Tag: Article Opinion

28 October 2013 | The American Tea Party hates Obamacare. They hate it with a visceral passion because it’s a government program that may – just may – succeed where the private sector failed. Such a success would invalidate basic Tea Party tenets, so they fight it with everything they have: a few rational points and a barrage of lies, half-truths, and innuendo.

Sadly, the tactic worked. Instead of a rational debate on national healthcare, we have a cacophony of non-points and negations.

Some of the same people also hate climate science, and for the same reason: if the science is right, then their premises are wrong, and that can’t be. So they bring out the lies, the half-truths, and the innuendo – again polluting public discourse.

But the ideological right doesn’t have a monopoly on this brand of intellectual pollution. Some of our friends in the environmental community have applied this same tactic to their own bogeyman: a new wave of tools to finance forest protection called “REDD+”.

The acronym stands for “reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation”, and it describes a set of practices that includes the use of private carbon offset purchases and government-to-government payments earned by people – and policies – that save the world’s critical forest areas.

REDD+ has emerged as a powerful tool for financing forest conservation, and forestry-based carbon offset purchases alone have financed the protection of over 26 million hectares in developing countries, according to data that we’ll be releasing in our next State of Forest Carbon Markets report. That’s larger than the entire forested area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the total land area of Ecuador.

Along the way, programs using REDD finance have put tens of thousands of indigenous people to work and preserved the habitat of 139 endangered species. Results like these have earned it the backing of indigenous people from Brazil to Kenya, the support of green-minded companies like Disney and Microsoft, and the sponsorship of lawmakers from Mexico to Indonesia. Well-regarded international NGOs from Conservation International to The Nature Conservancy not only employ these tools to fund their massive conservation solutions, but spearheaded their creation more than 30 years ago.

Yet certain ideologues hate REDD, and they hate it with the same visceral passion that the Tea Party hates Obamacare. They hate it because they think the profit motive got us into this climate mess, and there’s no room in their worldview for a market-based mechanism that succeeds where philanthropy and traditional policies have failed.

Rather than subject their views to the pros and cons of rational debate, however, they’ve unleashed their own barrage of lies, half-truths, and innuendo; and like the Tea Party barrage, it’s worked.

Even the generally reliable Atlantic Monthly took the bait, and the result is a piece entitled “The Forest Mafia: How Scammers Steal Millions Through Carbon Markets“. It harvests a particularly cartoonish anti-REDD meme from an entertaining but sloppy segment that the Australian version of 60 Minutes produced last year.

The piece tells the story of David Nilsson, a serial swindler who likes to talk big and dress like Crocodile Dundee. A few years ago, he pretended to be a forest carbon project developer, and he tried to swindle some indigenous people in Peru.

His goofy plans, however, didn’t resemble any legitimate attempt at forest carbon mitigation, and most of the indigenous people he targeted as partners wouldn’t sign with him. The contracts he did sign were declared invalid, and he was roundly ignored by everyone who knew anything about conservation-based climate solutions. He has also been rightly barred from ever entering Peru, according to media reports.

60 Minutes rightly identified him as a charlatan, but they failed to differentiate him from the legitimate (i.e, boring) conservation project developers who really are using these financing tools to save endangered rainforest. Then (perhaps because there’s no glory in “exposing” an irrelevant wannabe), 60 Minutes cast him as the Bond Villain of the carbon markets: the archetypal “carbon cowboy” who is too colorful to resist, too easy to lampoon, and too much of a clown to be taken seriously. Al Jezeera picked up the meme as well, and now the Atlantic has taken the bait.

In fact, The Atlantic takes it a step further. Not only do they cast Nilsson in his familiar role as the cartoonish heavy, but they cobble together bits of a half-dozen other stories from one, two, and even three years ago – nearly all of which are outdated, many of which are irrelevant, and some of which were recognized by credible actors as wrong the day they came out. (The gist of the piece is that nasty practices like phishing and tax-dodging exist, and someone will find a way to apply them to REDD, so REDD is bad.)

The Atlantic rightly pillories Nilsson’s revolting attempts to swindle indigenous people, but it also implies that these practices take place in legitimate REDD projects. In so doing, it ignores the fact that conservation projects only work if indigenous people are on board. That, in fact, is a pillar of REDD finance and part of its beauty: it rewards indigenous people for acting as guardians of the rainforest, because it compensates them for being providers of an ecosystem service. While logging and mining extract value from the forest, conservation finance helps indigenous people keep the value there, and that means it requires their active participation. That means it works best if you treat them as equal partners rather than as museum pieces.

Legitimate project developers have always worked with indigenous people as equal partners, and the new generation of project developers are indigenous leaders themselves – like Chief Almir Surui (Disclosure: I’m helping him on his autobiography). He spent the last six years building a privately-financed conservation project by and for his own community. REDD made his project possible, and REDD itself was made possible by existing carbon standards.

Standard-setting, by the way, is another pillar of REDD finance, but the Atlantic makes only passing reference to it – and when it does, it gets it wrong, referring to the Verified Carbon Standard as the “Voluntary Carbon Standard” – a moniker that VCS abandoned two years ago.

By ignoring its sophistication, the story is able to characterize REDD as a well-intentioned device that was created by eggheads but then hijacked by scoundrels like Nilsson. In reality, the Nilssons of the world are frozen out of REDD, largely because the eggheads who created VCS and other standards knew what they were doing. But the eggheads don’t blunder around the forest dressed like Crocodile Dundee, so they don’t make good television, and they don’t get covered by 60 Minutes.

Anyone who has worked in media knows what’s happening here: a fun read needs a compelling villain, and Nilsson comes prepackaged. He’s the perfect foil for a grandstanding journalist trying to cast himself or a favorite “activist” in the role of hero.

If a journalist wants to cast the people he’s writing about as heroes and villains, he should at least make sure the characters are relevant to the larger issues he’s trying to explore. Why pick out a clown like Nilsson when scores of interesting and relevant climate heroes are doing private conservation right?

Almir is a “certified” hero, and he also dresses colorfully (Cowboys and Indios, anyone?), but there are scores of others. American project developer Mike Korchinsky and his Kenyan partner, Chief Pascal Kizaka, are using REDD to protect 500,000 acres of endangered forest in the Kasigau District in Kenya, while a woman named Leslie Durschinger is working with Buddhist Monks and subsistence farmers in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia, to save forest there. Both of these are fascinating (and colorful) stories that illustrate how REDD really works. Both projects broke new ground – both technically and socially – in project development, and both have been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

The National Geographic of Canada did actually dive into the weeds of a project there in a way that was entertaining and informative, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. Other coverage of the same project has been muddled at best. Critiques of REDD are certainly needed if the mechanism is going to deliver real benefits, but those critiques need to be accurate.

