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.
The UK press have picked up the international debate on Land Use Land Use Change - Forestry (LULUCF)