Tag: Special Interest Communities

27 January 2015 | You don’t have to go far in Bolivia to find treasure. It’s everywhere: in the vast Amazonian forests; in Lake Titicaca, which lies nearly four kilometres above sea level in the Andes; in the peaks and rain-gathering waterways of the Andes mountains; or in Bolivia’s 2,000 animal species.

And to call all this treasure is hardly romantic because, to some, Bolivia’s natural environment is worth a lot of money.

Bolivia is not alone on that front. Programmes that pay people to sustainably manage environmental assets are increasingly popular, especially in the global South. But questions about the money’s impact on efforts to reduce poverty and inequality have persisted for decades. Does the cash help poor or indigenous people living in valuable ecosystems? Or is it more likely to benefit rich landowners? In Bolivia and elsewhere, research is beginning to show that these two goals environmental protection and poverty reduction need not be mutually exclusive.

Pricing up nature

A recent estimate of the planet’s natural capital is US$125 trillion a year. [1] This figure attempts to capture the value of the ecosystem services essentially all the benefits of a healthy, natural environment provided by such things as carbon-storing trees, drainage basins that prevent flooding and insect life that helps agriculture flourish.

Natural capital is a controversial concept. Many feel putting a price on nature is either impossible or ethically unsound. But its supporters argue that without doing so ecosystem services are at risk of being left out of economic models and decision-making.

“We’re degrading the natural environment and losing species at an alarming rate. So let’s put a value on nature and get it incorporated into these models so that we can start investing in the maintenance, protection or possibly even enhancement of those ecosystem services, says Darren Evans, a conservation biologist from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.

Programmes to quantify and pay to maintain the value of ecosystem services have existed in one form or another since the 1950s. Today they are known as payments for ecosystem services (PES) initiatives. These schemes pay farmers and landowners for managing land in a way that conserves some targeted environmental resources, for instance a forest, river or species.

But for as long as they have existed, efforts to price nature have been divisive. What has emerged, however, is evidence that the better a scheme is tailored to benefit all stakeholders, the more likely it is to succeed.

Bolivian dissent

One country involved in this battle and its possible resolution is Bolivia. In 2010, the nation hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, a global meeting attended by 30,000 government and civil society delegates. Bolivia consulted the conference on whether to sign up to the UN’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) programme.

REDD has some similarities to a PES scheme, but it operates at a global rather than a national scale. It is funded by selling certificates known as carbon credits, which represent carbon emissions saved through the programme, on international carbon markets. At present, 56 developing nations have signed up to the programme, but Bolivia decided against joining after the People’s Agreement drawn up by the World People’s Conference emphatically rejected this move. [2] Later in 2010, President Evo Morales further hardened his nation’s position in an open letter to indigenous peoples entitled: “Nature, forests and indigenous peoples are not for sale. [3]

Lykke Andersen, director of the Center for Environmental-Economic Modelling and Analysis at think-tank the Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD) in Bolivia, says: “Bolivia is really an ideal candidate for participating in a REDD mechanism. It is promising because it has so much forest and so much deforestation. But at the Peoples Conference, the people there rejected REDD strongly. The government accepted that decision and made it a national policy.

Bolivias opposition to REDD illustrates tensions that can cause schemes that put a price on nature to come unstuck, Andersen says. In the case of REDD, the unhappiness was triggered partly because poorer countries would have to reduce emissions while richer countries carried on raising theirs.

Alternative inspiration

With REDD branded a prohibited concept in Bolivia, Andersen says the country’s conservation scientists instead turned for inspiration to smaller, local PES schemes that took poverty alleviation into account.

In 2012, INESAD carried out a countrywide analysis of the likely social and environmental impacts if Bolivia had adopted REDD. [4] The results showed that large-scale adoption of REDD would have decreased deforestation, but would also have increased competition for agricultural land, pushing up food prices and worsening poverty. More than 90 per cent of REDD-related revenues from carbon credit sales would have gone to just five per cent of the population, it forecast.

INESAD also ran the analysis based on an alternative mechanism that Anderson and her team designed. This included financial and technical assistance for sustainable development projects within the forest  and taxes and fines for deforestation. Under this theoretical situation their model showed that the nation’s poor benefitted more and food prices were more stable.

The mechanism Anderson’s team designed has come to be known as the Bolivian mechanism. [5] In 2013, UN-REDD decided to support it with US$1.1 million and Denmark pledged US$26 million. Four pilot projects testing it are currently underway.
“The Bolivian mechanism is based on looking more holistically at forests, by supporting local communities who protect their forests and engage in economic activities that are forest-friendly, while punishing deforesters with taxes and fines, Andersen explains.

“What we showed in the analysis is that the benefits of the REDD mechanism almost exclusively went to the side of reducing emissions, with very little benefit for the people of Bolivia, the rural inhabitants who would have to modify their livelihoods, she says. “With the Bolivian mechanism, there was a much fairer distribution of the benefits, helping the poor while hurting the big deforesters.

Reward and punishment

Unlike REDD, which lacks punitive elements, the Bolivian mechanism goes further than simply paying landowners not to cut down trees which Andersen tartly likens to paying a thief not to steal by also rewarding activities that protect the country’s forests. “It’s a much more healthy system of incentives where you reward the behaviour that you want to see and punish the behaviour that you don’t want to see, she says.

Those most likely to be punished under the system are wealthy agricultural producers, while those most likely to receive payments are poorer Bolivians living and working in forest areas. And the mechanism also aims to make payments to poorer communities more straightforward by requiring legal evidence of land ownership only when levying fines and taxes, rather than when managing payments. This is vital for equity and wealth redistribution as many people that live on the land do not have legal proof of ownership, despite it unequivocally being their home.

Rejecting REDD means losing access to a larger potential pot of funding, but Andersen argues that financing the Bolivian mechanism through foreign aid offers greater stability than relying on volatile carbon markets. Nonetheless, she acknowledges that securing ongoing funding is the mechanism’s biggest challenge.

Paul van Gardingen, director of UK research programme Ecosystems Services for Poverty Alleviation, agrees that PES schemes must be well designed to equitably reward both the poor and wealthy for activities that protect the environment.

“There’s absolutely no question that PES can work, he adds. “But one of the challenges is how you link that up to poverty alleviation.

The problem of land ownership

Land tenure has been a persistent stumbling block for PES, with the worst cases reinforcing rather than alleviating inequalities. This is because many older or poorly designed PES schemes require proof of land ownership, something often only the wealthy have, for payment. Land ownership is often unclear, especially in countries with indigenous or remote rural communities.