The one good thing you can say about mainstream treatments of this topic is that they usually do touch on the critical challenges that REDD projects face. But then they they almost always ignore the real ways these challenges are being met.

Let’s take just one: tenure, which is generally phrased as being about who owns the land. This is another pillar of REDD, because if indigenous people don’t have rights to their land, they can’t reap the benefits of REDD. Lack of clear tenure has hurt many indigenous people when loggers and others come to take their resources.

Let’s now look at how Chief Almir dealt with it. Before starting his project, he asked Forest Trends (which publishes Ecosystem Marketplace) to see if there was a way to straighten out the tenure issue. Forest Trends commissioned the law firm of Trench, Rossi and Watanabe (an associated firm of Baker & McKenzie) to determine if the Surui actually owned the rights to carbon in the trees on their territory. They found that, yes, indigenous people do own the rights to income generated by carbon sequestration, and Chief Almir then leveraged this opinion into support for his project. It was a deft political maneuver, and now other indigenous groups are building on that, and similar dynamics are playing out across the globe.

REDD, in other words, is being used to help indigenous people resolve the tenure issue that loggers and others have worked so hard to obfuscate, which means REDD is helping people make progress on a thorny issue that decades of more traditional “activism” have failed to address, yet the Atlantic ignores this fact – just as it ignores almost anything that’s happened in real-world REDD in the last three years.

Take, for example, the REDD Offsets Working Group (ROW), a scientific body that just wrapped up years of open consultations among indigenous leaders, environmentalists, and governments. The ROW codified a set of rigorous procedures for making sure REDD works both for the environment and the indigenous people who use it, and it published a detailed backgrounder and policy brief in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that addresses all the issues that the Atlantic implies aren’t being dealt with.

That’s the real REDD: a concrete set of rules and procedures agreed on through an open process among diverse stakeholders and delivering tangible results – yet it’s been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

Instead of trying to first understand and the explain and question real-world REDD, mainstream publications have been devoting massive amounts of coverage to swindlers pushing imaginary projects, and then daring to quote people who dismiss real carbon quantification processes as “imaginary” (as The Atlantic did) or unworkable (as Harper’s did three years ago in a cover story called “Conning the Climate: Inside the Carbon-Trading Shell Game“).

The Harper’s piece wasn’t as bad as the recent Atlantic piece, but it did commit the sin of sloth. The author brought the reader on a colorful journey into the rainforest, laid out the concepts, and then abruptly concluded that it was all so complicated that it will never work.

Ask Chief Almir how “imaginary” or unworkable the process is.

Members of the Paiter-Surui measuring trees to determine their carbon content.

In order to earn their carbon offsets, the Surui had to first determine which parts of their forest were in danger, and then they had to prove that only finance from the sale of offsets would enable them to save it. After that, they had to develop a plan for saving it, then get that plan approved by a series of auditors and review panels, then implement a logging moratorium, then enforce that moratorium, and finally prove that they did everything they said they were going to do.

As a first step, they brought in economists from a Brazilian organization called IDESAM to analyze logging patterns and the economic needs of indigenous people in the region. The economists looked at patterns of land-use across the region and developed new analytic tools and methodologies using the detailed rules of VCS. Those rules, in turn, follow principles that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed by drawing on decades of research by thousands of independent scientists into what causes deforestation, how to measure the amount of carbon captured in trees, how to determine what is and isn’t “endangered”, and how to credit people for positive interventions.

After all this, the economists concluded that, of the 248,147 hectares that comprised the Surui territory, roughly 13,000 hectares would have to be converted to farmland over the next 30 years if the people were to survive. Thus the Surui will only receive carbon offsets for protecting a small proportion of their territory – the portion they would have had to harvest to survive. It’s this type of nuance that underscores another of the great misconceptions on REDD: for, while clowns like Nilsson (and reporters who fail to do their homework) assume that REDD is a lucrative endeavor, the fact is that while it can be a money-maker, it’s nowhere near as lucrative as logging or farming. As Chief Almir says, “It will always be easier to chop down the forest than to preserve it.”

And preservation is an active endeavor. Chief Almir and his people spent the long and tedious VCS assessment period patrolling the territory to keep out illegal loggers. He also threatened to prosecute even members of his own people who colluded with loggers, and the loggers responded with a bounty on his head. At least one local tried to earn that bounty, so the federal government assigned members of the elite Força Nacional to give him 24/7 protection.

Despite these challenges and the best efforts of opponents to discredit him and the financing mechanism – including many quoted in the Atlantic article – Almir persevered. In August, Brazilian cosmetics giant Natura Cosméticos stepped up to buy the first tranche of Surui Carbon Credits, and now scores of other indigenous people are developing projects of their own.

This is all part of a rigorous process that’s evolved over decades – the same process that the Atlantic dismisses as “imaginary” and Harper’s dismissed as too complicated to work.

Well, yes – it is complicated, but it’s also working, and it’s working incredibly well. What’s not working is the media that’s charged with informing the public – largely because a contingent of ideologically-driven organizations are hell-bent on making sure that non-traditional conservation finance never gets a fair hearing, and because reporters aren’t doing their homework.

If they did actually open their books, they’d find plenty of material from organizations like Forest Trends, Conservation International, and others.

Mindful of the knowledge gap, WWF recently teamed up with the University of California at San Diego to launch a course in terrestrial carbon accounting. I took the course this summer, and can tell you that baselines are far from “imaginary”. They’re just not as much fun to write about as characters like Nilsson are.

The failure of media to even try to understand these new tools for conservation finance is a truly global tragedy, because we stand at a critical juncture when both forests and the people who depend on their services – that’s all of us, by the way – are in a peculiar race for survival. On one hand, trees are mopping up the carbon that we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, and because there is more carbon to mop up, they’re getting fatter at a faster rate than they did before. Trees we save today, in other words, could end up sequestering more carbon than they have in the past, making conservation an even more valuable tool than it’s been to date.

But the research is mixed on how forests will respond to climate change. Intact forests may continue to thrive – or they may succumb to droughts and pestilence. That’s already happening in the Pacific Northwest, where the northern pine beetle is thriving in the longer summers, and trees are dying as a result.

