11th December 2009
Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono likes to make promises. Particularly at international meetings. At last year’s G-8 summit in Japan, Yudhoyono committed to reducing carbon emissions from deforestation by 50 per cent by the end of this year, 74 per cent by 2012 and 95 per cent by 2025. This year, at the G-20 summit in the USA, he said, “I do believe that it is much better for all of us to have our own targets, timeline and action plan which we can constantly update and improve.” Yudhoyono updated his targets on reducing deforestation, but he certainly did not improve them.
read more »
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.
read more »
2nd December 2009
A few weeks ago, the Jakarta Post reported the dangers of “fake carbon brokers” in Indonesia. “They offer pledges that say the regencies or cities will get a lot of money from REDD projects but they provide no programs,” Wandojo Siswanto from the Forestry Ministry told the Jakarta Post. “Regents and mayors in Kalimantan and Sumatra have been offered such promises. But … not a single cent goes to local administrations.” A new report by Human Rights Watch highlights another risk associated with carbon trading in Indonesia: corruption. HRW estimates that every year, the Indonesian government loses US$2 billion as a result of corruption, illegal logging and mismanagement. Indonesia stands to gain billions of REDD dollars, but as HRW research consultant Emily Harwell points out, “The solution to corruption and poor governance is not more money.”
read more »
24th November 2009
Earlier this month, the governments of Norway and Guyana signed an agreement worth up to US$250 million that is supposed to help address climate change by reducing deforestation in Guyana. Yet at a meeting in London last week, Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo admitted that under the deal the rate of deforestation in Guyana could actually increase. When asked whether Guyana will be allowed to increase deforestation under the agreement, Jagdeo said “Basically, yes.” Under the Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Jagdeo and Norway’s Minister of the Environment and International Development Erik Solheim, Norway will pay Guyana if the deforestation rate is less than 0.45 per cent. But the current rate of deforestation in Guyana is well below that figure.
read more »
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.
read more »
4th November 2009
Global deforestation accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all CO2 emissions. Everyone knows that. We’ve read it over and over again. The figure comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But recent research takes a new look at the data behind the figure and comes up with a figure of around 12 per cent. The research, carried out by Guido van der Werf at the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, VU University Amsterdam and colleagues, is published in Nature Geoscience this week. Van der Werf explains that “While the IPCC estimates were based on the best available information during the time of writing, several deforestation emission assessments have been revised downward since then. In addition, fossil fuel emissions have increased substantially but deforestation emissions remained relatively constant.”
read more »
12th August 2009
For the past five years, the Forest Peoples Programme and other NGOs have been working to persuade the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) that funding the oil palm sector in Indonesia is problematic. Given the destruction caused by oil palm plantations, you might think this would be easy. Not so. This is the World Bank, after all. In July 2007, Forest Peoples Programme and 18 other NGOs filed a complaint with the IFC’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO) about the IFC’s funding of the palm oil producing and trading company, Wilmar. The recently released CAO report found that “Because commercial pressures dominated IFC’s assessment process, the result was that environmental and social due diligence reviews did not occur as required.”
read more »
30th July 2009
Just twenty years ago, Riau Province in Sumatra, Indonesia was 80 per cent forested. Today only 30 per cent is left. The deforestation is driven by the insatiable hunger for timber of two pulp and paper companies: Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL) and Asia Paper and Pulp (APP). Recent analysis by Eyes on the Forest reveals that satellite data for the first six months of 2009 show that Riau Province holds the dismal record for the most fire “hotspots” of any province in Indonesia, with almost 5,000. The company with the most fires in its concessions? Step forward, Asia Pulp and Paper.
read more »
7th October 2008
For the second year running, Indonesia has the dubious honour of entering the Guiness Book of Records as the country with the highest rate of deforestation. According to the 2009 Guinness World Records, Indonesia’s deforestation rate was 1.8 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2005. This amounts to a loss of 2 percent of its forests each year.
read more »
|
|
|
