Seeing the forest for the carbon?
4 December 2007 | Washington, DC
As the World Bank prepares to launch the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) -- its flagship initiative to address deforestation-related greenhouse gas emissions -- at the United Nations climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia, we offer some background on the FCPC and outline the concerns surrounding this controversial new mechanism.
Yesterday marked the opening of the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP-13) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – the international agreement under which the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions was established in 1997. As the leaders of more than 180 countries gather in Bali, Indonesia to discuss what kind of climate regulation regime will replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, one of the hottest topics on their global warming agenda is tropical forests. Deforestation in the tropics is now widely recognized to be among the major causes of global warming.
The meetings, which are scheduled to run through December 15, are expected to be particularly important in charting the course for a post-Kyoto global agreement on carbon emission reductions.
Campaigners have been fighting to protect rainforests for years, citing their importance to forest-dependent peoples, their unparalleled biodiversity, and their medical, aesthetic and spiritual value for the planet, but it is their recently recognized significance to the world’s climate that has made forests an international priority today. While there is agreement on the need to stop destruction of the world’s rainforests, there is no consensus on how to provide the incentives necessary to do so, nor concurrence on how to calculate the value of not cutting them for the growing (though contested) trade in emissions reductions.
Even as the debate over whether and how to incorporate “avoided deforestation” into an international agreement on climate change mitigation continues, the World Bank has already proposed one solution. On December 11th in Bali, World Bank President Robert Zoellick will launch its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, formally setting in motion the first initiative to include emissions reductions from avoided deforestation in the global carbon market. This latest foray by the Bank into carbon ‘market-making’ heightens concerns among environmentalists opposed to emissions trading in general, on the grounds that it only perpetuates excessive pollution in the North.
Nikki Reisch, BIC's former Africa Program Manager, offers some background on the FCPF and recent debates at meetings held in November 2007, between the Bank, donor and “beneficiary” governments, industry and civil society representatives in Washington.
Seeing the forest for the carbon? World Bank brings “market-making” to tropical forests by Nikki Reisch, December 3, 2007 (Acrobat pdf, 370 KB)
Additional resources
Official Forest Carbon Partnership Facility documents:
Civil society documents:
NGO Statement on the World Bank’s Proposed Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), November 30, 2007 (Acrobat pdf, 35 KB) (BIC website)
Seeing ‘RED’? ‘Avoided deforestation’ and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, by Tom Griffiths, Forest Peoples Programme, June 2007 (Adobe pdf, 324 KB) (Forest Peoples Programme website)
Critical perspectives on carbon trading and climate change: