REDD+ debates in full swing at Durban

Durban is now in full swing – as are the discussions on REDD+, which are set to produce results by Saturday. The Norwegian delegation announced at a packed contact meeting yesterday that they had ‘already been for a jog this morning and had a double espresso’ which is just as well given that the REDD+ negotiators will be up night and day to have text agreed by Saturday.

This should give the REDD+ crowd plenty to chew over by the morning of Forests Day on Sunday, and following on from my last post this means my Sunday morning speak will be more REDD+ finance, reference emission levels and safeguards, rather than my usual caveman mono-syllables.

Over in the Durban Exhibition Centre (DEC) – the designated stomping ground for us NGO types – there has been a bombardment of REDD+/forestry side events. Navigating this festival of intriguing events is a tricky task, and like Glastonbury it means you always miss out on star acts. Highlights for me so far have been:

• The Environmental Investigation Agency providing sobering reminders of the mammoth task afoot in improving forest governance (one slide showed entirely fabricated forest inventories approved all the way through up the Peruvian forest agency). This ‘Enforcement and Anti-Corruption Measures’ event led to a energetic debate on whether strengthening ‘on the ground’ enforcement penalizes the ‘little-guy’ when REDD+ should really be used to address corruption and criminal activity further up the value chain.
• CIFOR’s ‘How is REDD+ unfolding on the ground’ showed that REDD+ Developers are hedging their bets in light of future REDD+ market uncertainty. An interesting side-effect has been that some developers choose not to use the phrase ‘REDD+’ in their outreach to communities, as they don’t want to raise false expectations. This is a justified approach, and avoids a problem now being faced by many projects in limbo where previously promised carbon finance is not forthcoming. However it was highlighted that this reduces the ability to carry out full Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as communities are not told and therefore cannot agree to selling the carbon in their forests. As a sneak preview, this issue crops up in our ‘Are capacity building services meeting countries’ needs’ policy brief, which is launched here on Thursday 1^st December with UN-REDD.
• The ‘Status of monitoring, reporting and verification in setting up REDD+’ presentation within the CIFOR event stimulated challenge from the floor. These challenges were on what MRV should cover, and if countries are ‘jumping the gun’ on using large chunks of limited readiness funding on MRV, rather than addressing the massive forest governance challenges they face. Admittedly the last challenge came from yours truly. The sensible reply was that we need to strike a balance between addressing both MRV and forest governance, with the admittance that often MRV takes up donor readiness money because it is easier to show progress, as opposed to the greater difficulty in clearly showing forest governance results. I walked away feeling slightly worried that the need to show clear results for donor money may mean that the ‘high risk/high reward’ options get sidelined in favor of less ambitious aims.

My highlights list will have doubled or tripled in length by the time you read this and I’m sure my fellow bloggers inside and outside of RECOFTC will cover the issues they raise. For those of you at Durban we look forward to seeing you at RECOFTC’s Forests Day booth. If you aren’t here please keep tuned for more blog posts soon!

Written by Jim Stephenson, RECOFTC

Expectations for Durban: High level progress on REDD+ likely to be held hostage by broader stalemate

As the negotiations of COP17 kick off in Durban, there are as many expectations flying around as there are participants. Compared to previous COPs however, most expectations are pretty low.

Overall progress in negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, or a separate, binding emissions reduction agreement including the emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa), is likely to be slow.  Which in UNFCCC terms means that 2015 is likely to be the first window of opportunity for a deal to be agreed, so don’t hold your breath on that one.

Finance discussions, another integral part of the whole negotiations, will focus on the operation of the Green Climate Fund, however where the money is likely to come from, including solid commitments to provide funding, is likely to be sidestepped in Durban. So although the rules of operation for the Green Climate Fund may move somewhat forward, the actual implementation and long term clarity on climate finance is unlikely to.

