Deforestation talks in Bonn

In the Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace, Evan Johnson has a useful summary of the talks in Bonn, now underway: …Delegates from 182 nations are beginning to arrive in the former German capital of Bonn to hammer their preferences into a 53-page negotiating text that will be kicked around ad nauseum between now and December, when the final version is set to be presented to high-level negotiators UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. On Monday, the working groups charged with hashing out sticky policy issues (see The UNFCCC Process, right) approved their agendas for the next two weeks, and not surprisingly Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) figures prominently.

… It is an axiom of life that money complicates everything, and so it is for REDD. Over the course of the last Bonn meetings, the debate continued regarding how to finance the reduction of deforestation in developing countries. Should REDD be financed in the model of traditional government-to-government development funding, or should it be linked to a market, and should it generate credits that can be used by industrialized countries to meet their emissions targets? No consensus was reached on these questions in previous Bonn meetings, but there was a general trend in the discussions towards developing a hybrid approach combining the various funding options.

…Leaving REDD aside, carbon emissions and sequestration from changing land use are already a part of the Kyoto Protocol, where industrialized countries must account for their LULUCF emissions. During a meeting of another of the working groups referred to above, the AWG-KP, a carbon accounting option suggested by the European Union caused quite a stir. The accounting method, known as the "bar approach", proposes that a country would have a reference level of LULUCF emissions (or reductions), based on some agreed-upon historical baseline. If the country went below that emission level, it would be credited; if it went above, it would be debited.

…The rights of Indigenous Peoples in the development and implementation of REDD also continued to be a contentious issue at previous Bonn meetings, with a number of organizations contending that little was being done to enable the participation of indigenous communities, or to protect the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), as provided in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples....

The Alte Rathaus in Bonn, shot by Leonce49, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Germany License