the agreement – which seeks to halve global deforestation rates by 2020 – will be fatally flawed.

"It is a priority for the safeguard to be reinserted, or otherwise we will have a situation where countries are paid for converting their natural forests into palm plantations," said Emily Brickell, the climate and forests officer for the Worldwide Find for Nature (WWF-UK).

"If this is not changed, the agreement will be part of the problem, not part of the solution, because it will allow things to carry on as they are now and we will continue to see the loss of natural rainforest," added Simon Counsell, the executive director of the Rainforest Foundation.

The key piece of text which was lost said that parties to the treaty "shall protect biological diversity, including safeguards against the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations".

It was deleted in closed negotiations but some observers think it was done at the instigation of African rainforest countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon, while other states including Indonesia and Malaysia are believed to have supported it. Both are heavily involved in the oil palm industry, which is a major driver of deforestation because palm oil is used to make biofuels.

A move to reinsert the clause was blocked at the last talks in Bangkok by British officials, who feared that the gains of the week's negotiations (the text was reduced from 19 pages to nine) would be lost if the text were reopened. Green campaigners accept that this was a matter of procedure but think it will have been a disastrously bad call if officials do not move swiftly to replace the lost text at the final negotiations in Barcelona, beginning a week today.

"The EU has to make sure the wording goes back in," said Charlie Kronik, of Greenpeace. "It's absolutely essential, otherwise it leaves open the possibility of removing intact, high-value forests and replacing them with oil palms as party of the treaty."

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "The UK is pushing hard for the strongest possible deal to stop deforestation and that includes wanting specific language in the UN text on the protection of natural forests."

The proposed forest pact, which could be one of the most positive outcomes of the Copenhagen summit, addresses the fact that deforestation, mostly in Central and South America, Africa and Asia, now produces nearly 20 per cent of annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – more than from all the world's transport. Many policymakers consider that the key goal of limiting global warming to no more than C above the pre-industrial level will be unattainable unless the problem of deforestation emissions is tackled. The issue, which has become known in official jargon as Redd (reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries), now has a section to itself in the proposed Copenhagen accord.

Nearly 200 countries will meet in December to try to frame a new treaty that would put the world on a path towards cutting CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Scientists say this is the very minimum that can be done to keep temperature rises below C, which is regarded as the threshold of climate change that presents a real threat to humans society. Last week, British government scientists said a potentially disastrous rise of 4C by 2060 was on the cards if emissions continued to rise at their present rate.

The Copenhagen accord, if signed, will replace the 1997 Kyoto protocol. A deal will depend on developing nations such as China and India cutting pollution because their growing economies will be responsible for 90 per cent of CO2 emissions growth in the future.

Historic chance to halt the scourge of deforestation
The Independent 26 Oct 09;

In the first of a landmark series on issues behind the climate summit, Michael McCarthy explains why a 'Redd' treaty is vital to cut CO2

At last, the wreck of the rainforests is being tackled. One of the key parts of the Copenhagen climate agreement which the international community will try to construct in December is a comprehensive treaty aiming to reduce deforestation rates in the developing countries by at least 50 per cent by 2020.

Not before time. It has been 20 years since we woke up to the reality of large-scale rainforest loss: in the late 1980s, the terrible scale of destruction in regions such as the Brazilian Amazon, and later, in Indonesia and other areas, dawned on the world, but in the time since then, all we have been able to do, in effect, has been to wring our hands.

Deforestation was clearly terrible for wildlife, for the indigenous peoples of the forests, and for the "ecosystem services", as the modern jargon has it, which forests provide, such as climates which bring rain. But the whole process seemed so vast, the huge socio-economic forces behind deforestation in the developing countries so intractable, that it seemed impossible that anything could be done to stop it or even slow it.

Active content removed by CSIT Things have changed, and the change can be summarised in a single word: carbon. For, as the threat of climate change has become more and more clear, there has been an growing perception that the biggest benefit of all that rainforests provide is their function as a carbon store, and the biggest danger from their destruction is the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they are cut down and burnt.