So what does that mean for the REDD+ negotiations? There have been a number of recent articles and blogs on expectations for Durban, including from REDD+ country delegations, and they have been fairly measured in what they expect to be achieved over the next two weeks. Many highlight the opportunity for REDD+ to move forward on procedural issues, which are largely separate from the broader negotiations, however the constant caveat is that ground-breaking progress will be hindered by other negotiation tracks.

 Issues such as clarifying the guidelines on a reporting system for the social and environmental safeguards , which are specific only to REDD+, provide an opportunity to make progress regardless of stalemates in other areas.  Furthering discussions on the establishment of reference emissions levels, or reference levels may also provide an avenue for providing methodological guidance for the REDD+ agenda.

Similarly, the issue of REDD+ finance provides an opportunity to make some positive progress in Durban. As a result of discussions on this issue in Panama in October, there is now broad agreement that a range of sources of finance will be needed as REDD+ moves from readiness to implementation. A decision in this area is likely to leave the door open to include multilateral, bilateral and private sector sources of finance (including ultimately carbon markets), however without overall agreements on emissions reductions targets and mechanisms to achieve this, as well as on climate finance beyond the fast start period, the detail on where and how will be hazy. As always, the devil will be in the detail.

There are still a range of sticky issues requiring resolution for REDD+ to have sufficient clarity to really get off the ground. How other sectors such as agriculture and energy can be aligned to meet climate change and REDD+ goals to ensure coherent national priorities will be key for the long term success of REDD+. Similarly, sufficient commitment towards long term finance from developed countries, and international policy clarity will be needed to cement current interest from REDD+ countries and private sector involvement. These sticky issues are all things intricately linked to the wider negotiations, and therefore inherently difficult to resolve at the moment, given the broader context.

But it’s definitely not all doom and gloom. There is cause for optimism – REDD+ is happening on the ground, there are a range of innovative approaches involving local communities, the private sector, development partners and national and sub-national governments, using a range of landscape scale approaches and innovative financial transfer mechanisms. Durban will provide a good opportunity to showcase some of these successes, learn lessons from the challenges, and remind ourselves that REDD+ is only one part of the climate change agenda, and there is lots to learn, and many positive experiences from a range of initiatives, whatever their acronym.

Written by Kristy Graham, REDD-net Coordinator, ODI

Going into Durban: Are we sugar coating the science?

On my flight to Durban, to attend the final COP before the (current period) Kyoto Protocol expires, I shared a cappuccino and some words with a NASA climate modeling scientist. Asked his views on how the climate change science tallies with the discussions taking place at the UNFCCC, he was blunt. “Things are going to be much worse than what the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) reports are forecasting”. 

In sum, the IPCC uses an average of a spectrum of different models for forecasting climate change scenarios. Of these, many use older, low resolution technology, or higher resolution models that continue to draw information from low resolution lateral conditions. The most advanced of the models (such as Japanese models simulating global climate at resolutions of 3.5–10 km) are considered to present the most accurate data. These are at the very highest end of the temperature scenario curve – higher than the IPCC’s ‘best estimates’ for temperature rise which range from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius by end of the century. The discrepancy lies in the fact that the IPCC takes the average of these various models – an average which includes low resolution models and temperature change scenarios that are significantly lower than what the most advanced technology suggests. These assertions were presented in an academic paper by Shukla et al 2009 and then again in 2010, wherein he appeals for a revolution in climate prediction methods.  The point made by my friend from NASA was that the numbers that most of us; negotiators, politicians, industry, public at large, rely upon are drawn from a divergent pool of both the most advanced and relatively outdated models. It cannot be taken as state of the art knowledge.

This is simultaneous to a second ‘climategate’ with a series of illegally hacked emails written by University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit released on the internet last Tuesday.  This follows a previously seen pattern with private emails from scientists publicly disclosed immediately preceding major international climate meetings, in 2009, the COP15 in Copenhagen. The naysayers of climate change, leaking this private information, have done little to further their cause and would appear mainly to have undermined it. In virtually all accounts, particularly regarding the ‘errors’ in the 2007 IPCC report which were held up as evidence to disparage the credibility of global climate science, the scientists have been vindicated. Stephan Lewandowsky of the Guardian writes compellingly that climate change scientists have been in many national contexts ridiculed, threatened and otherwise sidelined by powerful political and economic interests.

