By Janette Bulkan
(This is the fourth in a 10-part series intended to look at some of the issues surrounding Guyana’s bid for funds from the World Bank-administered Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (FCPF) and from Norway, and for the President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.)
In this article I outline the background discussions on and major approaches to tropical forest protection. The Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) approach is a newcomer in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, and its final shape is still in development. Still the REDD train is steaming ahead, and proposed activities can be categorized as projects, policies or sector activities that operate at different scales, multi-country, national and sub-national.
Background
The discussions between developed and developing countries over responsibility for protecting tropical forests, and at whose expense, took shape in the 1970s and have not progressed much since then. In the two decades leading up to the UN Conference on the Environment and Development – UNCED, also referred to as the Earth Summit in 1992 – environmental activist campaigns against rainforest destruction, and its effects on forest-dependent peoples, generally the most marginalized in their own countries, opened up spaces for discussion of global responsibility for the health of the planet. However, the media reports and images from far-off places in the 1970s and 1980s — the Chipko ‘tree huggers’ of Uttarakhand in India, the indigenous Penan people standing guard at roadblocks in what were ultimately failed efforts to prevent the depredations of large-scale loggers in Sarawak, Malaysia, and the Amazon burning – were mostly broadcast from developed countries, and raised the hackles of developing countries’ governments.
Southern governments reacted to the perceived interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign nations, and pushed back. Brazil restated its national sovereignty over the Brazilian Amazon, and other rainforest countries did likewise. Many Southern diplomats suggested that the North first put its own house in order before dictating to the South in tones reminiscent of colonialism. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad famously said that ‘If it is in the interests of the rich that we do not cut down our trees then they must compensate us for the loss of income’.
In turn, the Northern countries balked at developing countries’ demands for ‘compensation for economic costs foregone’ and a global forest fund and technology transfers as pre-conditions for a global forests convention. The UNCED in 1992 failed to reach agreement on a legally binding instrument for forests, parallel to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
In the years since UNCED, there have been a series of ineffective United Nations fora on forests – the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) from 1995, replaced by the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) in 1997, and followed in turn by the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) in 2001. The lack of progress on those fronts has resulted in a global focus on the UNFCCC as a negotiating forum for tropical forests. At the level of governments – the multilateral level – two principal approaches to protecting tropical forests are on the table – on one side, letting the market set a price on forest carbon, and trading that carbon on the open market; on the other side, insisting on Official Development Aid (ODA) from global North to forested global South countries, which would then be used to protect national forests in the global interest. The Coalition for Rainforest Nations is mostly associated with the first approach, from 2006, and Brazil with the second.
While ultimate power is vested in Governments at the multilateral level, the views of indigenous and forest-dependent peoples and some international environmental, religious and social organizations have also been prominent. Here also there is no single position. Some argue that carbon trading is a form of eco-colonialism; getting the world’s poor to forego development so that the rich can continue with their high carbon footprint lifestyles. Other lobbies eschew any talk about windfall cash, arguing that the poor will always lose out in that trade. They argue that the terms of the negotiations are set by powerful institutions located in distant places, and that the poor end up selling cheap. In this view, the end result is that control over priceless assets, like forest homelands, can be ceded for very little. In order to avoid the second scenario, the directly affected stakeholders need to be represented at the negotiating tables, with voice and vote.
Coalition for Rainforest Nations
In the impasse over measures to reduce global carbon emissions, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations’1 proposal of a market-based scheme in tropical forest carbon at the 11th Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in 2005 — REDD — was given serious consideration by the developed world. REDD was interpreted as a concrete signal by a subset of developing countries of willingness to commit to verifiable reduction measures. In 2006, seven member states of the Coalition (Bolivia, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands) argued for financial mechanisms and technical support to developing countries ‘to effectively and significantly reduce emissions from deforestation.’ In other words, developing countries would require ODA before they could enter the carbon trading market. The Coalition takes credit for the establishment of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), the United Nation’s UN-REDD program and the pledges made by various industrialized countries (including Norway, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Finland, and others) towards capacity building and incentives to reduce rates of deforestation in participating developing countries (http://www.rainforestcoalition.org/eng/).
On the other hand, some of the industrialized developing countries with significant forest resources oppose including a carbon trading mechanism in a post-Kyoto agreement, arguing instead for non-market based initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. Brazil, a major proponent of this view, favours international public funding-based approaches, both bilateral official development assistance (ODA) and a multilateral fund made up of voluntary donations from developed states. Brazil launched its Amazon Fund, in August 2008 to support sustainable development and conservation. Norway pledged US$1 billion by 2015 to the Amazon Fund, but full payment is contingent upon a demonstrated reduction in deforestation. Brazil is a key player in the global negotiations on reducing emissions. It is a member of the G20 group of countries, and very active in multilateral fora, including the UNFCCC. Brazil is both a holder of the greatest calculated carbon stock of the top 20 developing countries by forest area 2 (one-third of a total of an estimated 177,000 million tones of carbon) and the fourth largest emitter of GHGs after the USA, China and Indonesia. Brazil stands to gain from both market and non-market initiatives.
At Bali, the prospect of payment for carbon locked up in tropical forests, whether through market or non-market schemes, opened the possibility of substantial transfers of money from the historical emitters of greenhouse gases, the global North countries, to participating developing countries. Since then, however, a major global recession has set in, and has put a damper on global South hopes. The G8 meeting in Italy in July 2009 failed to reach agreement over firm carbon emissions reductions targets for the global North, and any commitments to following suit from the South. The REDD train may yet be derailed.
1 The Coalition had expanded to 40 member countries, including Guyana, by 2009.
2 Strassburg, Bernardo, R. Kerry Turner, Brendan Fisher, Roberto Schaeffer, and Andrew Lovett. 2009. Reducing emissions from deforestation – The ‘combined incentives’ mechanism and empirical simulations. Global Environmental Change 19:265-278.
