REDD: Forest Conservation as a key part of Copenhagen

Yesterday, IISS intern Isabella Santoro went to an event at the Center for Global Development on the UN-REDD program. Below is her report about it.

Yesterday, 18 November, the Center for Global Development hosted a seminar titled “Financing Forest Conservation to Combat Global Warming: Keys to Success at Copenhagen.” The event featured eight guest speakers. They focused on the impact of deforestation on global warming, including potential solutions to the problem, examples of successes, and areas of failure.

Deforestation accounts for roughly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than the entire global transportation sector, second only to the energy sector. For some countries, especially major emitters like Indonesia and Brazil, deforestation is the primary form of carbon emissions.

At Bali in 2007, diplomats in the UNFCCC proposed the United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) as a cost-effective and reliable measure to confront deforestation and climate change. The purpose of REDD is to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, so that more affluent countries such as the United States and other Western powers can provide a monetary incentive for developing countries to protect their forests as valuable carbon sinks. REDD has not yet been implemented, but it is expected to be part of an agreed framework that comes out of Copenhagen next month.

Nigel Purvis, President and Founder of Climate Advisers, spoke about the benefits of implementing REDD. He listed several advantages of REDD, saying it would: help mitigate climate change, provide a buffer from severe climate change, encourage countries to invest in climate adaptation, and create a monetary value for precious ecosystems in the poorest regions where there had been none before. However, there are obstacles and drawbacks to REDD. Deforestation is caused by many factors, including agricultural expansion, logging, infrastructure development and – most importantly – poor governance. Crystal Davis, an associate at the World Resources Institute, lists the following criteria as measures of good governance: transparency, participation, accountability, coordination and capacity. It is important to strike a balance between urgency, adequacy and equity when applying funding, as these can come into conflict with each other.

REDD will have to be applied in a timely manner, in support of local and sustainable practices, and with respect to the rights of the indigenous populations who rely on natural resources for survival. Manish Bapna, Executive Vice President of the World Resources Institute underscored this point, saying that we must make sure that developing countries are actually benefiting from REDD. The other main issue that must be confronted is mobilizing finance so that funding is applied in a reliable and predictable way. Too much money at one time can be counterproductive, because lasting solutions take time to implement. Funding should be stretched out over a longer period of time.

How can forest conservation be monitored on a global scale? Data collection remains scarce and often lacks context. Protected Areas of forests have shown to reduce deforestation. Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Engagement and David Wheeler, Senior Fellow at the Center presented their new and improved FORMA and CARMA programs. Forest monitoring for action (FORMA) developed a prototype system for monitoring deforestation in Indonesia by collecting satellite data from NASA satellites from 2005 to October 2009. Carbon monitoring for action (CARMA) provides a map detailing the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in the world. Both interactive maps are available on CGD’s website. These programs are examples of ways to monitor both carbon emissions and deforestation on a global level so as to determine the actual effect of Protected Areas as well as the implementation of REDD.

So, the question becomes, will developed countries be willing to support the REDD agenda at the upcoming Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen? The science is clear: forest preservation must be a part of the solution if the global average temperatures are to be stabilized within two degrees Celsius. The United States and other Western powers stand to gain in every way from the global reduction of greenhouse gasses and they hold the key to making it happen. Providing financial incentives to reduce carbon emissions would promote global cooperation between developed and developing countries, protect poor and indigenous communities, spur global economic growth, and curb climate change.

(photo from Flickr, courtesy of Greenpeace)

A Return to Yesterday's Post

I need to update my comments in yesterday's blog post. There have been two comments, each of which I should address in turn.

First, unintentionally mischaracterized Bernard Finel's take on the question of how climate causes conflict. Most of what he writes about in the post is the important point that anybody can cherry-pick information, using different dates to get the results they're looking for. The more important point, that climate change doesn't necessarily cause conflict, I agree with Dr. Finel about. I quote him below.

"The point isn’t that climate change causes conflict anyway. The point is that
climate change is likely to exacerbate existing conflicts. The end of the Cold
War was clearly a more significant influence on trends in conflict than climate
change has been thus far."

Suffice it to say, I agree with that statement. I must have I gotten caught up with arguing about the quoted material, and did not complete my thought process when composing yesterday's post. I hope that this corrects the record.

Secondly, James Jay Carafano (quoted in the Flash Point blog post) writes "dude the climate is always changing". Today's New York Times' Op-Ed piece "Ben Franklin on Global Warming" bears this out. I think he's trying to make the point that climate change isn't caused by human action (and I think he's on the wrong side of the science here). We don't go into the question of whether climate change is man-made or not around here, but from a planning and security perspective, that doesn't really matter. Climate change is likely to be a driver of conflict around the world (though far from the only one) in the 21st Century. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the security community to plan for it. More on this point in a later post.

Also, in hindsight, I was far too glib and condescending about Heritage's positions on climate change. Though I've often not agreed with them (but I very often do), I shouldn't have made such a statement without any support, and I've deleted it from the post.

Again: Be careful when saying climate causes conflict

The Flash Point Blog has a recent post asking: Is conflict declining, even as global warming occurs? This is yet another example of oversimplifying the question. They cite James Carafano (a scholar from the Heritage Institute) as saying that conflict is going down while climate change is occuring.

I think Carafano and the American Security Project are is looking at this is in a way that is just too simple. No political scientist would ever claim that there is a direct 1-to-1 causational relationship with something that is as complicated as the causes of conflict. Clearly there are many things that lead to conflict, like economic dislocation, religious differences, class conflicts, or others. In science terms, there is more than one independent variable in this equation. However, climate change and environmental security is part of the equation. In fact, it is rightly called a ‘multiplier’ that can exacerbate all the other parts of the equation.

So, to say that climate change won’t cause conflict isn’t true, just like like saying that climate change will cause conflicts is also too simplistic. I’ve written about this before.

Also, its interesting to note that Carafano apparantly is conceeding that climate change is happening, by saying that ‘things have been getting better’ even as climate change happens.

Greenland Melting Faster

A new study (subscription required) in Science shows that the ice sheets of Greenland are melting at a fast and accelerating rate. This is yet another example of how the latest science is showing that the effects of climate change are moving faster than even the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC's 2007 consensus report.

The report, based on satellite observations, states that the Greenland ice sheet lost approximately 1500 gigatons of ice mass from 2000-2008. This is about 0.46 millimeters per year of global sea level rise. And, the rate of loss is increasing. Since 2006, high summer melt rates have increased Greenland ice sheet mass loss to 273 gigatons per year (0.75 millimeters per year of equivalent sea level rise).

Importantly, this article appears to resolve much of the uncertainty about how much the ice sheet is melting. The article used two independent methods, one based on observations and the other on remote gravity measurements made by satellites. By getting these two approaches to agree, we can get a clearer, more precise view of what is actually happening. I have said before that policymakers are asking for better science. Unfortunately, its not pretty.

Whether we can keep the Greenland ice sheet intact will be an important factor in keeping Bangladesh, the Maldives, or New York above rising sea levels. The water contained in these ice sheets could account for 7 meters of sea level rise.

What I'm listening to: Climate Wars

The Canadian Radio Network, CBC, has run a radio series, titled "Climate Wars" with IISS friend Gwynne Dyer as the host. I've only stumbled across this today, and am only through the first episode of the series. So far, I can attest that its a very strong and interesting program. He was able to get very strong interviews that read as a 'who's who' of imporant players in the climate security argument, including John Holdren and others.

I can't link directly to the radio program, but you can listen to it through the CBC's website, here.