REDD in one of many tools that we can use to slow climate change, but it has its limitations, and it needs to be examined critically if it’s to deliver meaningful results. That’s why we need the media to let us know if REDD is working or if it isn’t – but they can’t do that if they’re so preoccupied with cowboys and cartoons that they neglect their calculus. If they’re going to report on REDD, they need to first invest a bit of time into learning what it is. VCS is REDD. ROW is REDD. Nilsson is not REDD.

A combination of ideological campaigning and journalistic laziness got us into the climate mess. A similar campaign is conspiring to keep us from exploring very real and scalable solutions to that mess, and journalistic laziness is again enabling that campaign. By swallowing the disinformation fed to them and not learning before they lecture, outlets like the Atlantic could end up doing more damage to forests and forest communities than all the carbon cowboys combined.

24 October 2013 | Some problems are complex. Others are simple. And often the twain converge.

Take, for example, the complex challenge of climate change. It’s caused by almost everything we do. It impacts us in ways that are difficult to fathom. And fixing it will require us to completely update the global energy sector.

Contrast this with the fairly straightforward problem of indoor air pollution. This one is caused by traditional stoves that burn dirty fuels inefficiently. It kills four million people every year. And fixing it will require us to replace about 1 billion traditional stoves with cleaner varieties.

Simple? Yes — but not easy, because those billion stoves are scattered all across the world, and replacing them also requires marketing, education and training. Aid agencies, nonprofits and commercial manufacturers have spent decades building up successful regional programs, but many are finding it difficult to get that extra bit of finance that can turn medium-sized efforts into larger ones and larger ones into massive ones.

Increasingly our research shows that the critical, final piece of finance is coming from a surprising source.

Stoves and fire pits, it turns out, pump hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That makes them part of the climate-change problem, which means we all have an interest in replacing them.

Over the years, standard-setting organizations like the Gold Standard and the Clean Development Mechanism have made it possible to generate carbon offsets by helping distribute clean cookstoves. In some cases, the credits provide deep discounts for poor people and aid agencies, but most of the money goes towards manufacturing, marketing, distribution and testing of stoves and fuels — activities that support a sustainable market that generates reductions many times higher than the number of credits generated.

Last year, carbon markets funneled more than $167 million into clean cookstove distribution, according to our most recent report produced in partnership with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and unveiled by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week in New York. That’s a huge proportion of the $246 million that carbon revenues have contributed to the stove sector over time.

The Funding Mosaic: Carbon Finance Is One Piece Of The Puzzle

The Alliance

The Alliance itself has more than 800 partners around the world, and its aim is to get these efficient stoves into 100 million households by 2020. Our research shows that Alliance partners distributed 8.2 million stoves in 2012 — up from 3.6 million the year before — and that carbon finance helped pay for about half of them.

That’s especially good news for women — because it not only means better health, but less time spent gathering wood and more time spent doing other things that improve their lives. Indeed, the report found that 172 of the Alliance partners had made it a priority to empower women.

Armed with this understanding, social entrepreneurs can now tap into carbon finance to attack other seemingly intractable social challenges — like women’s rights, indigenous empowerment and subsistence farming.

To promote this understanding, the Skoll Foundation supports Forest Trends, the environmental nonprofit that publishes Ecosystem Marketplace and pilots efforts like the Surui Carbon Project in Brazil. Forest Trends was created by foresters to explore the interplay between economy and ecology, and it’s been invited to participate in the Social Entrepreneurs Challenge. Launched on September 30 by the Skoll Foundation and Huffington Post, this is the largest CrowdRise campaign ever, involving scores of social entrepreneurs from around the world. You can participate by shouting us out on Huffington Post or sponsoring us on CrowdRise, where we aim is to raise $45,000 by November 22.

As in cookstoves, a little often goes a long way. If enough of us meet our goals, Skoll will step up with matching funds that we’ll use to expand our coverage into these fascinating and important mechanisms.

Donate Here

Read about cookstoves in Spanish here.

Clean Cookstoves: How They Slash Carbon Emissions

Hillary Rodham Clinton: How The Global Alliance Works

Additional resources

Voluntary REDD projects are actively protecting more than 14 million hectares of endangered forest, but most multilateral funding looks destined for countries with no history of REDD and no local expertise. This makes sense from a capacity-building perspective, but is it the right approach?

NOTE: This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post, where Forest Trends is participating in the Social Entrepreneurs’ challenge. You can view the original here. If you’d like to see more of this sort of content, feel free to support us in the challenge here.

23 October 2013 |For three years now, the people of Kenya’s Kasigau Corridor have been protecting 500,000 acres of endangered dryland forest to prevent 54 million tons of carbon dioxide from soaring into the atmosphere. That’s good for all of us, and as a reward they hope to earn REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) carbon offsets for keeping greenhouse gasses locked in trees.

Our research shows they’re far from alone. Voluntary carbon projects like these are actively protecting more than 14 million hectares of endangered forests around the world (see “Leveraging the Landscape: State of the Forest Carbon Market“) — a figure that has certainly grown in the past year.

Not only are these private-sector actors protecting millions of hectares of endangered forest, but they are doing so in a way that creates rigorous methods for measuring the amount of carbon captured in forests — methods that others can learn from and implement themselves.

And that, in fact, is exactly what’s happening, with state and regional governments around the world harvesting lessons learned in the voluntary carbon markets to develop their own home-grown programs (a trend we identified in “Bringing it Home: Taking Stock of Government Engagement with the Voluntary Carbon Market“).

So, why are these green-minded entrepreneurs risking hundreds of millions of dollars to save the forest and develop new methods that the rest of us can use? Partly because governments told them to — as Conservation International (CI) highlighted in a September white paper called “REDD+ Market: Sending Out an SOS.”

Drawing on research from our Ecosystem Marketplace initiative and elsewhere, CI recounts in clear language how governments signaled green-minded entrepreneurs that they’d be rewarded for taking action on climate change by saving endangered forest, but how these same governments are now leaving some of the most productive projects in limbo.

The Pact
The paper shows how the private sector began stepping up as early as 2007, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) formally recognized the idea of creating a REDD mechanism. It explains how entrepreneurs ramped up their activities after the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and federal cap and trade legislation in the US promised support for REDD+, which meant that entrepreneurs who developed REDD projects would be able to sell their offsets into government programs iwhen those programs materialized. It also offers this summary of results so far, based just a handful of projects:

What REDD Has Wrought

Beyond the three big projects highlighted above, the paper points to a review of 41 projects that created thousands of jobs, built schools, and funded scholarships. It points, in other words, to a mechanism that is working — and is delivering results with limited resources from voluntary buyers.

