LONDON (AlertNet) - An agreement by Norway to pay Guyana for preserving forests to help slow climate change will still allow the South American nation to increase its rate of deforestation, Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo said.
Norway could pay Guyana up to $250 million by 2015, in a possible forerunner of a global scheme where rich nations pay the developing world to preserve rainforests.
The scheme is expected to be part of a new global climate change treaty, which negotiators will work toward at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen next month.
Destruction of tropical forests accounts for about 12 percent of global carbon emissions, scientists estimated earlier this month, and paying countries to maintain their forests is considered one of the cheaper ways to fight global warming.
NATION HAS SOME OF BEST-PRESERVED FORESTS
Forests in Guyana have been preserved far better than in many tropical nations and today cover three-quarters of the country. Under the terms of the new deal with Norway, Guyana could actually be paid to increase its rate of deforestation.
When asked whether Guyana will be allowed to increase deforestation under the agreement, Jagdeo said: "Basically yes."
He was speaking to reporters, campaigners and researchers in London late on Wednesday.
The memorandum, signed last week, states that Norway will compensate Guyana if it does not cut down more than 0.45 percent of its forests per year. But Guyana is felling far fewer trees than that at present.
Guyana's maximum allowed rate of deforestation may be revised once the United Nations has established the best way of calculating it, the memo says.
Jagdeo said that Guyana's current rate was uncertain but likely between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent.
"We are going to do some detailed work between now and October 2010 when we will know what that figure is ... That may cause some adjustment," he told a briefing.
The maximum of 0.45 percent is a middle point between Guyana's estimated deforestation rate of 0.3 percent and the average rate of 0.6 percent for countries with tropical forests.
TARGET AIMS NOT TO DISADVANTAGE
Setting a stiffer target for countries like Guyana, whose forests are relatively intact, would disadvantage them compared with nations where deforestation rates are high, Jagdeo said. The latter group includes Brazil and Indonesia.
But some environmental groups were unhappy.
"I think the problem is that the agreement has tried to apply a mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation in a situation where there is actually very little deforestation," said Simon Counsell from the Rainforest Foundation UK.
The United States this week also pledged $275 million toward rainforest protection under the proposed U.N. Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries, or REDD.
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