Stop climate negotiators from bargaining away forests for their carbon content!

Published by Fern

October 2000

Stop governments negotiating a Kyoto Protocol which promotes forest loss and imposes Northern (ir)responsibilities on the South!

With just five weeks to go before climate negotiators flock to The Hague to hammer out the implementing rules of the Kyoto Protocol, forests are more and more in danger of being reduced to a single commodity ­ carbon ­ to be traded away under the Kyoto Protocol’s so called “Flexible Mechanisms”.

  The resulting “Kyoto forests” are likely to be tree plantations  - supposedly a substitute for reducing carbon emissions- and the implications of these for forests, forest people, biodiversity and sustainable development could be grave.

  Gaining credits for the natural ability of forests and soils to temporarily fix carbon, instead of addressing greenhouse gas emissions at home will mean that the North can continue to get away with using more than its fair share of the world’s natural resources ­ by claiming (supposedly degraded) lands in the South to make up for it’s exorbitant resource use.

So, the North goes on polluting and people in the South pay ­ These countries are often hit hardest by severe weather events (remember Hurricane Mitch, the recent flooding in Vietnam?). What’s more, land already under heavy pressure from conflicting uses is now being committed to Northern energy companies searching cheap land for their “carbon offset” projects. Carbon sinks will thus lead to a new form of colonialism, which passes onto the South responsibility for the past decades of inequitable resource use by the North.

Gaining credits to fix carbon instead of addressing greenhouse gas emissions will also delay the inevitable switch towards renewable energy sources.

At present the EU is the only Northern party concerned about making the Kyoto Protocol environmentally credible. If the US -and its allies, such as Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Russia and Norway- has its way in The Hague, the Protocol will be rendered completely ineffective.

Your voice is urgently needed to remind those about to bargain away forests as a cheap and easy fix to climate change that establishing tree plantations in the South to make up for continued excessive CO2 emissions in the North doesn’t work ­ not for the forests, not for forest peoples ­ and not for the atmosphere either.

Send a letter to European Environment Ministers meeting in Luxemburg on October 10^th  and urge them to keep a hard line against those governments willing to undermine the environmental integrity of the Protocol for short-term political expediency. Sample letter available from Fern.

Background information

What is at stake?

There are many reasons for being extremely cautious about using forests for carbon sequestration but the three main ones are

i) the uncertainty of measurement,

ii) the fact that the rate of, and capacity for, sequestration will change over time, and

iii) the potentially adverse impacts on forests, forest peoples and biodiversity.

Before considering these matters, however, it important to point out that the solution to human-induced climate change is not carbon sequestration but reducing emissions. The Earth’s forests, oceans and soils simply do not have the capacity to sequester the ever-increasing volume of greenhouse gas emissions. Any solution to climate change based on sequestration is thus, at the very best, a partial and temporary fix.

For over 150 years, industrial societies have been moving carbon from underground coal and oil reserves into the atmosphere. Today about 175 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide circulate in the atmosphere than before the industrial revolution. Another six billion is being added each year. This transfer cannot go on indefinitely. According to current scientific consensus, adding as little as few hundred billion tones of carbon added to the atmosphere would result in a heat wave unprecedented in human history. The effects are already felt in many places around the world in the form of rising average temperatures, more extreme weather events and uncontrollable forest fires. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was the first - albeit small - step of governments to respond to climate change.

The need for meaningful commitments

Under the Kyoto Protocol of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), adopted in 1997, industrialised countries agreed to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5,2% below 1990 levels. To enter into force, the Protocol must be ratified by 55 countries accounting for 55% of the total carbon dioxide emissions of industrialised countries.

For some, the reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol do not go remotely far enough to stave off the dangers of global warming. Prof. Bert Bolin, Chairman Emeritus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has calculated that even if the Protocol were ratified and fully implemented, it could not moderate an expected warming trend of 1.4^o C by 2050 by more than 0.05^o C. Given these considerations, the Kyoto Protocol is only a small step towards halting climate change. However, even this small step is under threat as “details” of implementation of the Protocol are being bargained over by climate negotiators.

Deciphering rules and regulations for the flexible mechanisms

The Protocol established three “flexible mechanisms”[1] based on the fact that for many Annex 1 countries reductions of their greenhouse gas emissions domestically will be costly. These flexible mechanisms allow Annex 1 countries to meet part of their obligations by achieving or acquiring reductions in other countries. The rules and guidelines for implementation of these flexible mechanisms have not yet been agreed. These rules, expected to be adopted at COP6 in The Hague, will determine both the costs of meeting emission targets and the environmental credibility and social integrity of the Protocol: Depending on the rules, the flexible mechanisms can either contribute to achieving the Protocol’s aims OR open up loopholes to reduce already inadequate emission reduction commitments.

One of the main activities threatening to undermining the aim of the Protocol are carbon sinks, a concept based on the capacity of some environments, notably forests, to absorb (“sequester”) Carbon Dioxide. Carbon sinks are already recognised in one of the Protocol’s flexible mechanisms (Joint Implementation) as a means to obtain emission reduction credits[2]. Whether or not the same provisions will be included in the Clean Development Mechanism is expected to be one of the most hotly contested issues at COP6. Many argue against the use of carbon sinks as a means to obtain credits under the flexible mechanisms pointing out that this practice will likely result in overall CO2 emissions to the atmosphere being higher than they would be without carbon sink credits.

Flaws in the concept of carbon offset forestry

Counting carbon emissions reductions gained from forestry activities into the carbon equation has given trees a new selling point and a new market value. However, many are concerned that reducing forests to their ‘carbon value’ could in fact exacerbate the current trend of deforestation and forest degradation. Some of the main concerns are mentioned below:

1.      Carbon offset forestry is most likely to promote large-scale tree plantations. Their negative social and environmental impacts are well documented. In many cases primary forests are destroyed to make way for tree plantations. An increase in tree plantations resulting from the UNFCCC would most likely be in contradiction with the spirit if not the letter of the Convention on Biological Diversity given the negative records of tree plantations with regards to biodiversity conservation.

2.      Carbon stored in fossil fuel repositories cannot be equated with carbon stored in vegetation and soil. It is impossible to predict with the necessary certainty[3] how much carbon any forestry project would remove from the atmosphere and for how long. Forests are fragile biological systems and the carbon stored in them can return to the atmosphere at any time; tree plantations in particular are prone to fire and pests. It has also been pointed out that with global warming progressing, respiration will increase faster than CO2 uptake and forests are likely to start returning their carbon to the atmosphere at a faster rate, becoming net sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

3.      Every carbon sink credit is a disincentive to end fossil fuel exploration and will thus slow down the inevitable shift towards renewable energies, prolong the negative social and environmental impacts suffered by communities and forests in the vicinity of oil exploration sites and increase the North’s historic carbon debt towards the South: The more greenhouse gases a country emits, the more land it will require to make up for the emissions. Unproportionately high levels of greenhouse gas emissions of the North are superimposed onto the land ­ a concept regarded by many as a form of neo-colonialism .

For more information please visit the fern website www.greennet.co.uk/fern

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