17th August 2009
At the start of last week’s UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary, described the negotiating text as “200 pages of incomprehensible nonsense”. By the end of the week, de Boer wasn’t much more optimistic. “We seem to be afloat on a sea of brackets,” he was reported as saying in the New York Times. Drowning in a sea of brackets would perhaps have been more appropriate. “The speed of the negotiations must be considerably accelerated at the [next] meeting in Bangkok,” de Boer said.
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21st July 2009
By the end of the UN negotiations in June in Bonn, the negotiating text had expanded from 50 pages to 200 pages. For those of you who like your square brackets, curly brackets and brackets within brackets within brackets, it’s a particular treat. The REDD section of the document is 20 pages long. But what actually happened during the negotiations and what do we need to look out for in the lead up to Copenhagen?
FERN’s “Forest Watch” this month includes this useful overview of the REDD discussions at the Bonn meetings.
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24th June 2009
Friends of the Earth released a new report during the recent UN climate negotiations in Bonn: “A Dangerous Distraction – Why offsetting is failing the climate and people: The Evidence“. The report examines the record of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and asks what the effects are likely to be of expanding offsetting as proposed in the UN climate talks, including through proposed offset-based REDD mechanisms. “Offsetting is now a dangerous distraction,” Andy Atkins, Executive director of FoE England, Wales and Northern Ireland writes in the introduction to the report. “Negotiators must recognise that it does not work, will not work and that it must be scrapped.”
FoE explains that “Offsets are a swap of an emissions cut in developed countries for a cut in developing countries. But action in both is needed.” The report recommends that governments should “Reject plans to introduce REDD offsets, and instead negotiate effective and fair mechanisms to protect the Earth’s forests that do not involve offsetting.”
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10th June 2009
On Monday, 8 June 2009, protesters gave delegates arriving to the climate negotiations in Bonn a simple message: “Halt climate change. Halt forest destruction. Halt plantations.” Compared to the mind-numbingly complex negotiations inside the Maritim Hotel, it was nice to have a clear vision of what the talks should be about.
A coalition of youth, environmental groups, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples organisations and women’s groups delivered a plea for delegates to ensure that any climate deal “immediately ends deforestation, industrial scale logging in primary forests and the conversion of forests to monoculture tree plantations.”
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5th June 2009
In a side event at the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Patrick Alley of Global Witness highlighted the dangers of REDD – as well as the potential opportunities. “Going beyond carbon: good governance, biodiversity conservation and demand-side management in REDD,” was presented by the Ecosystems Climate Alliance, which was formed in Poznan in December 2009.
Alley illustrated his talk with this slide of the Bugatti Veyron, a car that consumes more fuel per kilometre than any other production car on the planet, with a top speed of 407 kilometres an hour. That’s the length of a football pitch every second. At this speed, you could cross Equatorial Guinea in 25 minutes. Except, of course, that you couldn’t because the roads needed to drive a car like this don’t exist in Equatorial Guinea. For once, Jeremy Clarkson is right when he describes it as “a triumph for lunacy over common sense”. Something similar could be said about the idea of pouring billions of dollars a year for REDD into some of the most corrupt governments in the world.
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5th June 2009
We know what The Nature Conservancy thinks about forest offsets. It loves them. It loves them so much that it has got into bed with the biggest coal-burner in the US, American Electric Power. Meanwhile, TNC has developed a “global mechanism proposal”, which includes a goal of 3 billion tons of “emissions reductions from REDD” by 2020. These would be “fully fungible with emissions reductions from other sectors”. This is precisely what carbon traders, the timber industry and polluting companies like AEP want: forest carbon offsets.
At a side event at the UN Climate negotiations in Bonn earlier this week, TNC’s Greg Fishbein (whose job title, incidentally, is “Managing Director of Forest Carbon”) said, “We recognise that a goal like this needs to be combined with strict Annex I targets to ensure that these emissions reductions are in fact in addition to a contribution to overall emissions reductions and not just replacing emissions reductions that are taking place some place else.”
But when TNC talks about “strict Annex I targets”, what do they actually mean?
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31st May 2009
I’m in Bonn for the UN climate negotiations, or, to give the official title, the thirtieth sessions of the UNFCCC Convention subsidiary bodies – SBSTA and SBI, sixth session of the AWG-LCA and eighth session of the AWG-KP. REDD will feature in several parts of the negotiations. The thought of two weeks of government delegates avoiding the issues, arguing about trivialities and failing to come up with meaningful ways of addressing climate change doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. But I’m looking forward to reporting on what happens in Bonn relating to REDD and I’m hoping for an improvement over the Poznan meeting last year.
As well as the official discussions on REDD, there are many side-events to choose from featuring REDD. Thanks to Global Forest Coalition for compiling this list of REDD-related side events.
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