Danger just pointed out a very inspiring article on the going on’s at the Bali Roadmap meet on his blog. Here’s a snippet but read his blog for more:
Update 18/12/07
I feel quite emotional about this CNN video report below:
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December 17, 2007 at 2:12 am
Mangimosbi
Bro,
Its makes one kind of proud.
I’m just hoping that the world doesn’t find out how “friendly” our government is with certain Malaysain logging interests.
December 18, 2007 at 4:38 am
Emmanuel
LOL, true yah good point Mangimosbi…
Here’s some more from an email I got from KK.
Hey guys
I haven’t seen anything in the PNG dailies about this so am sending you bits of some articles written about something a little bit monumental that happened on the weekend. Out of 175 countries (including the EU), the USA is the only one not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. At the United Nations Bali Climate Change Conference, the US representative first said that the US would not support the proposed agreement to hash out a new treaty to supersede Kyoto and actually be meaningful – then was sternly rebuked by the representative from Papua New Guinea, at which point, the US did a complete 180.
BALI, Indonesia (CNN Article) — In a dramatic reversal Saturday, the United States rejected and then accepted a compromise to set the stage for intense negotiations in the next two years aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.
The White House, however, said in a statement that it still has “serious concerns” about the agreement … The head of the U.S. delegation, Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, announced the United States was rejecting the plan. Her comments were met by booing from other delegations. Under the global warming pact, negotiating rounds would end in 2009.
…The Saturday session, unpredictable and charged with emotion, was a roller coaster ride for delegates and the media.
After Dobriansky’s announcement, the delegate from Papua New Guinea, Kevin Conrad challenged the United States:
“We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”
Five minutes later, when it appeared the conference was on the brink of collapse, Dobriansky took the floor again to say the United States was willing to accept the arrangement. Applause erupted in the hall and a relative level of success for the conference appeared certain.
________________________________________________
To put into context what PNG did, I am also copying below part of an article from a British newspaper, The Independent entitled “The World Gets the Better of Bush” (see here in full: http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article3255614.ece ):
The mood had been building all week at the negotiations in Bali on a replacement to the present arrangements under the Kyoto Protocol which run out in 2012. For months the United States, and President Bush himself, had been insisting that it would not block progress. Spin-doctors were dispatched to assert, ludicrously, not only that the President was as committed as anyone to avoiding catastrophic global warming, but that the man who had spent years trying to destroy any attempt to tackle it had always really been on the side of the environmental angels. But once his hard-faced negotiators took their seats in the steamy conference centre at the Nusa Dua resort the pretence slipped away. They blocked virtually every constructive proposal put on the table, refusing any suggestion of concrete action by the US, while insisting that other countries do more and more. Ever since Bush first rejected — and set out to kill — the Kyoto Protocol, he had cited as his main objection its exclusion of big developing nations such as China and India. More recently he has indicated that the US would move if they took the first step. Sure enough, they came to Bali ready to take action on their own emissions — and still the US refused to budge.
It is simply not done in international negotiations for one country to single out another for criticism; it’s the equivalent of calling someone a liar in the House of Commons. But from early last week other delegations were publicly, unprecedentedly and explicitly blaming the US for the lack of progress. Worse, they were beginning to point the finger at President Bush himself, suggesting that things would improve once he was gone. That is the kind of humiliation reserved for such international pariahs as Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. But even they were never subjected to the treatment that America received yesterday morning. When it tried, yet again, to sabotage agreement the representatives of the other 187 governments broke into boos and hisses. When Papua New Guinea told the US to “get out of the way”, they cheered.
The US buckled, as it has always done in international negotiations when it has been isolated. The same thing happened at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, last summer, and two years ago in Montreal, when holding the Bali negotiations was unexpectedly agreed. That is why Tony Blair’s fatal flaw of constantly trying to let President Bush off the hook — while doing so much to raise the profile of climate change internationally — was so destructive. That is also why it is so deeply disturbing that an EU source told The Independent on Sunday that Britain had helped the US water down the Bali agreement after a phone call from the White House to Downing Street. We must hope, as Hilary Benn insists, that this is wrong. The last thing the country wants, or the world needs, is for us to have replaced the poodle with a Pekinese….
