REDD-Monitor

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. Astonishingly, when the government announced it would delay starting the plan, but with a new target of 25% emissions reductions, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Climate Institute and WWF announced their support of the plan. Australian author and climate change analyst Guy Pearse says they were “sucker punched by a government which has no intention of cutting emissions by anything like that magnitude, let alone cutting them in Australia.”

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FERN’s EU Forest Watch reports on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme directive, which was adopted on 17 December 2008. Forest credits are excluded from the ETS until at least 2020. This is good news, although they should be excluded after 2020 as well. The EU’s target of 20 per cent emission reductions by 2020 is already too weak. The EU needs to reduce dramatically its greenhouse gas emissions, not use the offsets scam to allow industry to continue polluting.
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Allowing carbon credits from forests to be traded under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) would create a enormous loophole, allowing EU Member States to buy their way out of emissions reductions. A coalition of European NGOs is campaigning to keep forests out of the ETS. The December 2008 issue of FERN’s EU Forest Watch provides a succinct summary of the current state of the EU/ETS discussions.
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The EU outlined its plans for carbon markets in relation to forests at a press conference today (5 December 2008) in Poznan. The EU aims “to halve the total forested area loss in the tropics by 2020, and to halt the global forest cover loss completely by 2030 at the latest” and estimates that this will cost somewhere between €15 and €25 billion a year. A “global forest carbon mechanism” is to be established to fund this, followed by “a pilot scheme to test the inclusion of forest credits in carbon markets, which could be used by governments to achieve their compliance.”
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As REDD-Monitor reported last week, the European Commission has decided not to include forests in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). FERN and Global Witness released the following press release praising the Commission’s decision.
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The European Commission will tomorrow state that it is opposed to the inclusion of forest-based carbon credits in the ETS, in a wide-ranging Communication on deforestation and how the European community plans to deal with it. The Communication will say that the aim should be to reduce deforestation by 2020 and halt it by 2030.
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Conservation campaigners were misled into believing that the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) supported the inclusion of ‘avoided deforestation’ credits within the the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) ahead of Tuesday’s vote in the influential Environment Committee of the European Parliament. In a message sent out on a widely used eco-activist mailing list, Andrew Mitchell of the Global Canopy Programme claimed that WWF supported his organisation’s campaign for tradeable forest credits to be included in the ETS, and asked readers to write to Members of the European Parliament urging them to agree to this. In fact, WWF had made it clear that they opposed such credits.
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