Published
by Fern 12.07.01 www.fern.org
CLIMATE
UPDATE X
Dear
friends and colleagues,
The
next round of climate talks has started today in Bonn, Germany with four days of
closed-door meetings between governments. What will follow after those four days
of ‘informal’ talks is anybody’s guess: Japan and Australia have already
made it clear during a last minute EU delegation visit to those countries that
they will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol without the US on board. The prospects
for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol any time soon are thus fading by the day.
Trying
to ‘save’ the Kyoto Protocol by caving in to US’, Japans and Australia’s
demands for a broad inclusion of ‘carbon sinks’ will turn the Kyoto Protocol
into a farce: instead of the meager emission reductions of 5% by 2012,
industrialised countries would be allowed to INCREASE their greenhouse gas
emissions beyond the 1990 levels as long as they plant enough trees to
‘offset’ the extra emissions.
Even
worse, such a false compromise would provide perverse incentives for the
establishment of large-scale tree plantations and exacerbate the global forest
crisis. And most likely the atmosphere would loose out, too: forests are
predicted to become net sources of carbon emissions in the next decades because
of local climate changes in the wake of global warming.
Over
the coming two weeks, pressure from civil society is urgently needed to force
governments into implementing agreed commitments to address climate change.
Please help create this pressure and
For more
information check out our revamped climate section on Fern’s website: www.fern.org
where you can also find our new report ‘Sinks
in the Kyoto Protocol. A Dirty Deal for Forests, Forest Peoples and the
Climate’. If you want a hard copy
of the report, please send an email to: sara@gn.apc.org