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The Guardian reports that after only two days, “The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray.” The problem is a leaked document that Denmark hoped that world leaders would sign at the end of next week. The text “hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations,” John Vidal writes in The Guardian.
The Australian government is one of the most enthusiastic promoters of using market mechanisms to finance REDD. The reason? Australia wants REDD to create a loophole in any climate deal large enough to allow emissions to continue in Australia. A new report by Friends of the Earth Australia and Aid/Watch exposes the flaws in the Australian government’s REDD plans.
In its most recent newsletter, Down to Earth outlines the increasing concerns about the way REDD is developing in Indonesia, focussing on the role of the World Bank and the Australian government. The World Bank is pushing ahead with its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility in Indonesia in spite of a “storm of criticism from civil society organisations at home and internationally”.
Papua New Guinea’s forest carbon trading fiasco is back in the news. The focus is on Kirk Roberts, pictured right, his company Nupan (PNG) Trading Limited and an Australian carbon trading firm, Carbon Planet. “It’s no secret that I am one of the most important foreigners in PNG,” Roberts says. But his opponents have called him “the kingpin of the ‘carbon cowboys’”.
A fascinating discussion is going on at “the Masalai blog” about carbon trading in Papua New Guinea. It is particularly interesting because Dave Sag, co-founder and Executive Director of Carbon Planet has answered some of the accusations against his company. Sag is a software programmer, who has found himself “at the forefront of Internet software development since 1993,” he writes on his website. In 1998, he won an Australia Day Council Award for services to Australian Business. He was nominated as one of Australia’s top 40 achievers under 40 years of age. Sag describes himself as “a serial entrepreneur. Right now my main focus is saving the world via Carbon Planet”. He’s even had his photograph taken with Al Gore.
Penny Wong is Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Water. Ilya Gridneff is a journalist working for the Australian Associated Press in Papua New Guinea. Recently, Gridneff sent 10 questions to Wong asking about Australia’s funding to Papua New Guinea regarding climate change. Given that PNG is currently embroiled in a scandal over the issuance of REDD “credits”, the questions seem perfectly reasonable. The Australian government has established a multi-million dollar series of initiatives on forests and carbon that are explicitly aimed at influencing the negotiations towards establishing a REDD mechanism under the UNFCCC. It is an extremely sensitive, important international issue. It is also public money. “The predictable, anodyne Australian Government response would be funny if it wasn’t the bane of my existence,” Gridneff writes.
Last week, Theo Yasause, the director of Papua New Guinea’s Office of Climate Change, was suspended while an internal investigation of the office is carried out, reports Australian Associated Press. For several weeks, the government of Papua New Guinea has been embroiled in a scandal over the issuance of a series of REDD credits, in the absence of any policy or legislation. Yasause denies having done anything wrong. Two journalists have been covering these REDD developments in Papua New Guinea: Natasha Loder is based in the UK and works for The Economist; and Ilya Gridneff, works for the Australian Associated Press in Port Moresby, PNG. This post is an attempt to summarise their stories so far. Please visit their blogs for more information. Loder blogs on Overmatter: Leftovers from the science desk at The Economist and Gridneff on Papua News Guinea.
Australia’s carbon pollution reduction scheme includes a nightmare vision of REDD. It would create a loophole big enough to allow Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution to continue and even expand. The way in which forests are defined will be a crucial factor in determining whether REDD serves a truly useful purpose in helping to protect the world’s forests or, alternatively, is simply used as a means of supplementing the incomes of logging and industrial plantation companies. It is widely agreed that the existing definition of “forest”, as agreed under the Marrakesh Accords, and which allows for any areas as small as 0.05 hectare and with as little as 10% tree cover, is woefully inadequate in terms of recognising the wider roles and functions that true forests fulfil. In this piece, Sean Cadman of the Wilderness Society, who has been involved in recent UNFCCC discussions on forest definitions, considers some of the issues. |
    
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