Several meetings to advance the so-called REDD+ Partnership, launched at the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference on 27 May, have been held on the margins of the two-week UN conference. But representatives of civil society and indigenous peoples and local communities are being largely excluded from the process driven forward by the partnership's co-chairs, Japan and Papua New Guinea.
"Our concerns about the closed REDD Partnership negotiations have escalated since nothing on the REDD agreement has happened here," said Nathaniel Dyer of Rainforest Foundation UK. "We now know that there will be a series of parallel negotiations up to October but we have received no commitments that indigenous peoples and environmental representatives will participate. If the partnership does not slow its stampede to make time for genuine participation of these groups then REDD could do more harm than good.”
Meanwhile, attempts by rich developed countries to hide their carbon emissions from logging have slowed down negotiations and thwarted expectations of reaching a decision on reducing emissions from forestry and land use (known as LULUCF1), which include massive emissions from drained peat soils.
Starting in the opening plenary of the group working on a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, many countries, almost exclusively from the developing world2, have challenged developed countries to genuinely cut logging emissions.
Developed countries resisted, however, and proposed accounting procedures to create the illusion they are doing more than they are to stop catastrophic climate change. The G77 and China ended the session with a proposal to establish transparent review of the carbon-hiding scams, but it falls short of actually plugging the logging loopholes.
A decision on the accounting policy has been delayed until the next round of talks in August, but observers including the Ecosystems Climate Alliance are wary, fearing that a cobbled-together compromise excluding civil society input will be presented then as a done deal.
“As long as these negotiations go round in circles on logging loopholes, alarming land use emissions continue in developed countries – for instance, almost 500 Mtons of CO2 from peat drainage alone. Parties acknowledge the emissions, but don’t yet have to account for them, so there is no incentive to reduce them,” said Susanna Tol of Wetlands International.
“All of climate science says we need at least a 25 to 40 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2020, but you've got the richest countries in the world using a logging loophole to actually go below their commitments,” said Sean Cadman of The Wilderness Society. “What we have here is a compromised situation for the climate.”
# # #
(1) LULUCF = Land Use, Land-use Change and Forestry
(2) Including the Africa Group, the Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC), Belarus, Tuvalu, Micronesia and the Coalition of Rainforest Nations
For release: Friday 11 June
Contact: Don Lehr, dblehr@cs.com, Bonn: +49 (0)176 3617 4404, +1.917.304.4058