But Ina Porras, an economist at UK-based policy research organisation the International Institute for Environment and Development, says there may be better ways of framing a PES programme than by using property rights and land ownership.

Even introducing such a system within a developed country would benefit big landowners most due to land ownership being concentrated among the rich, Porras says. “So we need to think carefully about how benefits are applied.

Costa Rica offers an interesting model in this regard. There, a national PES scheme has been a success since it started in 1997. It has helped raise the country’s forested land cover from a low of 20 per cent in the 1980s to over 50 per cent in 2012. It works by providing contracts to landowners for different types of forest conservation: protection, reforestation, sustainable management and regeneration.

Funding allocations for indigenous associations have also risen steadily, from three to 26 per cent between 1997 and 2012. This was partly due to ongoing redesigns of contract procedures: in 1997, the scheme did not prioritise different social groups on the basis of economic need, resulting in low uptake for indigenous groups with little money; in 2012, however, they were being allocated a set amount of contracts before others could bid.

While the principle of setting aside some contracts for indigenous groups resolves some problems around land tenure, the persistent challenges of fair access to the programme and equitable distribution of benefits still require further analysis, says Porras.

She is studying participation in the Costa Rican programme. In 1997, 44 per cent of funds were paid to cooperatives and associations, but these types of organisations had virtually ceased receiving money by 2012. Meanwhile, payments going to legal entities such as businesses or other legally registered groups have risen from just over a quarter to almost half of total payouts. Understanding these shifts is key to designing PES schemes and ensuring they work for both communities and conservation over the long term.

Looking at the studies by INESAD and Porras, it apparent that there is a need to understand the risk of a PES scheme exacerbating social inequality at the expense of environmental protection, and to design it accordingly.

Van Gardingen says there is now an emerging understanding that “if you are serious about using PES as a method to deliver poverty alleviation then you need to be thinking about the efficiency of the environmental benefits, the efficiency of the social benefits, accept that there’s going to be a trade-off and find the appropriate balance.

17 January 2015 | One month after an opposition leader of the Paiter-Surui indigenous people sparked an uncharacteristically public debate about the people’s landmark forest carbon project, several village and clan leaders sent a “letter of clarification” to the Federal Public Ministry (Ministério Público Federal) outlining what they see as flaws in the governing mechanisms designed to handle community finances.

In general, the signatories praised the Carbon Project itself, but said the governance apparatus that the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (Fundo Brasileiro para a Biodiversidade, “Funbio“) created for the community had been slow to disburse funds, and that too much authority had been vested in the Metareilá Association, which is the indigenous organization selected by the Paiter-Surui to implement the project.

“We are not questioning the Surui Carbon Project and its partners,” they wrote. “But there is a huge discrepancy between the money that the Surui Fund received and the amount passed on to the associations.”

The Surui Fund – officially known as the Fundo Paiter-Surui – only began to earn income from the Carbon Project in September, 2013 when Brazilian cosmetics giant Natura Cosméticos purchased the first tranche of offsets. Income from that sale was earmarked for institutional strengthening, border control/surveillance and jump-starting economic alternatives to illegal logging. The signatories say that funding began flowing quickly into the community early in 2014, but slowed as the year progressed. It’s not clear whether the alleged discrepancy reflects the Fund’s allocation of income to community-wide programs, or whether it is symptomatic of growing pains or issues that need adjustment.

Fundo Paiter-Surui

Despite its name, the Fundo Paiter-Surui is more than just a depository for money. It’s a long-term governance apparatus developed by Funbio, together with members of the Paiter-Surui, to operationalize the 50-Year Management Plan that Chief Almir Surui created a decade ago. The Carbon Project spawned the Fundo, but the Fundo and the Project are two separate, symbiotic entities.

The Fundo‘s mission, according to a document prepared by Funbio (See English and Portuguese versions of “Fundo Paiter Surui Explainer”, right), is “To generate benefits to the indigenous territory by organizing, centralizing and providing transparency for the collection, management and use of resources for the governance of the Paiter Surui and the implementation of the Management Plan.”*

Governance

In the explainer and in the longer Operating Manual, Funbio commits to shepherding the creation of a Deliberative Council (“Conselho Deliberativo” ) and a Conflict-Resolution Chamber (“Câmara de Resolução de Conflitos“) to govern the fund with the Labiway Esaga, or overall chief, acting as administrator.

Chapter 8 of the Operating Manual clearly describes the roles of each body: the Deliberative Council is to choose a financial manager and supervise the selection of projects, among other things; the Conflict-Resolution Chamber is to keep information flowing and resolve conflicts; and the Labiway Esaga acts as the voice of the Fundo and has veto power over projects.

The manual describes a detailed, multi-level process for proposing projects and a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of control in any one person or entity. It also lays out an intricate set of procedures through which Funbio will launch and oversee the fund while gradually training members of the Paiter-Surui to assume management themselves over time.

Ângelo dos Santos, Funbio’s head of Climate Change and Clean Energy, acknowledged the grievances and said they reflected theFundo‘s stepwise implementation.

“This is a process in which the Fund’s structures are implemented in different stages depending on their incorporation by the Suruí,” he said, adding that Funbio was reviewing the grievances and would provide a detailed response shortly.

“The structure has a certain degree of complexity, which is learned gradually during the incubation period,” he added. “This first year the governance is being tested, and the basic management processes have advanced well in comparison to the beginning of 2014.”

Chief Almir said he was reviewing the grievances with the signatories, and he would offer a formal response early next week.

The Grievances

While the manual describes an emerging participatory process involving all of the various clan associations and the creation of new associations to handle new business areas, the signatories say the reality is a more concentrated. They often, however, refer to the governance structure (Fundo) as the “project”, which has led to confusion outside the community.

“During the preparation of the project, it had been agreed that each association would be responsible for an area: agriculture, education, health, environment, culture and tourism,” they wrote. “But when the funding arrived, from the sale of sale [of carbon offsets] to Natura, this agreement was not honored.”

Instead, they say, “[Labiway Esaga] Almir created departments within the Metareilá Association, reducing the involvement and autonomy of the other clan associations within the Suruí Fund.”

They called on Surui leaders to decentralize the implementation of the community-assistance work financed under the project, and they also called on federal authorities to monitor illegal logging and to take an active role in supporting the project.

