The UN climate talks on forestry are on the verge of agreeing a deal on a global programme to reduce deforestation, known as
REDD, according to various reports from the Copenhagen conference.
A deal would pave the way for the preservation of vital carbon-storing native tropical forests, absent from the Kyoto Protocol, to be included in a global climate accord for the first time. Significantly the evolving agreement text appears now to include carbon-rich peatlands as well. Latest estimates put the total contribution to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and the destruction of peat forests and other wetlands at 15 per cent.
After a negotiating session that reportedly went to 3am on Monday evening negotiators and close observers say that the major sticking points to a REDD deal are close to being resolved. A final agreement drafted by official delegates may be ready to go before environment ministers on Wednesday, the New York Times reports, although any announcement of official agreement may not come until the end of the week.
But other reports suggest significant hurdles may still stand, particularly over how deforestation baselines are used and set in each participating forest country. Setbacks over the weekend saw developing countries back away from an agreement on a deforestation reduction target. And it is not clear where this goal for a 50 per cent reduction by 2020 now stands in the latest text. However, there appears to have been movement on commitments by developed countries for fast-track funding to get the scheme up and running in the next few years. Longer term funding commitments out to 2020 may not be included, which are somewhat dependant on the main talks elsewhere on the overarching climate agreement.
Those headline talks remained deadlocked on Tuesday without significant progress on the issues that have held back a new global agreement for some years now on national emissions targets and climate funding for the developing world. It may be that the forest sector talks provide the first breakthrough in the Copenhagen conference. The optimism for the REDD negotiations is based on progress to resolution in areas of previous disagreement such as technical definitions and safeguards for the land rights of indigenous forest peoples.
An agreed mechanism for REDD, or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, would see payments made by developed nations to developing and mainly tropical countries to preserve their forests. But just what form that financial mechanism would take – either a global fund at government and UN agency level or a more private-sector-oriented carbon-market scheme – may not be spelt out in Copenhagen agreement and may have to wait.
But a payment system delivering up to just $10 per tonne of forest carbon preserved may be enough to see forests protected rather than cleared in key rainforest countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature released in Copenhagen suggests.
New York Times, Reuters, Mongabay 15/12/09
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