And now governments are finally stepping up, with more than $30 billion in “fast-start” financing (as tracked by the World Resources Institute, our own REDDX initiative, and others) for projects that get rolling early. Almost none of that funding, however, is flowing to projects that are already rolling and have already delivered results. Instead, it’s going mostly to new pilots that have little transparency and no track record whatsoever.

It’s a problem we’ve covered extensively in the past, and one that CI illustrates with this chart, showing where World Bank money being deployed under the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) is going.

The Private-Public Disconnect

To be fair, the FCPF and other such funds weren’t created to support small, individual pilots, but rather to support national-level accounting mechanisms. That’s well and good, but those small, individual projects add up to a lot of forest already saved and scores of important lessons already learned, and countries that have nurtured them are in danger of being short-changed.

Voluntary carbon projects have already earned the trust of US companies like Microsoft and Disney and developing country companies like Brazil’s Natura Cosmetics, which are more than willing to voluntarily buy REDD offsets that conform to standards that they know and trust.

But these voluntary buyers are the minority, and private-sector funding won’t begin to flow on the kind of scale needed to slow climate change until governments impose global caps on greenhouse gas emissions, enacting policies that reward conservation with an adequate price on carbon. Until that happens, governments that choose to support REDD need to make sure that they are not leaving the good projects already underway in the lurch. Otherwise, not only will we lose the progress made to date, but we will dampen the enthusiasm of green entrepreneurs to take on risk to do the right thing.

How Can You Keep the Info Flowing?
This post is built on research generated by Forest Trends, a nonprofit environmental organization founded by foresters and economists to explore the interplay between economy and ecology. It’s part of our participation in the Social Entrepreneurs Challenge, which was launched on September 30 by the Skoll Foundation and Huffington Post. It’s a CrowdRise campaign designed to raise awareness and funding for social entrepreneurs, and we can certainly use it.

If you like our posts, be sure to shout us out on Huffington Post or to share us with your friends. If you really like them, be sure to help us out with a small donation here.

Thanks!

Additional resources

Voluntary REDD projects are actively protecting more than 14 million hectares of endangered forest, but most multilateral funding looks destined for countries with no history of REDD and no local expertise. This makes sense from a capacity-building perspective, but is it the right approach?

NOTE: This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post, where Forest Trends is participating in the Social Entrepreneurs’ challenge. You can view the original here. If you’d like to see more of this sort of content, feel free to support us in the challenge here.

23 October 2013 |For three years now, the people of Kenya’s Kasigau Corridor have been protecting 500,000 acres of endangered dryland forest to prevent 54 million tons of carbon dioxide from soaring into the atmosphere. That’s good for all of us, and as a reward they hope to earn REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) carbon offsets for keeping greenhouse gasses locked in trees.

Our research shows they’re far from alone. Voluntary carbon projects like these are actively protecting more than 14 million hectares of endangered forests around the world (see “Leveraging the Landscape: State of the Forest Carbon Market“) — a figure that has certainly grown in the past year.

Not only are these private-sector actors protecting millions of hectares of endangered forest, but they are doing so in a way that creates rigorous methods for measuring the amount of carbon captured in forests — methods that others can learn from and implement themselves.

And that, in fact, is exactly what’s happening, with state and regional governments around the world harvesting lessons learned in the voluntary carbon markets to develop their own home-grown programs (a trend we identified in “Bringing it Home: Taking Stock of Government Engagement with the Voluntary Carbon Market“).

So, why are these green-minded entrepreneurs risking hundreds of millions of dollars to save the forest and develop new methods that the rest of us can use? Partly because governments told them to — as Conservation International (CI) highlighted in a September white paper called “REDD+ Market: Sending Out an SOS.”

Drawing on research from our Ecosystem Marketplace initiative and elsewhere, CI recounts in clear language how governments signaled green-minded entrepreneurs that they’d be rewarded for taking action on climate change by saving endangered forest, but how these same governments are now leaving some of the most productive projects in limbo.

The Pact
The paper shows how the private sector began stepping up as early as 2007, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) formally recognized the idea of creating a REDD mechanism. It explains how entrepreneurs ramped up their activities after the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and federal cap and trade legislation in the US promised support for REDD+, which meant that entrepreneurs who developed REDD projects would be able to sell their offsets into government programs iwhen those programs materialized. It also offers this summary of results so far, based just a handful of projects:

What REDD Has Wrought

Beyond the three big projects highlighted above, the paper points to a review of 41 projects that created thousands of jobs, built schools, and funded scholarships. It points, in other words, to a mechanism that is working — and is delivering results with limited resources from voluntary buyers.

And now governments are finally stepping up, with more than $30 billion in “fast-start” financing (as tracked by the World Resources Institute, our own REDDX initiative, and others) for projects that get rolling early. Almost none of that funding, however, is flowing to projects that are already rolling and have already delivered results. Instead, it’s going mostly to new pilots that have little transparency and no track record whatsoever.

It’s a problem we’ve covered extensively in the past, and one that CI illustrates with this chart, showing where World Bank money being deployed under the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) is going.

The Private-Public Disconnect

To be fair, the FCPF and other such funds weren’t created to support small, individual pilots, but rather to support national-level accounting mechanisms. That’s well and good, but those small, individual projects add up to a lot of forest already saved and scores of important lessons already learned, and countries that have nurtured them are in danger of being short-changed.

Voluntary carbon projects have already earned the trust of US companies like Microsoft and Disney and developing country companies like Brazil’s Natura Cosmetics, which are more than willing to voluntarily buy REDD offsets that conform to standards that they know and trust.

But these voluntary buyers are the minority, and private-sector funding won’t begin to flow on the kind of scale needed to slow climate change until governments impose global caps on greenhouse gas emissions, enacting policies that reward conservation with an adequate price on carbon. Until that happens, governments that choose to support REDD need to make sure that they are not leaving the good projects already underway in the lurch. Otherwise, not only will we lose the progress made to date, but we will dampen the enthusiasm of green entrepreneurs to take on risk to do the right thing.

How Can You Keep the Info Flowing?
This post is built on research generated by Forest Trends, a nonprofit environmental organization founded by foresters and economists to explore the interplay between economy and ecology. It’s part of our participation in the Social Entrepreneurs Challenge, which was launched on September 30 by the Skoll Foundation and Huffington Post. It’s a CrowdRise campaign designed to raise awareness and funding for social entrepreneurs, and we can certainly use it.

