REDD-Monitor

On the final day of the UN climate change negotiations in Barcelona, two climate activists walked to the front of the main plenary and held up a banner reading “End CO2lonialism”. “They shouted about the dangers of carbon trading and were met with thunderous applause. They were immediately dragged out by police,” Rainforest Action Network’s Joshua Kahn Russell writes. The protest was one of the highlights of the meeting. At a mid-week meeting with NGOs, Yvo de Boer, the Executiive Secretary of the UNFCCC, said that it was impossible to craft a treaty in the time remaining before COP-15 in Copenhagen. By the end of the week, de Boer told Bloomberg that “I don’t think we can get a legally binding agreement by Copenhagen. I think that we can get that within a year after Copenhagen.” Negotiations on REDD were no better. “REDD forest agreement hits new low,” the Ecosystems Climate Alliance announced on the last day of the negotiations.

read more »

With only one more week of negotiations left until Copenhagen, what comes out of the Bangkok Climate Change Talks on REDD is important. The Ecosystems Climate Alliance commented from Bangkok that, “This text will profoundly influence the shape of the final agreement, determining whether or not we will actually succeed in reducing the 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions that result from the continuing destruction of the world’s tropical forests and peatlands.” But so far things are not looking good for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, forests or for the climate.

read more »

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.

read more »

On 6 April 2009 at a press briefing at the climate negotiations in Bonn, the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, was asked a question about carbon markets and REDD. In his response, he acknowledged two problems with incorporating REDD into the carbon markets: the science (measurement and permanence); and the impact on the carbon markets of trading forest carbon.

read more »

REDD is going to be one of the key discussion points at the UN Climate Change Conference at Poznan. REDD-Monitor will be following the events here and reporting on anything interesting that happens. In particular I’ll be attending some of the side events on REDD and noting what actors involved in REDD discussions are saying. Here’s a list of the side events related to REDD at Poznan:
read more »

The latest issue of “Forest Cover“, the newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition includes several articles about REDD. Miguel Lovera, GFC chairperson suggests chanting “stop the fraud now” might be the best strategy to follow in the run-up to the Climate COP in Copenhagen in 2009:
read more »