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A month ago, I wrote to the UN-REDD team in Papua New Guinea to ask, among other things, what has happened to the programme’s budget of US$2,596 million. I am still waiting for a reply. Last week, I sent a reminder, along with a new question about the PNG government’s investigation into the Office of Climate Change, the key documents of which, it seems, have disappeared.
This article was published in the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin 151, February 2010. It is loosely based on a presentation I gave at a workshop in Bogor earlier this month, about local media and REDD. The workshop was organised by the Indonesian local media association ASTEKI and the Samdhana Institute.
On 4 December 2009, Guyana’s President, Bharrat Jagdeo, was interviewed on the BBC programme “Hard Talk“. At one stage, the presenter, Zeinab Badawi, asks Jagdeo about REDD. What Jagdeo doesn’t say in response is more interesting than what he does say. He doesn’t mention the logging companies already logging Guyana’s forests. He doesn’t mention mining. He doesn’t mention road-building. He doesn’t mention the risks of corruption.
The Congo Basin forest is the second largest in the world after the Amazon. It accounts for one quarter of the world’s remaining tropical forest and covers an area of 1.8 million square kilometres. Clearly, whatever comes out of Copenhagen on REDD has to work in the Congo Basin.
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.”
Here are two more REDD-related news items from Papua New Guinea. The first is an article from Ilya Gridneff, a journalist with Australian Associated Press in Port Moresby. Carbon Planet has invested A$1.2 million in projects in PNG.
A couple of months ago, Kevin Conrad commented that “because Papua New Guinea was advocating a regime shift in forests, we had every carbon cowboy in the world descend upon Papua New Guinea.” Unfortunately, it seems that PNG is not the only country in the world that is facing an influx of “carbon cowboys”.
This month’s issue of the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin includes the following article about the problems of carbon offset tree plantations. The article gives the example of a offset plantation burning and releasing the carbon six years later. At a time when emissions need to be reduced dramatically (and not just stablised) this is a risk the world cannot afford to take. Offsets from carbon stored in existing, standing forests are even worse. Not only does the offset allow the polluter to avoid meaningful action to reduce its emissions, if the forest burns down then the net emissions are double what they would have been if there had been no trading: the emissions from the burning forest plus those from the polluting company.
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.
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.
The carbon trade is a derivatives market which may eventually be bigger than the credit derivatives market which collapsed so spectacularly in the current financial crisis, notes a new report by Friends of the Earth U.S. Despite this, most proposed climate legislation bills rely on cap-and-trade systems which fail to address the complexities of the carbon market and fail to address carbon trading as a massive new derivatives market. FoE U.S. warns of a “giant regulatory gap”. Regulation of secondary carbon markets, which are far larger than primary markets and are dominated by speculators, is effectively non-existent. The report, “Subprime Carbon? Re-thinking the world’s largest new derivatives market”, can be downloaded here.
Eastern Highlands Governor, Malcolm Kela-Smith, states that Papua New Guinea’s Office of Climate Change and Carbon Trading (OCCCT) “is illegal and established without due regard for existing mandates”, according to an article in The National on 15 February 2009. Kela-Smith warned landowners and provincial governments not to enter into any deals solicited by the OCCCT. On Tuesday, 9 December 2008, I visited the Sheraton Hotel for an event titled “Making Forests Competitive: Practical solutions for permanence”. Organised by the legal firm Norton Rose, in association with the UNEP Finance Initiative and Carbon Markets and Investors Association, the event looked at the possibilities for the insurance industry to insure forest carbon. The principle is simple. There are lots of risks associated with storing carbon in forests. If you are buying or selling carbon you want a contract and want it to be insured. While insurance cannot prevent the carbon being released to the atmosphere, it can insure against financial loss, thus making financing forest projects more attractive to investors. The point of insurance is “de-risking investment in forests”, as Phil Cottle from ForestRE put it. One of the key issues related to REDD is that of risk. All trade carries an element of risk, but there is general agreement that the risks associated with forest carbon trading might be substantial, and possibly unresolvable, at least in the short term. Some risks are well known – not the least that forests that are supported by carbon market financing might catch fire, blow down or suffer other catastrophic loss. However, some of the greatest risks relate to the ability (or inability) of tropical country governments to effectively manage large new flows of carbon financing, and to provide the needed stability, governance and ‘enabling environment’ for complex carbon trading regimes to work over necessarily long periods of time. REDD-Monitor has now compiled the ratings and rankings from 10 well-known indices of broad governance performance for the 21 countries with the largest areas of rainforest, which between them contain well over 95% of all tropical rainforests. We show the resulting ‘rainforest risk register’ in full below. |
    
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