The climate summit in The Hague, the Netherlands (November 13 25, 2000) will be remembered as the moment when governments abandoned the promise of global co-operation to face climate change. Talks at the climate summit collapsed after two weeks of intergovernmental meetings without consensus on how to actually achieve the reduction commitments agreed to in the Kyoto Protocol 1997 (see also TN 32). At the center of the controversies were forests and agricultural soils which are referred to as carbon sinks. It is the carbon-absorbing capacities of theses ecosystems that governments want to claim credits for. The US along with other members of the Umbrella Group[1] continued to insist on such large controversial loopholes (particularly credits for carbon sinks) to reach their emission targets through means other than domestic action.
As at previous intergovernmental meetings on climate change, the true links between forests and climate change were absent from the governments’ agenda. No discussion about the threat climate change poses to forest ecosystems and forest dependent communities around the world. Rather, most industrialised governments were preoccupied with ensuring carbon sinks were accepted broadly so industrialised countries could continue to increase their greenhouse gas emissions well above their Kyoto targets and still claim to have achieved their emission reduction obligations.
What comes after the collapse?
Since The Hague there have been a number of renewed attempts to move the dialogue forward
A week after the Hague talks collapsed, ministers got together in Ottawa to try again to broker an agreement, but when these again finished without getting closer, the US pulled out of the pre-Christmas talks on the grounds that they didn’t want to have to face another failure.
Now it is rumored that the US want to pull out of the May/June official talks which were due to take place in Bonn. It remains to be seen if the next negotiation will take place at COP7, which is scheduled for October/November 2001 in Morocco, or whether it will take place this summer as originally planned. The UNFCCC bureau comes together on the 15th February by when a decision is due.
Whilst chances seem bleak for a renewed intergovernmental effort that would turn the tide on climate change, the collapse of the climate summit has given forest NGOs the chance and responsibility to ensure the real issues concerning forests and climate change will be on the governments’ agenda in the future.
Forest NGOs present at the climate summit alerted both governments and NGOs to the need to address not only those vital links between forests and climate change but also to critically assess the social and environmental impacts of carbon sinks. This is even more important as it became obvious in The Hague that carbon sinks in reality would mean plantations most likely large-scale, industrial monoculture operations in the South where land and labour are cheaper and trees grow faster than in the North.
One indication of this was that in the final negotiating texts before the talks collapsed, forest conservation projects were not included any more as an option to obtain carbon credits within the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) the CDM would have turned into a “Plantations Development Mechanism” had the US, its Umbrella Group partners and some Latin American governments had their way in The Hague. From a forest point of view, the lack of consensus at the climate summit therefore gives forest NGOs the time needed to ensure that whatever governments will agree on in the end will not result in more large-scale plantations and an aggravated forest crisis.
Scientists
up warnings for a warming world
Representatives from 150 governments met in Shanghai on 17th January to review and agree on the latest, and starkest, global warming warnings from world-renowned scientists. The reported increase in effects from greenhouse gas emissions throws a burning spotlight on governments’ failure to reach agreement at the United Nations Climate Change negotiations in The Hague, the Netherlands, last November.
Governmental representatives met to adopt the scientific assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel of scientists established in 1988 by the United Nations. The new assessment ups the predictions of the last IPCC report in 1995, almost doubling the top end of the temperature increase projected over the next 100 years to 6 degrees Celsius. Also the report projects more extreme events such as storms, floods and droughts as a consequence of increased emissions of greenhouse gases.
It provides a stark picture of a warming world:
- The anticipated increase in temperature over this century has been raised from a range of 1 3.5° C in the Second Assessment Report, to 1.5 - 6°C.;
- The anticipated range of global sea level rise is now between 14 and 80 cm, with a mid-range estimate of about half a meter;
- There is likely to be an increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, increased precipitation leading to floods, and higher minimum temperatures and fewer cold days;
- Climate change will persist for many centuries, due to the long life of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the long time required for transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the deep oceans; even with quick action to curtail emissions, the effects of our current activity will be felt for hundreds of years.
SBSTA6 of the CBD in March 2001 will
focus on climate change and forests. NGOs will take this opportunity to ensure
that decisions made at the next meeting of the climate change convention will
not undermine activities of the other conventions and international agreements,
notably the CBD. The current note of the CBD's secretariat on co-operation
between the two conventions is disappointing as it shows the CBD is not willing
to challenge the recommendations made by the IPCCC on definitions of
deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. Nor does it show the CBD
secretariat to be fully informed on the potential large negative impact on
forest biodiversity of decisions that were on the table at the climate meeting
in The Hague.
What you can do
Watch out for action alerts and news on this issue we will need your actions and support to ensure governments face up to climate change and protect forests not only as an invaluable “STORE” of carbon but also as to home to forest-dependent communities and forest peoples.
[1] A group of industrialised countries plus Russia which tend to act as a negotiating block in the climate change negotiations. Members of the Umbrella Group include the USA, Canada, Japan, Norway, Australia, New Zealand and Russia.