“We expect that the Federal Public Ministry, in addition to monitoring the illegal logging, also monitor the correct implementation of the Project, because it is an innovation and might serve as an example to other indigenous peoples, if well executed,” they wrote.

Taking Stock

The grievances come amid general stock-taking involving internal and external actors. In July, for example, Metareilá Association invited an outside consultant to carry out a workshop assessing its governance, and that workshop produced recommendations for better integrating all the Surui communities to benefit from the Surui Carbon Project. It is not clear, however, which of those recommendations have been implemented.

The Carbon Project is also undergoing verification from external auditors under the rules of the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Association as part of the normal procedure and safeguards for projects of this caliber. The verification includes an assessment of governing structures, and it is expected to yield similar recommendations.

Logging and Financial Pressure

The signatories also defended the motivations behind the resumption of logging by some families, which they say began in 2012. That was three years after they implemented a logging moratorium to support the carbon project, two years before funding from the carbon sales started to flow into the community in January 2014.

“Some of our people were selling wood to survive, and in 2009 discontinued this illicit activity thinking that now things would get better,” they wrote. “However, legal and bureaucratic obstacles delayed the availability of financial resources, [and] in 2012, some community members were forced to return to selling wood, because there was no project that would have allowed these families to sustain their livelihoods, many people were going hungry.”

Differentiating Between the Carbon Project and the Fundo

The wording of the list of grievances is at times confusing, with the Carbon Project and the Fundo Paiter-Surui being used interchangeably. In the final paragraph of their clarification, for example, the signatories deviated from the messaging in the bulk of the document and appear to call for the carbon project to be terminated, but they also call for more autonomy given to the associations.

“Given the above, the leaders who have signed this document want that the Paiter-Suruí Carbon Project to be terminated and for the associations to develop and implement projects that ensure real autonomy for communities with a sustainable development and income generation without depredation of natural resources.”

In context, and given the earlier support of the project and references to the Fundo as the “project”, the paragraph could refer to the Fundo or some of its mechanisms. Furthermore, several of the signatories, including former overall chief Anine Surui, had recently voiced support the project but criticized the administration of the funds. Ecosystem Marketplace has reached out to Anine and others for clarification, and will provide an answer as soon as we receive it.

Financial Flows

The signatories offered a detailed breakdown of expected financial flows vs. actual flows, and they pointed out that many of the chiefs went without compensation in the years during which the project was working its way through the four-year process of verification and validation.

“It was foreseen in the project budget that the board members of each clan association would receive a salary of R$2,000.00 ($762.00) for a period of three years,” they wrote. “This salary would be paid for accompanying and supervising the project together with the communities that each association represents, but no such payment was made.”

But they said disbursal slowed down as the year progressed.

“The projects that had been approved received their contributions in two instalments,” they wrote. “The first was released in June, 2014 but some associations have not yet received the second instalment.”

They added, however, that “Technicians from Metareilá claim that they are still analyzing the statements of accounts presented for the first installment.”

The letter also says that 2014 funding to associations for general administration fell $R1,000 ($382.00) short of expectations.

“Contracts had been signed for an amount of R$7,500.00 ($2,866.00), payable in three monthly installments of R$2,500.00 ($955.00), but associations received two installments of R$ 2,000.00 ($763.00) and one instalment of R$ 2,500.00,” they wrote. “When they requested the amount still due, the Metareilá Association claimed that it had no means to pay the outstanding amount.”

Chief Almir acknowledged that some of the funds had been held up over concerns about how the first tranche was spent, but he pointed out that most of the allocated funds had been disseminated to the community. Both he and Funbio’s dos Santos said they would provide a detailed response shortly.

5 January 2015 | When EcoZoom began designing its first cookstove, it wanted to include women from the start. “It was common sense for us,” explains Amanda West, the co-founder and Chief Communications Officer at EcoZoom. “The cornerstone of our business is our product, and if we don’t have a product women want to use, the whole business was going to crumble anyway.”

To make a product that women will use, the company involved them throughout the design process. “It was over 230 participants in the whole design process,” she says. “Then we came out with this awesome charcoal stove that women are in love with.”

The design went on to win Gold in the International Design Excellence Awards earlier this year, and now EcoZoom wants to integrate gender inclusion throughout the rest of their supply chain. However, they’ve found that including women isn’t always as simple as stakeholder consultations.

That’s where the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves comes in. EcoZoom is one of 6 Spark grant recipients, and the Alliance is helping them develop data that more clearly identifies the users by gender. – In addition to working with individual companies, the Alliance also works to collect sex-disaggregated data at the sector-wide scale – beginning with the organization’s newly-released 2013 Results Report.

The report was informed by a survey that asked all respondents about their gender strategies, as well as for data that breaks down users by gender when available. While over three-quarters of partners reported having a gender-focused strategy, challenges remain to appropriately address gender issues in the clean cookstoves and fuels sector. Most organizations (35%) cited funding as a key barrier to further implementation. Other commonly-cited issues include internal capacity, capacity of partners, ability to scale, and the ultimate sustainability of such operations.

The Alliance hopes to address these challenges head-on, since increased knowledge from data and case studies could help cookstoves activities around the world become more effective.

As a case in point, another Spark grantee, Sustainable Green Fuel Enterprise (SGFE), could have benefitted from adapting EcoZoom’s design process. A 2014 recipient of the prestigious Ashden Awards in 2014, SGFE still scored low on gender in their SPARK Fund application. The primary reason cited? Because SGFE didn’t disaggregate their data by gender, and didn’t address gender concerns throughout the supply chain.

“Now we start to include them [women],” explains Carlo Figà Talamanca, SGFE’s CEO. “Not just because we want to do good, but because it will also help us do better business.”

Talamanca already knew that women were integral to his supply chain. They were the majority of owners in retail shops, and restaurants that made bulk orders from his company employed many women. He had also found that women SGFE hired were more reliable than their male counterparts, even if they weren’t able to provide heavy manual labor.

However, he didn’t have an established strategy for including women – his actions were primarily reactive, not proactive. In particular, problems started when he hired a female accountant and an administrative manager earlier this year. Talamanca explains that while the men weren’t overt in their disrespect toward the new hires, their subtle actions that had a big impact – sometimes they might ignore what she said or be mildly rude in a response to her.

“I got really upset,” Talamanca said. “I said anyone who is really impolite – not just to women or to management, but to each other in general – then they get a monetary fine. This they understand, because we enforce it.”