I walk away from my conversation with the NASA scientist and towards the opening of COP17 tomorrow wondering whether the real scandal here is not the exaggeration of the threat of climate change, but rather a willful downplaying of what might otherwise be politically unpalatable.

Written by Regan Suzuki, REDD-net Asia Pacific Coordinator

REDD+ and adaptation: are we asking too much of REDD+?

REDD+ is expected to do many things; reduce emissions from the forest sector and land use change, and contribute to social development objectives and biodiversity conservation. Elements of the social development and biodiversity conservation goals are established as safeguards at the international level, and are also being pursued at the national level as countries develop their REDD+ strategies and implement REDD+ pilot projects.  It is widely recognised that achieving multiple benefits from REDD+ is important to ensure the political sustainability and environmental integrity of the mechanism, and for the case of REDD+ projects, to reduce the risk associated with investments in these projects.

But why should REDD+, developed as a climate change mitigation instrument, be linked with adaptation? Are we asking REDD+ to achieve all things for all people? Might this hinder the achievement of mitigation goals?

In research and policy communities, climate change mitigation and adaptation are largely separate issues, however at the local level there is little distinction. ‘Mitigation’ projects will influence the capacity of local people to adapt to climate shocks and stresses, while ‘adaptation’ projects often have unintentional impacts on the mitigation potential of forests. At the local level, the separation between mitigation and adaptation is fairly meaningless.

This then begs the question, why is adaptation important in the context of REDD+? The main reason is that shocks and stresses associated with climate change are already being felt in many communities in developing countries, and in many cases adapting to these is their primary concern. Local communities’ ability to do this (adaptive capacity) depends on a number of types of assets, and processes, including institutions, governance, innovation and knowledge. There is therefore increasing attention being given to building adaptive capacity at the local level to assist communities in the face of climate change, and enable them to meet their development needs and objectives.

If local level adaptive capacity is integral to achieving long-term social development objectives, and REDD+ should be designed in a way that contributes to social development objectives, then surely local level adaptive capacity is also important for REDD+. Recent REDD-net research highlights this importance, and suggests how REDD+ can best be designed to contribute to local level adaptive capacity. It highlights key features of the policies and measures, benefit sharing mechanisms and governance systems used to implement REDD+ that can contribute to both REDD+ objectives and the adaptive capacity of local communities. REDD-net will convene further discussions on this topic, including drawing on practical experience from field implementation of REDD+, alongside COP17 in Durban.

So, it would seem that we’re not asking yet another thing from REDD+. Contributing to adaptive capacity at the local level is an important way of ensuring that REDD+ meets the development needs of local communities now and in the future, as the climate changes and development pressures change. It would appear then that fostering synergies and minimising tradeoffs between REDD+ and adaptation is imperative for the long-term sustainability of REDD+, at both the project and national policy levels.

Written by Kristy Graham (ODI)

Welcome to the REDD-net blog

Welcome to the REDD-net blog which is being launched in the lead up to COP17 in Durban. We will be using this blog as way to provide short updates and analysis of UNFCCC negotiations as they develop, as well as providing interesting information and insights from the range of side events that REDD-net partners and members will be attending.
Over the coming weeks the REDD-net blog will feature posts from REDD-net partners attending COP17, and we also welcome guest bloggers. So if you’re interesting in doing a post – get in touch!
The blog will continue during 2012 and will be used as a way for partners and REDD-net members to publicly communicate opinions and insights from regional events, on-ground implementation and policy developments and REDD-net research.
We look forward to you feedback and comments on the blog, and encourage you to check back regularly to keep updated with REDD+ developments in Durban and beyond.