Into the Woods!

Carbon-counting could be a key to a global accord on climate change, but world leaders have let it fall by the wayside.

The countries of the world are locked in high-stakes negotiations to forge a new global agreement to combat climate change by the end of this year in Copenhagen. The negotiations are impossibly complex and wound up in such important issues as historic responsibility for emissions, equity and survival. Much of the attention is focused on the interplay between strengthened commitments for industrialized nations and the emerging commitments of major developing economies, like China and India. Other key issues include massive funding for climate change adaptation in the world’s poorest countries, the transfer of technology to allow development along a greener path, and, of course, who’s going to pay the bill for all of this.

A bit off to the side from all this, partly obscured, poorly understood, yet critically important, are the mini-negotiations about forest accounting: how should countries be rewarded or penalized for the carbon balance of their national forests (i.e. whether they are a net source or sink of carbon)? Rewards come in the form of forest carbon "credits" that countries could use to offset increases in emissions from fossil fuels.

This negotiation is often too technical for non-experts to follow, but governments and observers would ignore them at their own peril: a colleague of mine recently calculated that the difference in offsetting credits between conservative and liberal accounting of the forest carbon balance of 36 industrialized countries could be more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide, with no difference at all in actual emissions to the atmosphere. This is more than the total fossil fuel emissions of the United States. The significance of numbers like these should be lost on no one: as China pointed out in its submission to the Bonn Climate Change Talks this past April, such numbers could allow industrialized nations to meet their remission reduction obligations with "magic paperwork," rather than real change – set a high target, relax the accounting rules to help meet it.

This mini-negotiation on forest accounting is being watched closely by a motley group of forest campaigners and scientists bound by their common membership in the Climate Action Network, a worldwide network of over 430 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working to ensure that the Copenhagen deal will help us prevent dangerous climate change. (I coordinate this group in my role as National Manager of Domestic and International Policy for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.) Although only signatory countries are official parties to the negotiations under the UN Climate Change Convention, the process is quite open and transparent, allowing this group to play an active roll in promoting environmental integrity, as is an essential characteristic of any new deal.

This group has put forward a recipe for the treatment of forests in the Copenhagen deal that would provide real benefits to the atmosphere and protect biodiversity:

i) Countries should be held strictly accountable for all emissions from forest and peatland degradation and be obliged to reduce these emissions; currently countries can cherry-pick the activities they want to account for, and generally don’t account for activities that result in large emissions.

i) Rewards and penalties should be awarded on the basis of actual changes compared to historical levels; in contrast to this seemingly obvious imperative, one of the options on the table is to allow countries to choose their own hypothetical emissions reference level, generating credits that have nothing to do with emissions actually seen by the atmosphere.

i) Country strategies for managing forest carbon must be appropriate to forest and biodiversity context; natural biodiversity-rich landscapes should be protected, degraded landscapes restored and cleared landscapes replanted (this is a draft recommendation from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity).

There are several key forces working against the inclusion of such positive elements in a final deal. First, forests were originally conceived of in the Kyoto negotiations as redeeming some of the emission sins of industrialized countries by sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere; there is therefore a perspective bias in favour of getting forest rewards rather than penalties.

There is a second bias that distorts thinking about how this sector should be treated: developed countries like to assume that their forest management is sustainable by definition and that problems like "degradation" don’t even exist. There is a double standard because reducing forest degradation and deforestation in developing countries occupies a large part of the climate change agenda, and some of the very same practices are happening in places like Canada, Australia and Russia.

The final barrier is a strong enforcement of the separation of solutions to the climate change problem and biodiversity survival into their two respective UN conventions, despite the fact that they both arise from unsustainable development and can have mutually supportive solutions.

The next round of negotiations is this June in Bonn. Environmentalists will be there to try to win one for the air and the trees.