Talamanca welcomed support from Els Rijke, the gender expert sent by the Alliance as part of the Spark Fund. The expert walked through every aspect of SGFE’s supply chain and created a gender action plan based off of the Alliance’s best practices guidebook,Scaling Adoption of Clean Cooking Solutions through Women’s Empowerment.

“She doesn’t have a magic wand,” he explained to me over the phone. Instead, the expert would ask questions about practices or actions that were taken for granted and try to figure out the cultural reasons behind them. In some cases, problems were only tangentially gender-related – and more overtly poverty-related.

Many of Talamanca’s employees come from poor waste-picker communities. Though they receive higher wages from SGFE than from many others jobs available, the women – usually more responsible employees by showing up on time and working harder – sometimes skip days.

Upon further questioning through a series of interviews, they found that this is because the majority of workers are indebted. The women are more often the ones who take out loans and repay debts (though their husbands often spend the money). They would skip days to work another job or try to find cash to pay off their debts.

After these interviews, Talamanca and Rijke worked to create a matrix of possible solutions and ranked them by long-term effectiveness and risk reduced. As a next step, Talamanca will review these suggestions to decide the next course of action.

He plans to address the lending issue immediately. Starting in November, Talamanca will pay salaries through a micro-finance institution instead of in cash. The bank account has multiple benefits: it reduces risk of theft both at the factory and at the employees’ houses, as well as encouraging savings.

A third benefit, as yet untested, is the opportunity for low interest loans. SGFE will back a few employee loans, so workers can benefit from reduced interest rates instead of going to money lenders. If the first test cases go well, Talamanca hopes to expand the backing to all employees that meet certain conditions (such as seniority or demonstrated reliability).

Back in Kenya, West of EcoZoom will also be deciding next steps. Asked what the most important take-away was from these consultations, she replied that with gender, “it’s really important to think about your strategy for engaging men as well as women.”

As EcoZoom looks to expand into manufacturing activities, they want to include women throughout the process. However, going into a community with high unemployment and only offering jobs to women may create additional problems for them at home.

West added, “Some organizations have tried to recruit women as sales agents… but then found that they were building all this income for women, but when she would bring it home the man would just take it. Because the man didn’t have any education about reinvesting money in the business, this short-term view hurt women entrepreneur’s ability to be successful.”

“If you don’t look at it holistically, you don’t create the solution you set out to create. You’re really affecting a family and a household.”

UPDATE: 13 December 2014 | 11:17 GMT-5 | A new text is reportedly circulating among the negotiating groups, but the plenary scheduled for 11pm has been postponed until after midnight.

13 December 2014 | LIMA | Peru | 1:42pm GMT-5 | Negotiators meeting under the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) here were unable to reach consensus on a stripped-down negotiating text that emerged early Saturday morning as least-developed countries objected to the removal of loss-and-damage provisions. COP President Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, however, says he will have a compromise text to present to the high-level negotiators meeting this evening as the 20^thConference of the Parties (COP 20) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) convenes.

• This morning’s text is available for Download here.
• Click here for Adopt a Negotiator’s nifty graphic summary of the text.

The new text emerged after intense one-on-one lobbying by negotiators from Singapore and Norway, acting at Pulgar-Vidal’s behest, and it eliminated the laundry list of items to be found in INDCs.

It also made no mention of land-use issues or loss-and-damage.

The Environmental Integrity Group and European Union acknowledged the text’s shortcomings but argued to send it up to the higher-level negotiatiors. Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry, however, set the tone for opponents by rejecting any text that doesn’t deal with loss-and-damage and saying the text needed “surgery”. Venezuela, speaking on behalf of the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries, reiterated that, but Singapore countered by saying that we can’t all have everything.

• Click here for Adopt a Negotiator’s country-by-country tally of positions in today’s ADP.

“If each of us submits just one item on a wish list, we will inflate this document beyond recognition,” said Singapore Environment Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, before offering what may be the most disturbing metaphor of the talks.

“Before embarking on any surgery, the most important question is whether it is necessary, and you have to ask, ‘What are the potential complications?'” he said. “If you are submitting for circumcision, be careful it doesn’t become an amputation because the surgeon used too big a knife and took too much flesh.”

New Zealand conceded there are “dead rats that need to be swallowed”, but also said “no sides have been ignored.”

With no consensus, the text was sent back to Pulgar-Vidal shortly before 1:30pm. He then announced that he will begin working with negotiating blocks individually starting at 2:30pm for a series of ten-minute meetings that will end around 5:30pm, and he promised to emerge with a new text to present to the COP this evening.

11 December 2014 | LIMA| Peru | For a brief moment, Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal seemed to have lost his spark. As President of the 20^th Conference of the Parties (COP 20) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), he’s been tirelessly shepherding delegates here towards an agreement on two issues: how best to tackle climate change between now and 2020, which is when a new climate agreement is supposed to come into effect, and sewhat should go into the building blocks of that new agreement so-called Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions (INDC).

But he looked drained and almost haggard as he introduced Kishan Kumarsingh, who heads the negotiating body charged with creating a basic text. Kumarsingh then reported that his group had failed to move beyond the 50-page document containing 36 paragraphs, almost all with several options: “In a nutshell, we have not had any progress on how we proceed with the textual negotiations on the text we completedlast night.”

Pulgar-Vidal then lit the room with a 20-minute harangue that blended into a rallying cry and culminated with him calling Kumarsingh and fellow co-chair Artur Runge-Metzger into a closed-door meeting designed to yield a simplified negotiating text a draft of which had already been accidentally posted to the UNFCCC’s web site in the morning, prompting a walkout by the G-77 and China.

Finally, at 10:30pm local time, he posted a new negotiating text that boiled 50 pages of bloated text offering several options for each paragraph down to seven pages comprised of 17 paragraphs, only four of which had options. Each of those four has only three options, and each of those three is clearly delineated from the others.

The new text is decidedly less prescriptive than the earlier one. On land use, for example, the previous text contained several detailed options for making land-use provisions explicit and calling for meetings between now and Paris. The new text has just one option in the main body that explicitly mentions land-use (the third option under paragraph nine, which asks countries to detail their “land-use accounting approaches and expected use of market mechanisms, undertakings in national adaptation planning processes, and if applicable, the provision of finance, technology development and transfer and capacity-building support for ambitious mitigation and adaptation action in developing countries.”)

