LONDON (AlertNet) Â? Ensuring that forests and the carbon they store are protected, and that the people who live in them benefit from the protection programmes, has just got more complicated.
This is the result of an unusual last-minute climate change accord at Copenhagen that recognised forest protection as key to reducing global carbon emissions but provided little guidance on how to go about it, according to experts at Forests, Governance and Climate Change, a conference held at Chatham House on Friday.
The so-called "Copenhagen Accord," brokered by the United States and signed by China, India, Brazil and South Africa in the waning hours of the Copenhagen negotiations, specifically supports REDD, an international mechanism aimed at "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation."
Under the mechanism, created through U.N. negotiations, developed nations would pay poorer countries to preserve their tropical forests as a means of cutting global carbon emissions.
Currently deforestation and degradation of forests account for some 20 to 25 percent of those emissions, and preserving forests is seen as a relatively inexpensive way to curb them.
Developed nations that pay to preserve tropical forests in turn would get credits for emissions reductions, which would help them meet their international commitments without having to make all of the emission cuts at home.
The Copenhagen Accord went further toward advancing the aims of REDD than anticipated, experts at the conference said. For the first time, it clearly stated that only natural forests would be eligible for protection in the programme, excluding the palm plantation countries that Indonesia would like to see included.
In a footnote, it also called for "respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and members of local communities" in REDD efforts, which advocates of the programme hope will help ensure that forest communities, and not just national governments, benefit from funds paid to protect forests.
"It's better than I thought it would be on safeguards for native forests and social issues," said John Lanchbery, head of climate change policy for the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, at the meeting.
But the Copenhagen deal is weak on details on how a REDD programme might be quickly put into action - something seen as key both for preserving forest and holding eventual global temperature rise to a minimum - and on how it will be governed, he and others said.
That suggests a "chaotic" year ahead as advocates of REDD programmes struggle to put details in place, said Andy White, coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, a U.S.-based non-profit that works on forest issues.
LOGGING CONTINUES
Relatively steady progress toward creating a REDD program has been one of the few successes of often painfully slow U.N. negotiations aimed at producing a new global climate treaty.
But with details of a REDD deal still to be pinned down, at least some countries are opting to continue logging rather than risk signing onto what is being sold as an alternative development path.
Liberia, for instance, recently rejected a proposal to put its remaining forests into a nascent REDD programme and has resumed logging, according to Philip Shearman, who heads a forest satellite monitoring program through the University of Papua New Guinea.
The decision comes despite a history of logging in the country that worsened corruption and deepened rural poverty, he said.
Papua New Guinea similarly has said it plans to protect only inaccessible forests in the nation's rugged mountain interior under REDD, while allowing logging in more accessible areas, Shearman said.
One problem, he and others said, is that people in developing nations - and particularly those living in the forests - still have difficulty understanding the sometimes complicated programme and its potential benefits and pitfalls.
"Many communities still do not know what these (REDD) words mean," said Tom Griffiths, a REDD expert at the Forest Peoples Programme, a non-governmental human rights organisation based in the UK.
He urged greater efforts to educate communities, and to protect them from efforts to divert their potential benefits under the programme.
In forest nations like Suriname and Indonesia, he said, governments are trying to claim ownership of both forests and the carbon rights potentially associated with them, while in places like the Colombian Amazon, so-called "carbon cowboys" are rushing to sign fraudulent REDD contracts with forest dwellers in an effort to benefit from future programs.
Human rights groups have also warned that organised crime is eyeing the potential billions of dollars expected to circulate through REDD efforts.
Making REDD work effectively will require stronger efforts at improving governance in countries that sign deals, noted Luiz Joels, director of Brazil's forest service.
In Brazil's Acre province, in the western Amazon, he noted, deforestation has plunged, largely as a result of active government involvement and a very active civil society movement. In Maranhao province, in the eastern Amazon, by comparison, deforestation remains a severe problem, largely as a result of a "very, very low level" of government commitment to solving the problem, he said.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
