REDD « Climate Equity

Well, let’s start with the good news first: the European Union and its 27 member countries have been good to their word and delivered a summary report on fast-start-finance commitments in time for the COP 16 in Cancun.  It is to be EUR 2.2  billion in 2010. As such, the EU — and the member countries who have taken the exercise serious enough to provide specific individual project information – have to be commended, and I give them a B+ for effort and initiative.  It cannot be easy for the EU Commission to try to bring 27 rascally students, pardon, countries, to order and make them do their homework in time.

Other industrialized countries, such as Japan, the United States or Australia have likewise joined in a mad scramble pre-Cancun — maybe as part of the peer pressure the early EU commitment for such a report created — and offered their take on how they are contributing to fulfilling the collective political pledge  industrialized countries made a year ago in Copenhagen to come up with US$ 10 billion in “new and additional” fast start money for climate change action in developing countries for 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively.

Alas, the execution of these reporting efforts is still insufficient.  I’ll give the EU effort, the most comprehensive of the FSF reporting by industrialized countries, a C – at present, but hold out hope for, and encourage,  improvement, both short-term (for the next report) and long-term (in the way climate funding is delivered).

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Illegal logging and trading in illegally sourced wood products is globally one of the major causes of deforestation and forest degradation in many developing countries.  It not only robs cash-strapped developing country governments of much needed revenues, it also destroys the livelihood of worldwide several hundreds of million of people who depend on forests. The destruction of forests — illegal or government-sanctioned — is also a significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, according to some estimates close to 20 percent.  So, it must be considered good news that a new study by the British Chatham House finds by looking at twelve major producer, processing and consumer countries that illegal logging globally has fallen by 22 percent over the course of the last decade, or more specifically by about 50 to 75 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, by 75 percent in Indonesia, and still by half in Cameroon.

As a result up to 17 million hectares of forest are estimated to have been protected from degradation in the five tropical timber producers studied. This adds up to at least 1.2 billion tons  and possibly many more of avoided carbon dioxide emissions since 2002.  In comparison: in 2009, Germany, globally the sixth biggest CO2 polluter, blasted 760 million tons into the atmosphere. (more…)