Don’t get us wrong. The RSPB is absolutely behind efforts to revive the UN process and achieve a global climate treaty for 2012 and beyond.
But there’s a scam at the heart of the negotiations, a scam that needs to be exposed if these talks are to produce anything worthwhile.
What would you say if a country had impressive forest resources – large swathes of temperate forest – that it described as a big green lung, locking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
If that country had the odd emissions from industry or transport or domestic use, you might partly forgive them, if that big green lung were doing so much work.
But what if you zoomed in on those great forests and found that they weren’t really a pristine, living, breathing lung? That year after year, commercial loggers were felling hundreds of thousands of trees – not necessarily clear-cutting, but thinning forests so that they were weakened, impoverished, and their carbon stores much depleted. (And, incidentally, what if that intensive management was damaging wildlife habitat and putting vulnerable species at risk, too?)
Now would it seem fair that such a country were burnishing its shining climate credentials?
Well, take this disingenous myth about the climate benefits of temperate forests, multiply it by five or six or ten, and you have a dark reality that threatens to undermine global progress on tackling climate change.
Canada, Russia, Australia and several heavily forested nations in the EU such as Austria and Sweden want to claim credit for holding large land areas under forestry. They say that forest land offsets some of their more obvious sources of emissions – ie, burning fossil fuels. But the ‘close up’ view is rather more as I’ve described above, a far cry from the stable carbon stores you might imagine, and which they’re banking on.
And the dangerous part is that these countries are trying to write the rules of international negotiations to obscure the real situation and give them far more credit on the climate front than they deserve.
We could end up with a situation where the international rules on forest carbon accounting are sufficiently vague or flexible that countries could present their forests as resources that sequester carbon (take carbon out of the atmosphere) when, over time, the reality is very different. Those forests could on balance be emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide because of the intensive way they’re managed.
The RSPB is one of just a few organisations in Europe lifting the lid on the blatant dodging and obfuscation that characterise the talks around ‘LULUC-F’ (land use, land use change and forestry).
We fear that if talks proceed as they have to date, with countries making up their own rules on how they account for forest carbon, nations such as Russia and Canada could end up with carbon balance sheets that are a sheer fantasy. And that will be disastrous for the planet.
On 31 March, the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) released a report on the future shape of international climate negotiations. DECC stated in the report, and in the public presentation of it, that ‘LULUCF rules would have to be tightened up’.
The RSPB wants to see far more resolve on the UK’s part in holding fellow rich nations to account on this critical issue. The UN negotiations need to deliver a meaningful deal or deals to address climate change, the greatest threat to life on earth.
Waving through forest carbon rules that not only hide the true emissions from that sector but potentially give participating nations the motive to keep polluting heavily from other sectors would be completely unacceptable. We need honesty and integrity on this issue, now.
Today the High Court ruled that the Government must go back and reconsider its decision to allow a third runway at Heathrow Airport, in line with its climate change policies. That's good news for wildlife, we say, because climate change is the greatest long-term threat to life on this planet.
Martin Harper, the RSPB’s Head of Sustainable Development, said:
“Right from the start, we have argued that building a third runway at a time when we are battling to reduce our carbon emissions made no sense.
“Climate change threatens many species with extinction and we are already seeing its impacts with catastrophic declines in seabird numbers in parts of the North Sea
“Concerns about climate change are at the heart of Friday’s judgement. The clear message from the High Court is that Government must now take those concerns into account.”
The RSPB's legal experts are still going through the finer details of the ruling but on face value, it clearly has implications for proposals to expand Lydd airport in Kent, which we are vociferously opposing, and for other proposed airport expansions.
Today’s press carried the alarming news that an island has disappeared from the Bay of Bengal, falling prey to rising sea levels. New Moore Island in the Sunderbans finally slipped under, thanks to sea level rises of 5 mm per year in the Bay.
The most alarming prospect, of course, is what rising sea levels will mean for human populations of this and other low-lying coastal areas. A one metre sea rise would displace some 20 million people in Bangladesh alone.
Here in the UK, of course we have greater resources to call on that the people of developing countries to adapt to climate change (and given our historic responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, we must make bigger commitments to finance adaptation in the global South – but that’s a topic for another day).
Although we have more resources to adapt, that still doesn’t mean adaptation will be easy.
I just spent a stimulating day with RSPB staff from around the country and speakers from the Soil Association and Natural England debating how the UK can rise to meet the challenge of managing its coastline and countryside in a climate changing world. We concluded – unsurprisingly - that the most critical thing we must all do is talk to each other. Take the challenge of sea level rise and its effects on the crumbling defences of England’s east coast.
There will be difficult decisions to be made about which productive farmlands and which human settlements we can afford to save from sea level rise and which we can’t, and how – in this changing landscape – space can still be found for wildlife to survive and even (we hope) thrive.
Answers to these taxing questions don't come easily but the first thing we can do is ensure that good processes exist for consulting with people and building community ownership for coastal management plans that affect their area. The RSPB has good recent experience of doing this at a managed realignment site at its Titchwell Marsh nature reserve.
We want to be involved in conversations about coastal futures at many other places along the coast in the years to come.
A new report by the RSPB's sister organisation in the USA, the Audubon Society, with collaborators including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, details the profound impacts of climate change on US bird populations - and possible trends in the future. The findings include:
• Oceanic birds are among the most vulnerable species because they don’t raise many young each year; they face challenges from a rapidly changing marine ecosystem; and they nest on islands that may be flooded as sea levels rise.
• Hawaiian birds such as endangered species Puaiohi and ’Akiapōlā’au already face multiple threats and are increasingly challenged by mosquito-borne diseases and invasive species as climate change alters their native habitats.
• Birds in coastal, arctic/alpine, and grassland habitats, as well as those on Caribbean and other Pacific islands show intermediate levels of vulnerability; most birds in arid lands, wetlands, and forests show relatively low vulnerability to climate change.
• For bird species that are already of conservation concern such as the golden-cheeked warbler, whooping crane, and spectacled eider (shown right), the added vulnerability to climate change may hasten declines or prevent recovery.
• The report identified common bird species such as the American oystercatcher, common nighthawk, and northern pintail that are likely to become species of conservation concern as a result of climate change.
The full report and press release are available at http://www.stateofthebirds.org
Today efforts to get the UK on track to a sustainable energy future took a blow, with news that Ayrshire Power was submitting plans to the Scottish Government for a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston.
Lodge your objection to the proposal now by taking the RSPB's campaign e-action at http://www.rspb.org.uk/stophunterston
Read more about the proposals in Sunday's Herald and in the RSPB's Saving Special Places blog.