This is happening on a tremendous scale. In a band around the tropics, shown in the red in our map, about 13 million hectares of natural forest are being chainsawed and burnt every year – an area about the size of England – and the CO2 emissions released total about 5.8bn tonnes annually.

This is almost as much as the emissions of the US or China, the two biggest carbon emitters; it is nearly 20 per cent of the global total, more than the whole of the transport sector across the world, which has always been considered one of the major difficulties in dealing with climate change.

The deforestation emissions of Indonesia and Brazil, for example, are now so great that they propel those countries to fourth and fifth place respectively in the world emissions table although, if their places are based just on burning fossil fuels, they are much lower.

It has become clear to policymakers that the now generally accepted goal of reducing global emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, in the hope of keeping the rise in temperatures to two degrees above the pre-industrial level – thought of as the danger threshold – will be impossible without tackling forest emissions.

So when the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, a grouping of 40 countries with substantial forest holdings from Costa Rica to Papua New Guinea, proposed in 2005 that there could be an agreement – we preserve our forests, you in the rich world pay us to do so – they were met with a sympathetic response.

The issue is known as Redd, reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries,and you will be increasingly hearing the unfamiliar acronym as the Copenhagen meeting approaches. For Redd is now a key part of the treaty negotiating process under which, it is hoped, the developing countries will agree to tackle their own, mushrooming greenhouse gases, in return for billions of dollars of new aid.

The principal objective of the Redd agreement, put forward by the EU, with Britain leading in the negotiations, is that "all parties should collectively aim at ... reducing gross deforestation in developing countries by at least 50 per cent by 2020 compared to current levels."

That is widely supported by environmentalists. But another phrase in the objective, more supported by tropical nations with big logging industries, is also that "all parties should aim at halting forest cover loss in developing countries by 2030 at the latest". To decode the text, "reducing gross deforestation" means in essence slowing the rate at which you cut down your virgin, natural forests.

But "halting forest cover loss" means you can cut down the forests but replace them with other trees, so that "forest cover", the general area covered in trees, remains the same.

These other trees are likely to be commercial monocultures such as eucalyptus or oil palms, not remotely as valuable ecologically, or as a store of carbon, as virgin forest, and although it might be better to have those trees growing than bare ground, many environmentalists would stress that not cutting the virgin forest down in the first place is the best option of all.

The text is still up for negotiation, but the fact that two potentially conflicting stances can be part of the same first sentence of the proposed treaty shows what a difficult matter it is on which to reach agreement.

Even so, both parts of the objective constitute an ambitious aim, and the use of the phrase "all parties" indicates that we are all in this together; if they are going to stop deforestation in the developing world, we in the rich world have got to help them.

One of the key aspects of Redd is that is conceived of at a national level; before, attempts at preventing deforestation tended to be local projects. Now whole countries are being asked to lower their deforestation rates, if we finance it. How are we to do so?

There are three options. The first is to supply substantial new aid funding; the second is to let countries with high deforestation rates generate "carbon credits" from the forests they preserve, which could then be sold on the growing international carbon market; the third is a mixture of both.

Using the carbon market is the most controversial, because some policymakers feel this will provide a vast pool of emissions credits which western countries can buy and thus escape much of the obligation to cut back on emissions of their own (Brazil's rule of thumb is that a hectare of forest holds a tonne of carbon).

There are further objections, such as the "permanence" of the forest which has generated a carbon credit by being left uncut. What happens if it is subsequently cut down, or burnt, or even dies off because of climate change? But others feel the carbon market will be an essential tool, not least as the total funding needed is likely to be very substantial.

Last year, Johan Eliasch, a Swedish-born, London-based businessman with environmental interests, was asked by Gordon Brown to report on how the preservation of global forests could be financed. Mr Eliasch estimated that, according to one scenario, this could cost between $18n and $26bn annually, with perhaps $7bn of the funding coming from the carbon market. The rest would have to be found by the developed countries.

It'is an enormous sum, but Eliasch thought it was worth it. "Saving forests is critical for tckling climate change," he said. "Without action on deforestation, avoiding the worst aspects of climate change will be next to impossible."