If you like our posts, be sure to shout us out on Huffington Post or to share us with your friends. If you really like them, be sure to help us out with a small donation here.

Thanks!

Additional resources

Over the past six weeks, Forest Trends’ REDDX and ODI’s Climate Funds Update have been exploring the state of REDD+ finance with input from Transparency International, the Tropical Forest Group, Ecosystem Marketplace and UNEP Finance Initiative. Here’s how these organizations can work together in the future to shine more light on this critical process.

29 August 2013 | In bringing together the views of a number of initiatives tracking REDD+ finance, this series has highlighted why there isn’t a single aggregate figure for global REDD+ finance flowing. Despite this, we are increasingly able to assess where finance is coming from, how it flows through different channels and funds to recipient countries and eventually to REDD+ projects and activities on the ground. But knowledge remains incomplete and we are still faced with challenges and gaps that make it difficult to make comprehensive and conclusive remarks about the state of REDD+ finance.

The road ahead

Marigold Norman is Program Manager for Forest Trend’s Forest Trade and Finance Program. Her work focuses on tracking public and private funding delivered for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) activities in thirteen REDD+ partner countries. Charlene Watson is a Research Officer at the Overseas Development Institute; her work focuses on the flows, sources and instruments of climate finance at both the national and international level.

Governments have pledged billions of dollars to programs designed to slow climate change by saving endangered rainforests, but the real results to date have come from the private sector and civil society. Here’s a brief look at what policymakers designing tomorrow’s public-sector programs can learn from today’s private-sector projects.

22 August 2013 | Kenya’s Kasigau Corridor Project that Reduces Deforestation and forest Degradation (“REDD”) protects 200,000 hectares of endangered forest between the Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks. The Surui Forest Carbon Project protects 32,000 hectares of endangered forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey REDD+ Project protects 64,000 hectares of endangered forest in the northwest province of the same name. The world’s largest REDD project – the Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – will protect almost 250,000 hectares and dispatch with approximately 175 million tonnes of carbon over its lifetime.

Beyond the fact that each of these endeavors harness carbon markets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by saving endangered rainforest, each of them has been spearheaded by private initiatives working closely with national, state, and local governments, which means each has managed to identify risk mitigation tools – that appeal to both the private and public sectors.

Each, therefore, is ripe with lessons for anyone looking to develop REDD interventions that will make the leap from “project” to “program” – i.e. from private and local, to public and jurisdictional. Admittedly, there are still gaps in information on finance and activities at the project level, but, Ecosystem Marketplace has been tracking private sector projects since 2005, reporting forest carbon data on the Forest Carbon Portal and in Ecosystem Marketplace’s annual State of the Forest Carbon Markets reports designed to explore these lessons and results.

Through focusing tracking on the project level we have found that the private sector was more likely to support projects that reported at least one revenue stream other than carbon offset sales, like sustainably commodity (including Fairtrade-certified) sales revenue or donor government contributions. The presence of additional non-carbon revenues suggests to private sector actors that the project is more likely to be financially viable in the case that carbon markets are not a long-lived source of project financing. Our more recent findings illustrate that private dollars are also “mobile” – with businesses preferring to catalyze new activities in new locations, which is not inherently conducive to large-scale, long-term REDD activities.

Based on these findings, is the profit motive alone too capricious to support and expand REDD efforts? Should the burden of forest conservation instead rest solely with forests’ traditional public sector custodians? In reality and as reported last week by UNEP FI, seasoned stakeholders conclude that both public and private actors must be at the table if the world is to support existing forestry and land use carbon projects (total of $2.2 – $5.4 billion over an unspecified timeframe, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2012 survey data; cut deforestation in half between 2015 and 2020 ($75 – $300 billion according to Resources for the Future estimates); or protect the world’s hectares that are currently under threat ($1 trillion, based on 55.5 million hectares that will be lost between 2010 and 2020, as estimated by WWF, multiplied by average price per hectare paid for REDD offsets in 2011 [$20/ha] based on Ecosystem Marketplace data). Regardless of your metric of choice, the price tag is too high to ignore anyone with insights into how a significant source of finance can be incentivized to act.            

To this end, private project developers that have honed their business models to become market “survivors” provide proof of concept for the idea of internationally-financed conservation forestry. They have an inherent understanding of why the private sector steps in – or backs out of – forest finance, learned over now-decades of direct experience with private sector stakeholders. They also boast first-hand experience with national and regional government approval processes and gaps in capacity – often including a deep understanding of the extent of local governments’ capacity for enforcement.  
 
Many actors already understand the value of lessons gleaned from these private pilot actions, which is why the Verified Carbon Standard and the American Carbon Registry are working with national governments on Jurisdictional Nested REDD (JNR) that ensure existing projects can be absorbed into national accounting programs. It’s why the Norwegian government is even helping to pilot nested programs around the world.

And it’s why Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace and REDD Expenditures Tracking initiatives are tracking payments – both public and private, top-down and bottom-up – to uncover “sweet spots” where emerging government REDD programs have successfully engaged the private sector as investor, implementer, or (in an ideal world) both. Private lessons for the public sphere to increase private investment, therefore, include (but are not limited to):

• Due consideration and recognition of private actors’ early action via public support of credited project-level activities. Indications that governments will support early action REDD projects (via “buyer of last resort” credit purchase guarantees or other purchase programs) would help de-risk new investment or projects in need of re-financing, and could be implemented to reward those already exploring REDD implementation on the ground, in tandem with the development of up-scaled REDD approaches. Such approaches have successfully been taken in other sectors in some countries, as explored in this report.
• Enacting policies that favor “zero-deforestation” or low carbon products/commodities by recognizing products sourced from verified REDD projects, activities or areas.
• Engaging with private actors to explore “carbon-linked” funding mechanisms, like REDD/carbon revenue bonds, developing new types of public-private contract structures to deliver low cost REDD emissions reductions. Such efforts would leverage the early experience of project developers managing relationships with donor governments supporting emerging jurisdictional nested REDD programs.              

Unless policymakers are willing to incorporate more lessons from the companies that are already buying REDD project offsets or from the developers who are creating them, they run the risk of re-creating the Kyoto Protocol’s sub-optimal treatment of forest carbon offsets. The world needs a mechanism that incorporates tested methods that work. And that requires more funding for pilot projects and more efforts to harvest existing projects for insights that can be broadcasted from the boardroom to Bonn.    

Molly Peters-Stanley is the Co-Managing Director of Ecosystem Marketplace. These views are hers alone and do not represent those of Ecosystem Marketplace, ODI, or the Climate Funds Update.