The annex, which contains the proposed elements of a country’s Intended Nationally-Determined Contribution, has also been whittled from 15 pages to two, and makes a brief reference to the need for “accounting for the land sector, including an explanation of how Parties will address all significant lands or activities, pools and gases; the reason for exclusion of any significant lands or activities, pools and gases; the approach proposed for addressing non-anthropogenic impacts, if any; and whether any accounting approaches build upon existing and agreed guidance or other methodologies.”

The result is a document with no one’s pet projects delineated explicitly, but none explicitly endorsed, either.

“Don’t leave me alone.
Work with me together, based on confidence, to deal with the problem.

Pular-Vidal drew a standing ovation for his appeal to put legalistic thinking aside and focus on core values.

“This isn’t a linguistic discussion,” he said. “It’s a substantial discussion.”

He conceded the need for negotiators to look out for their own national interests, but urged them to cooperate.

“The solution is not in the words, not in the dots or points, but in the substance,” he said, recounting his 28 years in environmental law. “You are my colleagues. Most of you are ministers of environment; some of you are ministers of foreign affairs; and I’m sure we believe in the same thing. Obviously we recognize your domestic needs, your domestic problems, your internal political difficulties.

“Don’t leave me alone,” he concluded. “Work with me together, based on confidence, to deal with the problem.”

In the morning, we’ll see how well the appeal worked.

5 December 2014 | Lima, Peru |The first thing Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), did during her conversation with International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) President Dirk Forrister on Wednesday was rearrange the room. Sans microphones, Figueres and Forrister perched on the front of their desk and invited audience members to gather around fireside-chat style, with some people sitting cross-legged on the floor. It was a fitting arrangement for a discussion about carbon markets that have emerged from the ground up.

Countries are expected to lay the groundwork for submitting their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs their national plans for action on climate change) in spring of 2015 at this 20th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 20) in Lima, Peru. Though the role of markets in INDCs remains a question to be discussed over these two weeks of negotiations, Figueres sees their power to help solve one of the most perplexing conundrums of the climate talks: how the commitments countries eventually make to reduce emissions will be measured and enforced.

“I am very much a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) enthusiast, and my enthusiasm is not just because of the offsetting potential or the market part of it but because it is such a valuable tool in verifying mitigation, she said. “I would not be surprised if the toolset of the CDM precisely to measure mitigation and verify is something that would actually be pretty inspirational to put it mildly for the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Originally developed as a flexibility mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM was envisioned as a way for developed countries to offset their emissions by investing in sustainable development projects. Since its inception, the CDM has registered 7,800 projects across 107 countries and verified 1.5 gigatonnes of emissions reductions more than the annual emissions of the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa combined.

But CDM prices dropped to just cents per tonne around the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Since then, many CDM project developers have been looking to sell their stranded Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) on the voluntary carbon market. The significant drop in CDM prices presents an opportunity for more individuals to voluntarily offset their emissions, Figueres argued. Individuals accounted for 0.5% of voluntary offset purchases in 2013, according to Ecosystem Marketplace State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report.

“CERs will never be as cheap, she said. “They will go up in price.

By encouraging individuals to voluntarily offset at more affordable prices, their comfort with the overall concept of offsetting can be accelerated. And this is the moment to do so because greater engagement with carbon markets down to the individual level is crucial, she said. “We actually have a huge psychological barrier to get to the concept of climate neutrality” if individuals are not encouraged to think about it on a personal scale, she said.

Working from the ground up

Emerging carbon markets such as California’s cap-and-trade system have taken the cue from the CDM market and implemented minimum allowance prices to mitigate the risk of significant price drops. But the question of demand remains an important one for any market-based mechanism emerging from the UNFCCC process.

“I think from a very simple lesson learned perspective from the CDM: If there’s no demand, it doesn’t matter how much supply you have, you just don’t have a market, hence prices fall,” Figueres said. “So I think certainly developing countries have been very much on the thought of, well first let’s see what the collectivity of mitigation targets, contributions, commitments – whatever noun you want to put to it – are going to be, and then let’s figure out how we’re going to get there.”

However, Figueres was asked how to respond to businesses impatient for the emergence of policy signals about potential future markets from these negotiations.

“I guess I would turn that around and say, well, but there is nothing there that says markets are not going to be there,” Figueres answered.

Countries such as China and South Africa are already developing carbon pricing mechanisms even without an international agreement in place. Eight jurisdictions in China are piloting emissions trading systems in anticipation of a national market emerging in 2016, and South Africa is also expected to implement a carbon tax that year.

As for the expected Paris climate agreement, the bottom-up approach means that countries will likely have considerable flexibility in applying market mechanisms, Figueres said.

“I can’t imagine it would be prescriptive,” she said. “Having said that, the more that you have linking of systems, whether they be in this case the plethora of markets that are still underway and more mushrooming up, the more that they link with each other and the more that they standardize with each other, the more efficient the system is.”

With hundreds of different languages spoken at COP 20, INDCs are now part of the common vocabulary. But the concept of ground-up contributions is brand new – and much different from the top-down agreement envisioned at the inception of the UNFCCC process.

To Figueres, though, the idea of INDCs provides fresh perspective. Rather than viewing carbon mitigation as a punishment or a burden, countries are now very deliberately merging their climate and development agendas, she said.

“As I see it, that is the strength of [a bottom-up] agreement – that the driving force is going to be the national economy driving force, and you can’t have anything stronger than that,” Figueres said. “So when the driving force comes from the benefit that is going to be derived from those countries, that’s a very, very strong impetus. Then the question is what do we do if the sum total of that is not actually going to sum up to what science tells us we have to do? So that’s where the bottom-up meets the top-down and where the sum total of INDCs over time – not in the first iteration, but over time – will have to actually begin to close the gap.”

8 December 2014 | LIMA | Peru | The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has its share of critics and is in serious need of reform, but can still play a valuable role in supporting national climate policies and facilitating the flow of carbon finance, according to market observers.

With the 20th Conference of Parties (COP 20) climate negotiations here in Lima laying the groundwork for the climate deal expected to be finalized during the Paris COP in 2015, much of the discussion has centered on the potential new market mechanisms that could emerge from the negotiations.

• UPDATE: The new ADP negotiating text was released Monday morning, and is available here.

However, Miles Austin, Executive Director of the Climate Markets and Investment Association, questioned the need for new market mechanisms, given the ones that currently exist, including the CDM and the Joint Implementation.

“We actually have some very well-functioning methods both within the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and external to it,” he said at a COP side event last week. “We have the CDM, which is in need of reform, clearly.”