Global warming is now the defining issue of our times, and it will determine almost exclusively how future generations judge us.
December 28, 2007 at 5:49 am
Considerations for a Government Media Company in PNG « the Masalai blog
[...] truths that do nothing for what we want to see as news. I’ll give you an example. The news of Kevin Conrad’s position on behalf of PNG at the Bali Climate Conference was a statement that shamed the US into agreeing to [...]
December 31, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Roger Mundy
Congratulations, Kevin and PNG! I was incredibly delighted and proud to see Kevin’s comment broadcast on the BBC News, following the dramatic climbdown by the USA at Bali. As someone who is passionate about raising the issue of climate change from the British perspective, to see a former student from my school playing a pivotal role at a conference which might - just might - at last make the leading world polluter do something about saving the world for future generations, was a fantastic moment for me and I hope for the world and our future.
Roger Mundy,
Former Geography teacher at Ukarumpa High School,
Papua New Guinea
(Kevin Conrad’s School in the 1980s!)
January 1, 2008 at 10:21 am
Emmanuel
It’s always nice to hear from old wantoks! Thank you very much for your comments Roger.
April 3, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Emmanuel
Save the Climate by Saving the Forests
By Fred Pearce
The New Scientist
22 March 2008 Issue
Kevin Conrad was brought up in Papua New Guinea, the son of American missionaries. He spent his childhood “shooting birds, cutting down trees and burning things”. His name might not be familiar, but at the Bali climate conference last December he drew applause and worldwide TV coverage for taking on the US. If it wasn’t willing to lead the world in combating climate change, said Conrad, head of the Papua New Guinea delegation, the US should “get out of the way”.
There is more to Conrad than those 15 seconds of fame. He is an academic and an investment banker. He is also the founder and director of an organisation called the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, which has almost single-handedly persuaded the world that one of the best ways to tackle climate change is to offer developing countries huge cash incentives to stop destroying their rainforests.
Conrad runs the coalition out of a small office at Columbia University in New York. But it began, he says, in 2005 on a beach in Papua New Guinea. “I went for a walk by the ocean with the prime minister, Michael Somare, who comes from the same home town as me. He talked about how he wanted to save our rainforests, but how we depended on them for our income. We agreed there had to be a way of paying to save the forests. So we set up a group of nations with the same ideas - Deforesters Anonymous, we called them at the start - and got those ideas on the agenda of the climate negotiations.”
Two years on in Bali, delegates from more than 100 countries agreed to establish a system of compensation for reducing deforestation. The aim is to have a deal ready for signing at a climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. If it works, it will cut a source of greenhouse gas emissions that is second only to the burning of fossil fuels.
“Bali achieved more than we ever expected,” says Conrad. There is widespread support for the plan, dubbed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). It extends from green non-governmental organisations and forest scientists to aid experts and a new breed of carbon capitalists keen to make money out of cutting carbon emissions.
No doubt it helps that reducing deforestation is the cheapest way of cutting global emissions. At about $10 per tonne of CO2 it works out at around half the cost of replacing coal with renewable energy.
This is, however, a radical plan. The “good guys” will get nothing. The money will go not to those trying to conserve forests or harvest them sustainably, but rather to bribe the “bad guys” who are destroying them. The most prolific deforesters are already lining up.
Some will find this idea hard to stomach, but with CO2 levels rising fast, the important question is whether REDD will work. Can forest scientists measure how much carbon is locked up in the jungle accurately enough to police deals that hand out dollars in return for keeping it there? Or will REDD be a recipe for corruption that ends up accelerating climate change rather than slowing it?
The world’s forests hold 50 per cent more carbon than the atmosphere. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the net loss of forests releases around 1.1 billion tonnes of this carbon to the atmosphere each year, or more than a seventh of total annual man-made emissions.
At least, that’s what the official numbers say. Alan Grainger of the University of Leeds, UK, recently concluded that the UN figures are so poor it is unclear whether tree cover is declining at all. “I’m not saying it isn’t declining, just that the data don’t prove it,” he says. The national forest ministries who compile the data are simply not up to the job and methodologies keep changing, making comparisons difficult.
Luckily, however, the virtual monopoly of governments on forest data is being broken by breakthroughs in remote sensing. Until recently, satellite monitoring relied on the visible spectrum. That meant satellites could only capture occasional glimpses of rainforests through the clouds. Even when the skies are clear these images are poor at revealing the more insidious processes of forest degradation - and resulting carbon loss - as humans invade.
Now satellites such as the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), launched in 2006, can use radar to peer through the clouds and assess changes in biomass. “This marks a new era. We can get complete cloud-free observations three times a year from ALOS,” says Josef Kellndorfer of the Woods Hole Research Center at Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Such technologies could be used to create an independent World Forest Observatory, says Grainger: “If a global forest monitoring system is to be scientifically credible, it must be non-governmental.” Will governments accept its conclusions? That remains to be seen, but the potential returns are so great that they might. Indonesia, one of the countries keenest on REDD, reckons it could earn $3.75 billion a year from the scheme.
The bigger question is whether the scheme really can turn things around. Many other attempts to save the forest have foundered. In 1990, for instance, industrialised nations agreed with Brazil a $1.5 billion rescue package for the Amazon rainforest. Between 1990 and 2004 deforestation rates doubled.
There is one exception: Costa Rica (see Maps). This small country has achieved a dramatic turnaround with a mix of conventional measures - such as creating national parks, banning deforestation and planting trees - and cash incentives akin to those envisaged by REDD. Its expanding forests are now absorbing so much carbon that Costa Rica expects to be carbon-neutral by 2021 - the first country to achieve this.
Can REDD repeat the Costa Rican success on a global scale? Pilot projects are already being launched to test the ideas, but there is no shortage of problems. One of the most obvious is “leakage”.
Consider: country X announces a large REDD project in a forest being wrecked by loggers or cattle ranchers. It collects the compensation, gives the cash to the loggers and ranchers, and the forest is saved. But the loggers and ranchers don’t sit around doing nothing: they move into a neighbouring area of forest, and plunder that instead. Overall there will be just as much deforestation.
To avoid leakage, says Conrad, countries should only get payments if they can show that the destruction did not relocate. That means working out a national rate of expected forest loss. Only countries that reduce deforestation below this baseline figure will get compensation. “National accounting is essential,” he says.
Forest scientists, however, throw up their hands in despair at the idea of working out baselines. The rate of forest loss can change greatly from year to year, depending on the state of the forests, the price of forest products and land, corruption and law enforcement.
In the Philippines deforestation rates are falling fast - because there are not many trees left to cut down. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however, rates look set to rise as civil war subsides. And what about Brazil, where the deforestation rate doubled from 1990 to 2004, then fell by two-thirds till the middle of 2007, and is now climbing sharply again as food prices rise?
Here science is likely to take a back seat to politics, especially as countries’ involvement in REDD will be voluntary. Rainforest nations could end up determining their own baselines. If the system ends up rewarding countries with rising rates of deforestation, however, it will rapidly fall into disrepute.
Many hope that REDD will at least help the poor inhabitants of rainforests who take the trouble to protect their own forests, as happens in Costa Rica. But the carbon market is unlikely to be that benevolent. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon or central Africa, who have lived in harmony with their forests for generations, will almost certainly receive nothing. They have not been deforesting, so what could they be compensated for?
What about small farmers? There is a great deal of uncertainty about how much real damage to forests is caused by shifting cultivators, who clear forest, farm the land for a couple of years and then move on as soils lose their fertility. Conventional forest surveys blame them for destroying large areas, but much of the cleared land swiftly regenerates.