Governments have pledged billions of dollars to programs designed to slow climate change by saving endangered rainforests, but the real results to date have come from the private sector and civil society. Here’s a brief look at what policymakers designing tomorrow’s public-sector programs can learn from today’s private-sector projects.

22 August 2013 | Kenya’s Kasigau Corridor Project that Reduces Deforestation and forest Degradation (“REDD”) protects 200,000 hectares of endangered forest between the Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks. The Surui Forest Carbon Project protects 32,000 hectares of endangered forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey REDD+ Project protects 64,000 hectares of endangered forest in the northwest province of the same name. The world’s largest REDD project – the Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – will protect almost 250,000 hectares and dispatch with approximately 175 million tonnes of carbon over its lifetime.

Beyond the fact that each of these endeavors harness carbon markets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by saving endangered rainforest, each of them has been spearheaded by private initiatives working closely with national, state, and local governments, which means each has managed to identify risk mitigation tools – that appeal to both the private and public sectors.

Each, therefore, is ripe with lessons for anyone looking to develop REDD interventions that will make the leap from “project” to “program” – i.e. from private and local, to public and jurisdictional. Admittedly, there are still gaps in information on finance and activities at the project level, but, Ecosystem Marketplace has been tracking private sector projects since 2005, reporting forest carbon data on the Forest Carbon Portal and in Ecosystem Marketplace’s annual State of the Forest Carbon Markets reports designed to explore these lessons and results.

Through focusing tracking on the project level we have found that the private sector was more likely to support projects that reported at least one revenue stream other than carbon offset sales, like sustainably commodity (including Fairtrade-certified) sales revenue or donor government contributions. The presence of additional non-carbon revenues suggests to private sector actors that the project is more likely to be financially viable in the case that carbon markets are not a long-lived source of project financing. Our more recent findings illustrate that private dollars are also “mobile” – with businesses preferring to catalyze new activities in new locations, which is not inherently conducive to large-scale, long-term REDD activities.

Based on these findings, is the profit motive alone too capricious to support and expand REDD efforts? Should the burden of forest conservation instead rest solely with forests’ traditional public sector custodians? In reality and as reported last week by UNEP FI, seasoned stakeholders conclude that both public and private actors must be at the table if the world is to support existing forestry and land use carbon projects (total of $2.2 – $5.4 billion over an unspecified timeframe, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2012 survey data; cut deforestation in half between 2015 and 2020 ($75 – $300 billion according to Resources for the Future estimates); or protect the world’s hectares that are currently under threat ($1 trillion, based on 55.5 million hectares that will be lost between 2010 and 2020, as estimated by WWF, multiplied by average price per hectare paid for REDD offsets in 2011 [$20/ha] based on Ecosystem Marketplace data). Regardless of your metric of choice, the price tag is too high to ignore anyone with insights into how a significant source of finance can be incentivized to act.            

To this end, private project developers that have honed their business models to become market “survivors” provide proof of concept for the idea of internationally-financed conservation forestry. They have an inherent understanding of why the private sector steps in – or backs out of – forest finance, learned over now-decades of direct experience with private sector stakeholders. They also boast first-hand experience with national and regional government approval processes and gaps in capacity – often including a deep understanding of the extent of local governments’ capacity for enforcement.  
 
Many actors already understand the value of lessons gleaned from these private pilot actions, which is why the Verified Carbon Standard and the American Carbon Registry are working with national governments on Jurisdictional Nested REDD (JNR) that ensure existing projects can be absorbed into national accounting programs. It’s why the Norwegian government is even helping to pilot nested programs around the world.

And it’s why Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace and REDD Expenditures Tracking initiatives are tracking payments – both public and private, top-down and bottom-up – to uncover “sweet spots” where emerging government REDD programs have successfully engaged the private sector as investor, implementer, or (in an ideal world) both. Private lessons for the public sphere to increase private investment, therefore, include (but are not limited to):

• Due consideration and recognition of private actors’ early action via public support of credited project-level activities. Indications that governments will support early action REDD projects (via “buyer of last resort” credit purchase guarantees or other purchase programs) would help de-risk new investment or projects in need of re-financing, and could be implemented to reward those already exploring REDD implementation on the ground, in tandem with the development of up-scaled REDD approaches. Such approaches have successfully been taken in other sectors in some countries, as explored in this report.
• Enacting policies that favor “zero-deforestation” or low carbon products/commodities by recognizing products sourced from verified REDD projects, activities or areas.
• Engaging with private actors to explore “carbon-linked” funding mechanisms, like REDD/carbon revenue bonds, developing new types of public-private contract structures to deliver low cost REDD emissions reductions. Such efforts would leverage the early experience of project developers managing relationships with donor governments supporting emerging jurisdictional nested REDD programs.              

Unless policymakers are willing to incorporate more lessons from the companies that are already buying REDD project offsets or from the developers who are creating them, they run the risk of re-creating the Kyoto Protocol’s sub-optimal treatment of forest carbon offsets. The world needs a mechanism that incorporates tested methods that work. And that requires more funding for pilot projects and more efforts to harvest existing projects for insights that can be broadcasted from the boardroom to Bonn.    

Molly Peters-Stanley is the Co-Managing Director of Ecosystem Marketplace. These views are hers alone and do not represent those of Ecosystem Marketplace, ODI, or the Climate Funds Update.

The EPA is slated to pass regulations on power plants this year under the Clean Air Act, while Senators Boxer and Waxman work to inject a carbon price back on to the federal agenda. Here are a few reflections on the undercurrent of discussion on how tradable mechanisms for climate mitigation might figure into federal GHG regulations down the line.

This piece originally appeared on the EKO-ECO blog moderated jointly by Ecosystem Marketplace and EKO Asset Management Partners. Read the original here.

25 March 2013 | We’ve seen the United States achieve significant emission reductions for the transportation sector through the Clean Air Act, but power plant emissions – representing almost 70% of US emissions – require a unique fix. Last week in Washington, DC, I attended a symposium hosted by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) where panelists explored possibilities for achieving meaningful reductions of power plant emissions under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act – and without hurting the US economy.

Through the Clean Air Act, the US Environmental Protection Agency is slated to finalize New Source Performance Standards for GHG emissions from new power plants this year under Section 111(b), and expected to propose standards for existing power plants under Section 111(d).