A Slow Fix

The CDM allows developed (Annex 1) countries to purchase emissions reductions from certain projects established in developing (Annex 2) countries. However, prices for CDM offsets declined to well below the $1 per tonne mark as the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol was coming to an end in 2012.

That year, the high-level panel for the CDM Policy Dialogue made recommendations to stabilize the program, including increasing the ambition of emission reduction targets to create demand and applying the CDM’s standards and methodologies to facilitate the rapid implementation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Additional suggestions included allowing any countries to use the emission reductions generated by the CDM rather than just those with mitigation targets under the Kyoto Protocol and reforming the CDM’s operations and governance to ensure more accountability and efficiency.

The panel also proposed expanding the CDM to test sector-wide approaches that could mitigate emissions at scale, such as reducing emissions from deforestation the CDM excludes all land use, land-use change and forestry activities, with the exception of afforestation and reforestation activities.

Many of these recommendations, though, have not been implemented despite the endorsement of the UNFCCC parties, Austin observed.

Important CDM reforms must happen to transfer these mechanisms into a post-2020 agreement, said Philipp Hauser, Vice-President of Carbon Markets for GDF Suez Energy Latin America. Access to the CDM program and offsets must be opened to any interested parties, regardless of whether they are parties to the Kyoto Protocol or not, he said. The CDM must also be revamped to reduce the cost and bureaucracy of the mechanism since issuance fees the costs of covering the issuing of Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) generated by the project activity of 15 cents per CER might be high for developing countries, Hauser said.

Speaking a New Language

The International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) developed proposed language for a new agreement allowing parties to cooperate in achieving their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). This would include a unified international transfer system that enables parties to transfer portions of their contributions to other parties through carbon instruments of their choice, including carbon offsets via the CDM and REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), said IETA President and CEO Dirk Forrister.

“Having a very robust international transfer system is necessary,” said Philippe Chauveau, head of climate change policy and carbon dioxide sales for Solvay. “It’s really a de-risking thing. You’re not going to have the private sector really involved if you have risk on the asset itself.”

Aside from the risk of manipulation or outright theft of permits from weak registries, the environmental integrity risk is “even more lethal” to society’s belief in the fight against climate change, he said. “That definitely calls for, in our view, unifying the different crediting systems into one singular umbrella, which you can rebrand as new mechanisms,” Chauveau said.

The JI program is similar to the CDM, but is designated for offset projects in developed (Annex 1) countries. JI projects generate offsets called Emission Reduction Units and follow two paths, with Track 1 projects approved and offsets issued by the host countries themselves and Track 2 projects approved by the Joint Implementation Supervisory Committee (JISC) an international body that functions like the CDM Executive Board.

The majority of JI projects are developed under Track 1, which has raised questions about potential threats to the environmental integrity of the program since countries can approve projects and issue offsets with little international supervision. The JI program does need reform, particularly with regard to the potential Track 1 environmental integrity issues, Austin said.

“But we’ve already done a helluva a lot of this work and it seems ridiculous to throw away the capacity we’ve built up, both within the UNFCCC itself, within host country governments, within the governments in the buyer countries and also with the private sector and start again afresh,” he said. “Because if we don’t learn the lessons of the CDM and from JI, then we’re simply going to recreate history.”

A Political Football

The CDM, for example, was used as a political football during COP 17 in Durban, with certain countries threatening to end the CDM, Austin said. Even though they could not achieve the consensus required to disband the program, the fact that they publicly made such threats makes it difficult to convince investment boards at large banks and other capital providers to invest in CDM projects, he said.

Private-sector capital “particularly doesn’t like political risk and this process has been very bad at reducing political risk associated with the mechanisms that it’s created,” he said. “The effect that this has is that you scare away investors that require low-risk return, basically pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, and you attract people more at the venture capital end of the scale who require very high returns because they’re taking on a large amount of risk, be it real or perceived. There’s also less of that money available. So by not addressing the political risk that this forum is creating, it’s reducing the availability of capital to go into emissions reductions. It’s making the capital more expensive, which means that there is less of it.”

The EU is the largest buyer of CERs and has been consistently pushing for reform of the CDM. The Executive Board has resisted some of the requested reforms, which is part of the reason the EU has restricted CDM offsets to least-developed countries excluding advanced developing countries such as China and India. But the EU has also been “somewhat blind” to the fact that this is inherently a multilateral process and it will not always get want it wants, which gets in the way of reaching a balanced agreement, Austin observed.

“That scares off patient, cheap capital, which is fairly abundant, and attracts impatient, high-return capital,” he said. “But at the moment, there is almost no capital available for the CDM because the demand has completely collapsed.”

Using all the Tools in the Toolbox

Carbon pricing is the tool of choice to ensure that the rise in global temperatures is limited to below 2 degrees Celsius in an economically efficient way, Hauser said. GDF Suez does not focus on the currently low price of carbon, but applies an undisclosed internal carbon price, he said.

“We don’t look at the current lack of demand that the market is showing,” Hauser said. “We look at the significant demand for abatement being imposed by our environment. And that leads us to the conclusion that there will be a carbon price in the future and there will be demand for carbon credits and mitigation in the future. That leads us to a carbon price that allows us to do clean energy investments.”

GDF Suez and Solvay were both signatories to the World Bank’s statement on carbon pricing, which was published in June, but gained momentum in September during the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit when 74 countries, 23 subnational jurisdictions and more than 1,000 companies and investors expressed support for a price on carbon.

Smart combinations of existing and emerging policies and tools such as the CDM and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) with multilateral development bank (MDB), GCF or private-sector financing such as the GDF Suez’s 2.5 billion Green Bond issued in May 2014 to finance development of renewable energy projects and its energy efficiency activity gives value to emissions reductions, Hauser said.

“It’s all things we have on the table, but if we combine them, we can do very interesting things,” he said.

The company is already engaging such combinations. It has 16 projects registered under the CDM, 11 of which are supported by NAMAs and seven of which are financed by MDBs. “There’s nothing which prevents you from combining these tools and this is what we think is necessary,” he said.

The NAMAs create the enabling policy needed to finance these projects, which then generate emissions reductions that can be measured, reported and verified using current tools, he said.

“The CDM, which is a very important mechanism to price and monitor emissions reductions, has to be in synergy with national policies,” he said. “They cannot be in conflict.”

“We know very clearly where we want to go,” Hauser continued. “We know the tools that we have and there is a creative path of combining solutions, getting new results and moving toward this global, comprehensive carbon markets that we need for the future.”

10 October 2014 | United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon raised eyebrows last year when he announced that the UN would host a Climate Summit in New York City in September 2014. Some observers questioned what could be accomplished at the Summit that had not been achieved during years of international climate negotiations. A lot, as it turns out.

The People’s Climate March brought more than 400,000 people to the streets ahead of the Summit to demand leaders of countries and corporations alike take ambitious action to address the climate change threat. The gathering was the largest civil demonstration in history on climate change and world leaders still had those voices echoing in their ears when Ki-moon called the Summit to order two days later.

Countries and corporations participating in the Summit responded to Ki-moon’s call for bold pledges with a wide range of commitments on agriculture, cities, energy, financing, industry, resilience and transportation. Perhaps the most ambitious in terms of emissions reductions was the New York Declaration on Forests through which government, business, civil society and indigenous leaders pledged $1 billion to end deforestation by 2030. Norway and the United Kingdom made particularly rich promises for climate finance (see Climate Finance section). If successful, the pledge would prevent the emission of between 4.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (tCO2e) annually.

“I think the Summit was a success,” said Paul Bodner, Director for Environment and Climate Change for the White House’s National Security Council. “We talk about tipping points on climate change. I think it’s possible we’ll look back on this Summit as a different type of tipping point where countries really got serious about action.”

Carbon pricing was also at the top of leaders’ minds in New York. The World Bank counted 74 countries, 23 subnational jurisdictions and more than 1,000 businesses and investors as signatories on its petition supporting carbon pricing. Noticeably absent was the United States, which Bodner attributed to the lack of political consensus at the federal level.

On the opposite side of the world, New Zealand’s National Party maintained control of the parliament after a general election seen aspivotal for the country’s emissions trading system (ETS). In June, the Green Party pledged to abandon the “failed” ETS in favor of a tax of $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent on emissions for all sectors, except agriculture, if it prevailed in the election.

The opposing Labor Party promised to strengthen demand for domestic offsets through rule changes during a review of the ETS in 2015, but he National Party has no plans to make changes to the system. However, New Zealand Unit prices are still expected to rise since compliance entities will lose access to inexpensive international Emission Reduction Units next year.

More news from the voluntary carbon marketplace is summarized below, so keep reading!