“Poor people are usually too poor to do much damage,” says Frances Seymour, director of the Center for International Forestry Research, a World Bank-backed research agency based in Indonesia. She fears that such farmers will be thrown off their land by entrepreneurs intent on claiming compensation for “protecting” the forest.
Meanwhile, some huge forest destroyers are drawing up plans to get compensation. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for instance, giant pulp mills are responsible for vast amounts of carbon being released into the air as they log rainforests and drain peat bogs to plant new trees. One of them, Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL), wants to set up a REDD pilot project under which it will block the canals that now drain the Kampar swamp. APRIL could receive tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation for protecting the forest and not releasing the peat carbon. The project is genuine and is based on sound science, but the reductions are only possible because the company has been so destructive in the past.
At the national level, too, it is the prolific deforesters who have most to gain. Costa Rica will go penniless, while Indonesia could cash in. And countries that reduce deforestation now, before the baselines are set, could lose out. “Each country will have a direct financial incentive to set deforestation baselines as high as possible, in order to qualify for larger REDD transfers,” Seymour says.
Some say we cannot be too squeamish. That there are bound to be failed projects and scams, but any reduction in deforestation is a good thing. If the compensation is paid in cash, then this will be true: REDD should make a difference even if some money goes into the wrong pockets. One way to raise cash, favoured by the European Commission, is through government-to-government aid, perhaps funded by a levy on the growing trade in carbon credits among rich-world polluters.
State aid, however, could be limited. Instead, the rainforest nations want compensation in the form of carbon credits, which they can sell to rich countries or companies that need the credits to meet emissions targets. Economists say this system should be the most cost-effective, with competition delivering the cheapest ways of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
However, this could let the developed world off the hook. Preventing deforestation could become a substitute for cutting industrial emissions.
It is also risky. Suppose a power station in the US or Europe offsets its emissions by buying carbon credits from a deforestation project in the tropics. If that project is a failure, then more carbon will have been released than would have happened without REDD.
Another danger in linking REDD to a global carbon market is that the value of carbon credits will depend on supply. As more and more rainforest is earmarked for saving, the market could be flooded with carbon credits, causing a price crash. Cheap credits would provide little incentive to cut emissions or protect more forests.
There are solutions. One is to ring-fence REDD from the carbon market. Another is to dramatically toughen emissions targets in the industrial world, so that the demand for credits rises in line with supply. But there were no signs in Bali that governments have factored this into their calculations of emissions targets.
What’s more, many analysts say that REDD is unlikely to save the rainforests unless it is combined with a crackdown on the economic drivers of deforestation. “We have to address the drivers, or it won’t work,” says Conrad, despite his fervour for market solutions. “That’s the big task now.”
Seymour agrees. “REDD finance to Indonesia, for instance, must prompt decisions to mothball pulp mills in Sumatra, or to reject proposals to convert forests into oil palm plantations.” Yet many developing countries still hope that funds from REDD can be secured without them having to make sacrifices elsewhere in their economies.
And what of Papua New Guinea, birthplace of the plan? While the country is still largely forested, much of it is licensed to loggers. The World Bank estimates that around 70 per cent of current logging in the country is illegal. The government’s own audits reveal that politicians are complicit in the illegality and profiting from it. “REDD [will] pour money in one end, and corruption will just siphon the whole lot off,” says John Burton at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University, Canberra.
Papua New Guinea’s government has already entered into an agreement with a bank called Pacific Capital Limited to lay the groundwork for carbon trading. There have been allegations in the country’s parliament that Conrad has received payments in connection with this, an accusation he denies. “I don’t benefit personally from any of this. One of the foreign logging companies here doesn’t like my ideas, and they have hired people to make allegations about me.”
It would not be seemly for an international climate diplomat to have a large personal financial stake in what he is pushing for. But we all have a stake in a stable climate. And, most likely in the modern world, this will only be achieved if there is money to be made along the way.