What would meaningful reductions at reasonable cost look like under Section 111? Conrad Schneider from the Clean Air Task Force walked through calculations by the Northbridge Group for different levels of GHG reduction targets, invoking the most stringent example – 28% reductions by 2020 compared to 2005 levels – as a strawman argument. Costs to run the program would approximate $23/tCO2e. Schneider said that if phased in properly, increases in natural gas prices could be limited to 1% a year.

David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Council argued that these emission reductions could be achieved at a lower cost than Schneider proposes – thus it really comes down to the model and set of assumptions used.

While I can’t pass judgment on these models per se, what interests the Ecosystem Marketplace Carbon Program of course is how GHG regulations might leverage market mechanisms to make these numbers more favorable for compliance and ultimately for political and industry buy-in.

Because there it is – legislatively elusive yet referenced everywhere these days: President Obama’s State of the Union address call to Congress to pass a “bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change.” What enabling power does this phrase really have? What’s the federal legislative hook that might enable the US to achieve greater emissions reductions at reasonable cost and with legal certainty?

Against all political odds, if and when Congress stops dragging its feet, the US could see passage of a new climate bill – perhaps in the form of a federal carbon tax as promoted by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) through their respective new carbon tax plans. But in the interim, Congress has the potential to provide clarity on how markets could fit into existing Clean Air Act legislation, which Monday’s panelists believe could create a clearer pathway for market-based solutions at a federal level.

Expanding existing EPA regulation:

Within Section 111’s regulation of power plants, there are a couple of grey areas relevant to markets. Kyle Danish – who advises companies from energy and other sectors at Van Ness Feldman – explained these at Monday’s symposium:

1. The EPA has yet to clarify whether compliance activities can include “beyond-the-fence” reductions outside of the power plant. There is no case law yet on compliance options for 111(b). Using industry preferences as the litmus test for legislative outlook, assuming regulations will require some level of GHG emission reduction target, it seems that industry members prefer to have flexibility in how they meet their compliance requirements. As Danish put it, “All companies in the industry place a high priority on having requirements that are at modest cost, provide for some flexibility all other things being equal, and have legal certainty.” Following on this, the business case seems to point in favor of use of a market-based approach that allows some level of flexibility through trading. The aggressiveness of emission reduction targets could in turn vary depending on the level of flexibility provided.
2. There is a lack of legal clarity on how much discretion states would have in determining their own plans in relation to the federal EPA directive. Industry’s receptiveness to GHG regulations varies by state, depending on how much companies rely on coal or natural gas for power generation. Already, many states feature market-based mechanisms – California’s cap-and-trade scheme, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the 35+ US states operating mandatory or voluntary renewable portfolio standards to name just a few. How these would plug into federal legislation is still up for discussion.

What about a fresh climate bill?

Beyond the Clean Air Act, the carbon tax candle is still burning. Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Henry Waxman – historically cap-and-trade proponents – are both incubating carbon tax plans with the intention of restarting the conversation and pushing their plans through Congress.

The quick and dirty:

• Price tag: $20/tCO2e, +5.6% annually for 10 years
• Revenues: $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with 60% rebated to US residents and 40% to incentives for clean energy and research
• Emission reductions: 20% from 2005 levels
• Next steps: hearings this spring in the Environment and Public Works committee, Senate floor vote this summer

The plan (see discussion draft) backed by Sen. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), like Section 111, hones in on power plants.

• Price tag: $15/$25/$35/tCO2e, +2-8% annually
• Revenues: TBD, possibly going toward mitigating energy costs for consumers, reducing Federal deficit, protecting jobs of workers at trade-vulnerable, energy intensive industries, reducing tax liability for individuals and businesses, and/or investing in other carbon mitigation activities
• Emission reductions: TBD
• Next steps: Public comments on draft due April 12

How Boxer and Waxman relate to 111

Going into the Q&A, I asked the panel to provide their frank assessment of the prospects for these new bills compared to working within Section 111 legislation. Dirk Forrister, head of the International Emissions Trading Association, said that based on his conversations with those involved with the new carbon tax plans, “Part of the interest in these new carbon tax plans is to allow discussion on options or proposals that might follow a path like Australia’s, which began as a fixed price that looks like a tax and then shifts into an emissions trading program.”

Forrister noted that a new carbon tax bill would have advantages in terms of providing legal stability (compared to patchwork provisions for markets using Section 111) and some basis for harmonization with carbon markets abroad, but that it’s probably “a long, slow path.”

Van Ness Feldman’s Danish shared two views on the interplay between the EPA moving forward with legislation this year and how that might affect Congressional willingness to act. “On one hand, some people take the position that the EPA moves forward to regulate this area and then Congress can take a pass because they won’t have to act,” he explained.

“On the other hand,” Danish continued, “some folks find that for the EPA to move forward with legislation will create the kind of friction needed for Congress to act. So it depends on which side you fall down on in that debate.”

The EPA is slated to pass regulations on power plants this year under the Clean Air Act, while Senators Boxer and Waxman work to inject a carbon price back on to the federal agenda. Here are a few reflections on the undercurrent of discussion on how tradable mechanisms for climate mitigation might figure into federal GHG regulations down the line.

This piece originally appeared on the EKO-ECO blog moderated jointly by Ecosystem Marketplace and EKO Asset Management Partners. Read the original here.

25 March 2013 | We’ve seen the United States achieve significant emission reductions for the transportation sector through the Clean Air Act, but power plant emissions – representing almost 70% of US emissions – require a unique fix. Last week in Washington, DC, I attended a symposium hosted by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) where panelists explored possibilities for achieving meaningful reductions of power plant emissions under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act – and without hurting the US economy.

Through the Clean Air Act, the US Environmental Protection Agency is slated to finalize New Source Performance Standards for GHG emissions from new power plants this year under Section 111(b), and expected to propose standards for existing power plants under Section 111(d).

What would meaningful reductions at reasonable cost look like under Section 111? Conrad Schneider from the Clean Air Task Force walked through calculations by the Northbridge Group for different levels of GHG reduction targets, invoking the most stringent example – 28% reductions by 2020 compared to 2005 levels – as a strawman argument. Costs to run the program would approximate $23/tCO2e. Schneider said that if phased in properly, increases in natural gas prices could be limited to 1% a year.

David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Council argued that these emission reductions could be achieved at a lower cost than Schneider proposes – thus it really comes down to the model and set of assumptions used.

While I can’t pass judgment on these models per se, what interests the Ecosystem Marketplace Carbon Program of course is how GHG regulations might leverage market mechanisms to make these numbers more favorable for compliance and ultimately for political and industry buy-in.