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The Editors

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VOLUNTARY CARBON Walking the Walk In what Ki-moon called “walking the walk,” the UN maintained its commitment to keeping its system carbon neutral by minimizing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the Summit. The UN purchased over 18,000 tonnes of Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) to offset the emissions of participants’ air travel and make the event carbon neutral. Read more here Mickey Mouse to the rescue The Walt Disney Company is one of the largest purchasers of offsets in the voluntary carbon markets, retiring 457,882 tCO2e in 2013 and 433,677 tCO2e in 2012, according to company data. Its latest project supported the replanting of 234,000 spruces along the Missionary Ridge in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest through the National Forest Foundation. Intervention was necessary since the area showed no signs of regrowth after a 2002 fire. The 250-acre project area is expected to sequester about 54,000 tCO2e over the next 100 years, according to project documents filed with the American Carbon Registry. Read more here Riding the rails The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) is making a profit by selling CERs under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. However, income from international offset sales has waned as prices dropped from 20 euros per tonne to under a euro per tonne, said K K Saberwal, DMRC Director of Finance. “The West’s own attempts to reduce carbon footprints has impacted the cost of CERs.” The DMRC generates offsets through a regenerative braking system and its Modal Shift project, which accounts for the difference between train travel and more polluting transportation options. The Metro system handles 250,000 riders daily and generates more than 630,000 tCO2e offsets annually, according to DMRC’s blog. Read more here More on Modal Shift methodology Trees for you and me A new initiative from Code REDD, Stand for Trees, is attempting to channel the public’s enthusiasm from the UN Climate Summit into real GHG reductions utilizing avoided deforestation offsets. The campaign will facilitate sales of forest offsets to the general public in half tonne increments through a new mobile web platform. “People are what motivate the private sector and the public sector decision making, so we feel it’s essential to engage the general population in forest conservation and helping them to understand the role of forests in climate regulation, said Kate Dillon, Director of Membership Development at Code REDD. Individuals represented less than 1% of demand for forest-based offsets in 2012, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s State of the Forest Carbon Markets 2013. Read more here COMPLIANCE CARBON Mock trials for carbon South Korea is set to launch its ETS on January 1, so the Korean Exchange (KRX) began testing the system last month. During the first phase, KRX will coordinate infrastructure between itself, the country’s GHG management system and settlement banks as well as educate corporations on the trading process. The second phase will begin October 27 with mock trading for compliance entities. South Korea has voluntarily committed to reduce its GHG emissions 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020. Officials expect allowances in South Korea’s program to trade around $20/tCO2e, but some analysts say the price could reach nearly $100/tCO2e. Read more here Chile reception for CO2 Chile has officially adopted a carbon tax, making it the first South American country to price CO2 emissions. The $5 per tCO2e tax will focus on electricity generators larger than 50 megawatts (MW). Chile has a voluntary target of cutting GHG emissions 20% from 2007 levels by 2020. The carbon tax is scheduled to begin in 2018 and is expected to raise $160 million in revenue as part of a broader tax reform bill. Chile’s program does not include provisions for the use of offsets, unlike similar taxes in Mexico and South Africa. Read more here Filling their dance card California and Quebec are courting others to join their cap-and-trade program. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said his staff has been in discussions with regulators in Ontario and New England states while California officials continue talks with fellowPacific Coast Collaborative members Washington and Oregon. Couillard singled out Vermont as particularly interested in partnership, but the state is currently a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) with eight other Northeastern states. “Vermont is not considering leaving RGGI – rather we are looking to strengthen RGGI even further by exploring the possibilities to integrate our market with others, said Justin Johnson, Deputy Secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources. Read more here Double, but still trouble The Climate Action Reserve (CAR) expects offset issuance will more than double from 40 million tCO2e in 2014 to over 80 million tCO2e in 2017 over half of which will come from project types eligible for California’s compliance program. However, CAR issuances would still fall short of fulfilling demand for offsets for California’s program if covered entities maximized the 8% limit they can use toward their compliance obligations because not all protocols are allowed into the program. Currently, only offsets generated under five protocols forest, urban forestry, livestock, U.S. Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS) and mine methane are eligible, with rice cultivation possibly added to the mix later this year. Read more here Always be prepared Chinese companies are preparing for a domestic carbon market scheduled to begin in 2016. Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer headquartered in Taiwan, has established its own carbon trading business, Shenzhen Fox-Energy Technology. The company has already benefited from investments in CO2 reduction technologies that allowed it to sell part of its allowance allocation in the Shenzhen pilot carbon market in addition to saving on electricity expenses. Once China establishes a national price on carbon, other markets will follow, according to leaders at the recent Summit. China could regulate 3-4 billion tCO2e by 2020 under its planned ETS, which would make it the largest carbon market in the world, according to officials. Read more on Foxconn’s activities Read more about China’s influence Gas in the power grid Genalta Power has become the first company in Alberta to earn carbon offsets for converting waste gas that would otherwise be flared into electricity. The 4-MW Cadotte Peace River project generated more than 8,000 tCO2e in 2013 and will result in 240,000 tCO2e of reductions over its lifetime to be sold to the gas provider Baytex Energy. The project was developed under Alberta Environment’s waste heat recovery protocol in partnership with Blue Source Canada, with verification by Alberta-based Stantec. Read more here CARBON FINANCE No empty promise The New York Declaration on Forest commits governments, multinational corporations, civil society and indigenous peoples to cut forest loss in half by 2020 and completely end it by 2030. The commitment comes backed with a promised down payment of $1 billion in economic incentives for countries to reduce forest loss. Norway has pledged up to $300 million to Peru and $150 million to Liberia to support their forest preservation efforts, bringing Norway’s total support for climate and forests initiatives to about $3 billion through 2020. The United Kingdom pledged $235 million split between two programs designed to jump start sustainable land-use programs across the developing world. Read more here The perils of peace The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the second largest forested area in the world, and the usual threats to forests logging and agricultural expansion have historically been muted by the civil war that has plagued the country since the mid-1990s. However, the DRC’s increasing political stability could result in the forests falling under threat from development, so a new effort to protect the home of endangered species such as the bonobo  the great ape that is the closest living relative to humans is now underway. The government is launching a pay-for-performance avoided deforestation program seeking $50 million a year from the private sector, but the program will first need a $20 million boost from philanthropic donors. Read more here STANDARDS AND METHODOLOGIES Just a little tweak The CAR will adapt its ODS protocol for use with ODSs sourced in Mexico and destroyed in Mexican facilities. The organization has invited stakeholders to form a working group this month to develop the modified protocol, which is expected to be complete by April 2015. ODSs have a high global warming potential and offsets are generated from their destruction in cases where they would have otherwise been vented to the atmosphere. Read more here SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY On different latitudes A New York Times op-ed by Yale atmospheric chemistry professor Nadine Unger caused a stir last month when it argued that “large-scale increases in forest cover can actually make global warming worse” and warned against UN funding for forestry. Unger’s research found that increasing forest cover at high latitudes darkens the color of the Earth’s surface and absorbs more sunlight. But scientists responding to the op-ed pointed out that REDD funding is directed specifically to tropical (low-latitude) forests, where the clouds that trees create lighten Earth’s surface color. Unger also stated that the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released naturally by trees mix with fossil fuel emissions to produce GHGs. Critics responded that Unger’s own research shows that VOCs have anywhere from a cooling to a warming effect, while deforestation is clearly connected to an increase in GHGs. New York Times op-ed Scientists response Actions have consequences Scientists have made an uncharacteristically strong connection between Australia’s 2013 heat wave and human-related GHG emissions. Five independent researchers using different methods concluded that last year’s temperatures could not have occurred without human intervention.“When we look at the heat across the whole of Australia and the whole 12 months of 2013, we can say that this was virtually impossible without climate change, said David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne. The ground-breaking finding came too late to preserve Australia’s carbon pricing program designed to reduce the country’s GHG emissions which federal legislators voted to repeal in July. Read more on the heat wave Read more about the carbon tax repeal AIME Program Senior Associate Forest Trends Based in Washington, D.C., the Senior Associate will lead all administrative functions of the Accelerating Inclusion and Mitigating Emissions (AIME) grant and support the Manager and Chief of Party of the AIME program. Eligible applicants should have demonstrated experience with the rules and regulations associated with the use of US federal funds. Ideal candidates will have previous experience with US Agency for International Development grants. Fluency in English and Spanish is required, working knowledge of Portuguese is preferred. More information here Asia Program Manager Center for Clean Air Policy Based in Bangkok, Thailand, the Asia Program Manager will serve as a consultant and contribute to the Mitigation Action Implementation Network project focused on helping developing countries create Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions to reduce GHGs and promote sustainable development. Successful candidates should have eight years of climate change mitigation or environmental policy experience with government, international or a regional development institution in a position of responsibility in at least one of the target countries. Fluency in English is required and fluency in Thai is preferred. More information here Manager, Corporate Program Ceres Based in Boston, Massachusetts, the Manager will organize and lead ongoing dialogues and develop advocacy positions focused on companies within several sectors, such as financial services, technology and consumer products. Eligible candidates should have five years or more of direct experience working on sustainability and corporate responsibility issues in the corporate, investor or non-profit sectors. Preferred candidates will have experience in North America with knowledge of the broader international context of sustainability. More information here Program Assistant – Natural Resources Defense Council Based in Washington, D.C., the Program Assistant will provide administrative and research support for both the China Program and the Energy and Transportation Program. The position will require flexible hours given the coordination challenges that the time difference with Beijing-based China Program team presents. Previous administrative and research experience highly desired. A Bachelor’s degree and proficiency in Mandarin is required. More information here Operation Associate, Shipping Efficiency Carbon War Room Based in Oxford, United Kingdom, the Operations Associate will be responsible for the day to-day coordination of the shippingefficiency.org website and conduct research for the Operation team. Ideal candidates will have a Master’s degree in environmental science, energy, economics, business or other related field. More information here Associate Outreach Director, Pricing Carbon Initiative U.S. Climate Plan Based in Washington, D.C., the Associate Outreach Director will help coordinate the “Price Pollution, Cut Carbon: A National Dialogue to Address Climate Change event on November 14-16. This is a two-month position with the potential for longer-term employment as funding allows. Applicants should have proven competency in managing, coordinating, and overseeing staff and volunteers. Experience with the NationBuilder community development software, communications expertise and web design proficiency is preferred. More information here ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACEEcosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected].