Here’s a (slightly late!) update from one of our supporters, Fred Putnam, who is currently at the climate talks in Durban. He is following the debate on how forests are part of the climate debate (REDD). Check out his impressions from his first few days there below.
For more information on forest and climate policy in Borneo, please visit: http://borneoproject.org/our-work/ongoing-campaigns/redd-and-international-policy.
***********
Monday Nov. 28
The only difference between this and any other conference I have been to is the security – the whole convention center and adjoining parking lot is fenced off and patrolled by police. Once you have your badge, you can go in and out of the secure area easily. Your badge bar code is scanned on the way in and out.
I expected it to be bigger, and with more people. I think it will build through the two weeks. The official UN negotiations are in the convention center, and the official “side events” and booths are in a large outbuilding – kind of like an airplane hangar. This space is somewhat scruffy, which works just fine, because it is full of young professionals — environmentalists having intense meetings around tables with their computers out.
I sat down to have lunch and learned of a highly relevant session that was starting immediately, and the rush was on to that session, which was a presentation in the US booth about SERVIR, a USAID program that brings land use monitoring via NASA satellite photography to the developing world. The exciting thing about this for me was that if you get in this program you can actually ‘target’ their satellite that takes three meter resolution photos of your land of interest. That could be used to document land-grab oil palm deforestation. However, talking to the lead presenter, I learned that the world’s best forest carbon sensor, Japan’s ALOS radar satellite, ‘died’ a few months ago. Bummer.
Get ready for that kind of serendipity if you go to this meeting – everybody I run into is relevant to another key piece in my climate puzzle. It’s uncanny. Sitting back down in the café to plan what I was going to attend, I ran straight into a UNDP Advisor based in Indonesia who is knows all about Norway’s REDD+ program there, all about sustainable palm oil issues, and said the US is partnering with Indonesia on verifying its REDD emissions reductions with NASA satellites. I’m invited to visit him in Jakarta.
Tuesday Nov. 29
I am majoring in REDD+ here – Reduction in Emissions from forest Destruction and Degradation. The high-level meetings where the official REDD+ discussions are being held are private, but there are numerous REDD+ “side-events”. Here at COP17, anyone who wants to can find space for a presentation self-host it, and self-promote it by invitation, posting a flyer on a big wall, handing out flyers, and/or emailing announcements to a list server everybody uses. REDD+ side-events abound and overlap, so you can’t cover them all. Two of them were really good today.
Enforcement and Anti-Corruption Measures Essential to REDD+ Success
This panel has excellent experienced people from the EIA, Global Witness, Chatham House, and by a Peruvian from AIDESEP, in Spanish – but this is a UN meeting, so there was translation for me. The leadoff quote was “Alarm bells are ringing. REDD+ is too big to monitor.” Another: “We are dealing with organized crime here.” A detailed account was given of the recent felonious issuance of an oil palm license on peatland in Aceh, Indonesia by the governor of the province. This is an egregious violation of the much-hailed moratorium declared by Indonesia’s president this year. It’s a poster child for the worst kind of corruption, and how unsustainable palm oil is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia. Finally, the Peruvian told a classic case of “carbon cowboys” – scam artists that got an indigenous community to sign on to a ripoff pseudo-REDD agreement in English. …a very passionate speech, with a list of compelling reasons why “structural reform of REDD is essential.”
Toward REDD+ Readiness in Tanzania: Lessons Learned, Opportunities, and Challenges
Tanzania, an early adopter of REDD+, had a panel of about eight members of their top-level REDD+ task force. These people really have their act together – they are the opposite of the “carbon cowboys”. Their presentation was extremely impressive – transparent, dedicated to benefiting the communities, with proper attention to land rights, comprehensive MRV (emission reduction verification), etc., etc. They are truly a showcase of what UN-REDD+ can and should be, and it’s all there on reddtz.org. However, in the Q&A, the questioning was tough, and there was a sense that there were still unanswered questions, and the wrap-up speaker wondered aloud “Are we really going to see more trees alive”? Privately, after the event, I congratulated him on their dedication to the communities, and he said that they are talking to multinational corporations about financing now, and there are tough negotiations on the percentages that the communities will get…