Tag: forest management

LULUCF Reference Levels: Technical Review Good, Policy Deeply Flawed

Submitted by Anonymous on December 4, 2011 - 11:46pm

ECO recognises that significant time and effort have gone into improving the transparency and technical robustness of Annex I Parties’ proposed reference levels for forest management.

However, although the review process achieved those objectives, this is in no way sufficient to ensure the environmental integrity of the reference level approach to forest management accounting. Put bluntly, the policy premise of the reference level approach is deeply, irrevocably flawed.

Although the review process was able to identify and correct technical issues and inconsistencies in individual country reference levels, it was never intended to assess the broader policy implications of the reference level approach. These implications include the following:

Environmental integrity. The reference level approach would allow Annex I Parties to increase net emissions of greenhouse gases relative to current levels over the next commitment period without penalty. Over time, this approach could seriously undermine global climate change mitigation and result in a loss of forest carbon stocks in developed country forests.

Economy-wide mitigation. The forest management reference levels for some Annex I Parties have been set in a way that allows them to hide increases in emissions from managing their forests and therefore allows them to avoid undertaking mitigation actions in other sectors.

Comparability. One supposed strength of the reference level approach is that it is flexible enough to allow all Annex I Parties to adopt mandatory forest management accounting.

However, reference levels overshoot the flexibility actually needed several times over. The result is a framework in which a tonne of mitigation in one country is not necessarily equivalent to a tonne of mitigation in another country.

The review was designed to assess the technical robustness and transparency of Parties’ reference levels, and it did its job. It is now plainly and utterly apparent just how bad the effects of the reference level approach could be.

ECO therefore implores Parties to take a step back, consider the broader implications of the reference level approach and reject it in favour of one of the more robust options on the table as we head into the critical second week of negotiations here in Durban.

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Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Europe

France

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COP17/CMP 7 – Durban

Anonymous's blog

High Level Note - Closing the LULUCF Loophole - May 31, 2010

Submitted by Anonymous on April 20, 2011 - 4:09pm

CLOSING_THE_LULUCF_LOOPHOLE_High_Level_Note_-_May_31_2010.pdf

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Climate Action Network

Kyoto

UNFCCC

CAN intervention - REDD - COP 13,

Submitted by admin on June 28, 2010 - 9:53pm

Intervention given by Paula Moreira on behalf of CAN in Bali on REDD issues

Thank you for this opportunity, my name is Paula Moreira from IPAM Brazil, The Amazon Institute for Environmental Research

The Climate Action Network International believes that:

To avoid the worst impacts of human-induced climate change, average global surface temperature rise needs to be stabilized as far below 2C above pre-industrial levels as possible. Keeping climate change below these levels is critical to the protection of tropical forests.
Global emissions must peak and begin to decline in the coming decade and reducing emissions from deforestation has a key role to play in achieving this goal.
The question is no longer whether deforestation should be addressed as part of the evolving global climate change regime, but rather, how this can be done most effectively and rapidly, while:

Ensuring equitable and fair incentives to Indigenous and forest people and
Protecting their land rights and customary land.

CAN’s objective is to ensure that the development of policies and mechanisms will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation at the national level; fast enough to prevent dangerous climate change.
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation must:

enhance the environmental effectiveness and improve the integrity of the climate change regime;
be accompanied by deeper and additional cuts in fossil fuel emissions by developed countries after 2012.

Developed countries must provide substantial resources for capacity building and technology transfer for effective monitoring, measurement and implementation of national and conservation legislation.
It is therefore essential that the Bali Mandate includes ambition, content, process and a timetable for negotiating a mechanism that provides incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation.

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Climate Action Network

Kyoto

UNFCCC

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COP 13 - Bali

LULUCF Follies

Submitted by Anonymous on November 2, 2009 - 7:44am

Right now in Barcelona is the time for Annex I Parties to change their LULUCF strategy and stop looking for cheap and easy credits from this sector. Continuing on this path will undermine the integrity of the Copenhagen climate agreement instead of creating a fair and transparent accounting framework through which industrialized countries take full responsibility for emissions from logging and bioenergy production.

It has already become clear that seriously flawed rules will be challenged by non-Annex I Parties and observers alike. Moreover, continued advocacy for such rules by some Annex I Parties risks a setback in the overall negotiations and raises the necessity for further modifications such as caps or discounting.

Fair and effective forest management accounting rules will provide an incentive to make structural changes in forest management that benefit the climate, and discourage forest management practices that yield little value. Yet the options in the current working text are flagrantly asymmetric.

Sources of debits are variously removed from the accounting altogether, defined away in the reference levels, explained as natural disturbances, or delayed for decades by favorable wood product accounting. Erasing debits is like deciding that nobody will ever fail in a pass/fail system – and will provide about the same amount of motivation for the effort to get forest management right.

It's a little hard to believe, but the positions taken by many Annex I negotiators effectively define their preferred management choices as carbon-neutral, regardless of what emissions actually are. In this fantasy world, you incur no debits for a ‘business-as-usual’ policy of cutting forests at age 50 even if most of the national forest estate is now 49 years old and you’re about to cut it all down! Nor do you receive debits for stepping up forest harvest to produce bioenergy. But the atmosphere sees the debits as emissions that should not have increased.

Annex I LULUCF negotiators need to remember -- or be reminded by their ministers and civil society -- that the planet is at stake here and, yes, we actually need to reduce emissions. Good intentions are welcome, but we are not here to engineer rules to avoid changing how forests are managed.

ECO is pondering what would happen if other sectors played the LULUCF game. How about assigning zero emissions to the power sector if they ramp up production using a business-as-usual practice of burning oil? In the LULUCF world they would only count the emissions if the sector switched to a dirtier fuel like coal. But that's not what we meant by 'ambition' in a good Copenhagen deal.

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Fair and effective forest management

forest management

Land use

Land use land-use change and forestry