Dear Editor,
You reported that civil society groups are not happy with the state of relations between Guy-ana and Norway in relation to the MoU signed in late 2009 and expiring this year (Stabroek News ‘Civic groups concerned over gov’t posture on future of Norway-Guyana forests pact’, 24 October 2015). There are a number of misunderstandings in the civil society protest.
- Norwegian money for Guyana comes from its international aid budget. If it had been a commercial contract to buy forest-based carbon emission reduction credits, then we could have expected a much more rigorous deal, more thorough and transparent assessments and audits, and less inflated perceptions. Only US$69.8 million have passed from Oslo to the World Bank-administered Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (according to the last statement from the trustees on the GRIF website), and only about half of this money is included in projects submitted by the President’s Office of Climate Change (OCC). The Ministry of Finance in Oslo has blocked further transfers to the GRIF because Guyana is not spending according to Norwegian aid rules. A major problem is that the OCC appears to be unable to prepare fundable project proposals from the ragbag of sketchy ideas in the Low Carbon Development Strategy.
- Outside the MoU/GRIF mechanism, Norway has been passing money through a Ger-man aid organisation and through Conservation International. There are no audit reports in the public domain on how these moneys have been spent. In November 2014, just after the prorogation of Parliament here, Norway made a conditional transfer of US$80 million to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in anticipation of construction of the Amaila Falls hydropower dam. Norway appears to be not interested in the chaotic and non-transparent negotiations over the Amaila Falls financing, some of which was revealed in mid-2013 before the project developer Sithe Global Power LLC withdrew (but still hangs on to the development licence, which presumably it could sell onwards, just as it purchased that licence from Fip Motilal). As we now know, the IDB has at last taken note of the report of its own independent expert advisory panel which investigated the Amaila Falls proposal in 2011. The IDB will not now contribute to this dam as currently designed, a dam which would run dry in drought years leaving the coastland with candlepower and a donkey cart economy.
- Earlier this month, October 2015, the World Bank-coordinated Carbon Fund rejected the Emission Reduction – programme idea note (ER-PIN) submitted by Guyana for access to the Carbon Fund project pipeline. The rejection was partly because of the very poor and incomplete nature of the proposal, and failures to comply with the Carbon Fund methodological framework. In addition, and perhaps the major reason for rejection, was the ER-PIN suggestion of inflating the carbon emission reference level to three times the baseline level, and then claiming credits for the ‘hot air’ between the assessed emission levels and that reference level.
- SN readers should note also that in the years 2009-2015 Guyana has made no policy changes to support or encourage reductions in emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And the only documented but still underhand change in procedure has been to further facilitate smash-and-grab logging: a relaxation in the inter-stump distance rule, from 10 to 8 metres, to facilitate the taking of high-value small trees from ‘reefs’ of greenheart and purpleheart. The Guyana Forestry Commission has not explained how this destructive relaxation, from the 10-metre rule based on detailed research by the Stichting Tropenbos Guyana programme in the 1980s and 1990s, is compatible with its claims to sustainable forest management.
There are several other problems with the Intended National-ly Determined Contributions (INDCs) and the ER-PIN submitted recently by Guyana to international meetings. It is regrettable that the National Assembly’s sectoral committee on natural resources has not yet convened in this 11th session of the Assembly, and has not scrutinised these fraudulent claims which are detrimental to the reputation of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan
