3rd December 2009
In the lead up to Copenhagen, letters, articles and reports about REDD are coming out thick and fast. Before looking at them, here’s some bad news. In 2005, a drought meant that in that year the Amazon rainforest did not sequester its usual 2 billion metric tons of CO2. It also released 3 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere from dying trees. The total 5 billion additional tons of CO2 is greater than the combined emissions of Europe and Japan. This year there is another drought in the Amazon. The photograph on the right was taken last weekend by Paulo Whitaker. It shows a fisherman paddling through dead fish that died because of lower water levels on the on the Manaquiri River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
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1st December 2009
The first thing that you need to know about “forests in exhaustion” is that they are not forests. According to the Clean Development Mechanism, the photograph on the left is a forest. All of it. The eucalyptus monoculture plantation in the background is a “forest” because it is bigger than 500 square metres and more than 10 per cent of it is covered with trees taller than two metres, thus meeting CDM’s definition of a “forest”. But the muddy wasteland in the foreground? Well, in UN-speak, that’s a “forest in exhaustion”. While it’s clearly not a forest, it certainly looks exhausted. Bloody knackered, more like.
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17th November 2009
At a recent conference in Oxford, Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, launched a new report that warns that we could see a global increase in temperatures of 4°C as soon as 2055. Climate change could accelerate so rapidly because of feedback loops which are triggered by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and which in turn will cause new emissions. “Four degrees of warming, averaged over the globe, translates into even greater warming in many regions, along with major changes in rainfall,” Betts said. An increase of 4°C global average temperature would mean a rise of up to 15°C at the North Pole. Sea levels would rise by up to 1.4 metres. Monsoon rains could fail. At the conference, two scientists looked specifically at the implications of 4°C warming for the Amazon rainforests: Yadvinder Malhi, a Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford University; and Wolfgang Cramer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
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12th November 2009
Thomas Friedman’s most recent column for the New York Times comes from Tapajós National Forest, Brazil. His trip was organised by Conservation International and the Brazilian government (Friedman doesn’t say who paid). Conservation International could not have chosen a better journalist to back up their pro-carbon market ideology. Friedman, author of The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded, firmly believes that markets are the solution, regardless of the question. Even better, Friedman is incapable of putting forward an argument. He doesn’t even try. He simply makes statements and assumes that because he’s made them they must be true. His latest offering “Trucks, Trains and Trees“, reveals his genius for taking a complex issue and rendering it as complete gobbledygook.
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6th November 2009
It really hasn’t been a good few weeks for The Nature Conservancy. First Greenpeace slammed TNC’s Noel Kempff project in Bolivia. Now investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reports from Brazil’s Atlantic Coast about TNC’s Guaraqueçaba project. Schapiro’s article in Mother Jones and a series of films on Frontline/World, document the impacts of the project. “You’ll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy’s website as an example of corporate partnerships that make ‘an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity,’” Schapiro writes. “What you won’t see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.” Neither will you see any mention of the impacts on local communities on TNC’s website.
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15th October 2009
Representatives from social and environmental organisations and movements met recently for two days in Belém, Pará state, Brazil to discuss REDD. After the meeting they produced a letter calling on the Government of Brazil to reject REDD as a carbon market-based mechanism. They also call on the government to reject REDD as a way of compensating emissions from Northern countries. Signed by 49 organisations and movements, the letter rejects “the use of market-based mechanisms as tools to reduce carbon emissions based on the firm conviction that the market cannot be expected to take responsibility for life on the planet”.
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21st May 2009
The International Institute for Environment and Development published an important new report last week, “Tenure in REDD: Start-Point or Afterthought?“. Written by Lorenzo Cotula and James Mayers, it is a welcome addition to the discussion on REDD.
Like a football match, this is a report of two halves. In the first half, the authors discuss the issues surrounding tenure of land and trees in the context of REDD: “the systems of rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating their access and use”.
The second half consists of seven country studies. The authors note the “often apparent gulf between policy and practice” in looking at the land tenure situation in the seven countries. “The current international drive to explore REDD could do more harm than good,” if it focusses on the letter of the law rather than the practice, Cotular and Mayers write.
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6th April 2009
During the climate negotiations in Poznan, Brazil pushed for “forests in exhaustion” to be included under the Clean Development Mechanism. Currently, any plantation established on land that was forested after 1 January 1990 is excluded from the CDM. Brazil hopes to overturn this ruling by arguing that severely degraded logged-over forests store little carbon and that the only way of storing more carbon on the land is by planting trees.
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23rd January 2009
On 11 December 2008, the Brazilian government organised a side event in Poznan to explain the National Plan on Climate Change and to present the Amazon Fund. The National Plan on Climate Change was launched on 1 December 2008 by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The timing was interesting. Coinciding with the first day of COP 14 in Poznan, the country with the largest area of forest in the world announced its climate change plans, which include reducing deforestation but excludes the possibility of trading the carbon stored in its forests.
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15th January 2009
On the final day in Poznan, a dispute took place between Saudi Arabia and Brazil over the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Saudi Arabia wants carbon capture and storage to be included in the CDM. Brazil wants carbon credits for “forests in exhaustion”. Saudi Arabia’s motivation is obvious. It wants to continue extracting and selling oil. But what is Brazil’s motivation? And what, exactly, are “forests in exhaustion”?
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