Iwokrama preparing for carbon market - Bali meeting could open way for standing forests

http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56525181

Iwokrama preparing for carbon market
-Bali meeting could open way for standing forests
By Johann Earle
Stabroek News
Monday, July 23rd 2007

Dr David Singh

Director General of Iwokrama Dr David Singh says Iwok-rama is preparing
for carbon trading even though the Kyoto Protocol doesn't now assign
credits for the preservation of standing forests.

He said that for countries like Guyana, benefiting from carbon credits
under the Kyoto Protocol was fraught with many hurdles and it was
mostly the intermediary who gained.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol does not
speak to countries with standing forests for conservation, but for
countries which engage in reforestation.

But an important meeting on the Kyoto Protocol this December in Bali,
Indonesia, could decide if in future there could be recognition in the
protocol that standing forests should attract some form of funding for
avoided deforestation.

A recent BBC report said that Papua New Guinea - heavily forested like
Guyana - had proposed that rainforest protection be added to measures
to prevent global warming. PNG Ambassador Robert Aisi told a recent
climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, that even though a tonne of carbon
saved from the atmosphere came with a price tag, there was no way
developing countries could trade avoided rainforest destruction on the
international market.

The Iwokrama Director General said that its carbon trading would be
done under an arrangement whereby private individuals and companies
would be willing to pay for the maintenance of carbon sequestration.
This would be done outside the framework of the CDM and Iwokrama would
be paid for such activities.

Iwokrama said on its website that while the Kyoto Protocol had created
a carbon trading market, sustainable forest management and conservation
of standing forests remained excluded from carbon trading under the
current protocol. "Despite having a large amount of carbon stock, the
argument used is that intact forests have low rates of absorption of
carbon. There is therefore little economic incentive under the climate
change framework that promotes better land use and land use change
initiatives of intact tropical rain forests," Iwokrama said, adding
that this directly contradicted Article 6 of the Convention on
Biological Diversity.

Iwokrama said that as a flagship programme of the Government of Guyana
and the Commonwealth, it would play a crucial role in the re-valuing of
standing forests and sustainable forest management as effective climate
change adaptation and mitigation measures.

According to Dr Singh, such an arrangement would not only give Iwokrama
good standing with the international community, but it would also open
up a fantastic opportunity to promote Guyana as a model for such
arrangements.

He said that by virtue of Iwokrama going the way of carbon trading, the
organisation would be seen as achieving the triple bottom line: social,
economic and environmental targets.

At the moment negotiations are ongoing between Iwokrama and
International Forest Products Corporation, a UK company for the
commencement of the venture. The Iwokrama Board of Trustees at its
meeting in London about three weeks ago had approved the opening of
negotiations with IFP, a major US-owned trader of forest products. IFP
is keen on purchasing and marketing under the Iwokrama brand the
forest's annual sustainable timber harvest.

At the meeting, the trustees also agreed that there should be
discussions with an important UK company, Carbon Capital Limited, which
creates and manages investments in the carbon economy, about a possible
carbon facility for Iwokrama in accordance with Guyana's national
guidelines.

On its website, Iwokrama said that even if there were to be significant
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, countries would still need to
cope with a changing climate for the next 40 plus years, because of
emissions already put into the atmosphere.

"The future climate is already set over this time period and the
consequences cannot be ignored. Businesses and the financial markets
need to grasp the reality we face - that we have to both reduce our
emissions and acclimatise to inevitable climate change. There is no
choice between mitigation and acclimatisation - we have to pursue
complementary actions on both - now," Iwokrama declared on its website.

The BBC report said that in the past the complexity of assessing the
amount of rainforest destruction and any change in the rate of
destruction had led to it being sidelined in the original Kyoto
Protocol which would not be reviewed until 2012.

Aisi said in the BBC report, "Kyoto does not allow developing nations
that reduce deforestation emissions to get credit. Kyoto unfairly
discriminates against rainforested developing nations who seek to
participate within the world carbon market."

It is thought that around a quarter of all greenhouse gases are
attributable to rainforest destruction.

singh