Because there it is – legislatively elusive yet referenced everywhere these days: President Obama’s State of the Union address call to Congress to pass a “bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change.” What enabling power does this phrase really have? What’s the federal legislative hook that might enable the US to achieve greater emissions reductions at reasonable cost and with legal certainty?

Against all political odds, if and when Congress stops dragging its feet, the US could see passage of a new climate bill – perhaps in the form of a federal carbon tax as promoted by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) through their respective new carbon tax plans. But in the interim, Congress has the potential to provide clarity on how markets could fit into existing Clean Air Act legislation, which Monday’s panelists believe could create a clearer pathway for market-based solutions at a federal level.

Expanding existing EPA regulation:

Within Section 111’s regulation of power plants, there are a couple of grey areas relevant to markets. Kyle Danish – who advises companies from energy and other sectors at Van Ness Feldman – explained these at Monday’s symposium:

1. The EPA has yet to clarify whether compliance activities can include “beyond-the-fence” reductions outside of the power plant. There is no case law yet on compliance options for 111(b). Using industry preferences as the litmus test for legislative outlook, assuming regulations will require some level of GHG emission reduction target, it seems that industry members prefer to have flexibility in how they meet their compliance requirements. As Danish put it, “All companies in the industry place a high priority on having requirements that are at modest cost, provide for some flexibility all other things being equal, and have legal certainty.” Following on this, the business case seems to point in favor of use of a market-based approach that allows some level of flexibility through trading. The aggressiveness of emission reduction targets could in turn vary depending on the level of flexibility provided.
2. There is a lack of legal clarity on how much discretion states would have in determining their own plans in relation to the federal EPA directive. Industry’s receptiveness to GHG regulations varies by state, depending on how much companies rely on coal or natural gas for power generation. Already, many states feature market-based mechanisms – California’s cap-and-trade scheme, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the 35+ US states operating mandatory or voluntary renewable portfolio standards to name just a few. How these would plug into federal legislation is still up for discussion.

What about a fresh climate bill?

Beyond the Clean Air Act, the carbon tax candle is still burning. Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Henry Waxman – historically cap-and-trade proponents – are both incubating carbon tax plans with the intention of restarting the conversation and pushing their plans through Congress.

The quick and dirty:

• Price tag: $20/tCO2e, +5.6% annually for 10 years
• Revenues: $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with 60% rebated to US residents and 40% to incentives for clean energy and research
• Emission reductions: 20% from 2005 levels
• Next steps: hearings this spring in the Environment and Public Works committee, Senate floor vote this summer

The plan (see discussion draft) backed by Sen. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), like Section 111, hones in on power plants.

• Price tag: $15/$25/$35/tCO2e, +2-8% annually
• Revenues: TBD, possibly going toward mitigating energy costs for consumers, reducing Federal deficit, protecting jobs of workers at trade-vulnerable, energy intensive industries, reducing tax liability for individuals and businesses, and/or investing in other carbon mitigation activities
• Emission reductions: TBD
• Next steps: Public comments on draft due April 12

How Boxer and Waxman relate to 111

Going into the Q&A, I asked the panel to provide their frank assessment of the prospects for these new bills compared to working within Section 111 legislation. Dirk Forrister, head of the International Emissions Trading Association, said that based on his conversations with those involved with the new carbon tax plans, “Part of the interest in these new carbon tax plans is to allow discussion on options or proposals that might follow a path like Australia’s, which began as a fixed price that looks like a tax and then shifts into an emissions trading program.”

Forrister noted that a new carbon tax bill would have advantages in terms of providing legal stability (compared to patchwork provisions for markets using Section 111) and some basis for harmonization with carbon markets abroad, but that it’s probably “a long, slow path.”

Van Ness Feldman’s Danish shared two views on the interplay between the EPA moving forward with legislation this year and how that might affect Congressional willingness to act. “On one hand, some people take the position that the EPA moves forward to regulate this area and then Congress can take a pass because they won’t have to act,” he explained.

“On the other hand,” Danish continued, “some folks find that for the EPA to move forward with legislation will create the kind of friction needed for Congress to act. So it depends on which side you fall down on in that debate.”

Over 30 representatives of Indigenous Peoples worldwide have gathered at a Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s (FCPF) workshop on REDD+ which, Benoit Bosquet of the FCPF says was less focused on the possible worrying impacts and more on how Indigenous communities can benefit and become active participants in the REDD+ process.

This article was originally published on the World Bank’s blog page. Click here to read the original.

The views are those of Benoit Bosquet and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

6 March 2013 | A little while ago, I blogged about an unprecedented meeting of Indigenous Peoples’ representatives from 28 countries that took place on the idyllic islands of Guna Yala, Panama, in September 2011.

One and a half years later, it is fair to say that we have come a very long way as we welcome over 30 representatives of Indigenous Peoples and southern civil society organizations from Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific for a workshop on the Carbon Fund of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) here in Washington, DC this week. The Bank serves as the Trustee and the Secretariat of the FCPF, a global partnership that is helping countries draft REDD+ readiness plans and will provide carbon payments to countries that meet certain targets.

Since our initial meeting in Panama, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives adopted an Action Plan, travelled the world to meet, dialogue and learn, and gathered in regional follow-up meetings to build capacity and prioritize demands.

When I look back at the beginning of the series of dialogues with Indigenous Peoples, I remember that discussions mainly revolved about the role of Indigenous Peoples in REDD+ (which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Indigenous Peoples were concerned that REDD+ could become a means for pushing them off their ancestral lands. With their livelihoods and cultural identity deeply connected to the forest and the land, losing access to them would mean losing everything. At the time, our engagement centered on broad questions such as, How do we ensure that REDD+ will not undermine customary rights to land?

While the complete response to these questions is bound to evolve slowly as countries implement REDD+, and in-step with the development of the global negotiations on REDD+, the focus of the discussions has matured tremendously. They no longer revolve around the basic question of whether there should be REDD+ or not, but of how Indigenous Peoples can participate fully and effectively in REDD+ design and benefit from implementation. Indigenous Peoples have turned from critics of REDD+ to critical actors for REDD+. And they are now fully engaged in the FCPF at various levels.

Yesterday and today, representatives provided their inputs into highly technical aspects of the FCPF’s work, such as how to assess a country’s REDD+ readiness and how to develop the methodological framework for the FCPF Carbon Fund, one of the leading multilateral results-based REDD+ financial mechanisms.

This shows just how much has been achieved at the regional dialogues held in Arusha, Tanzania, in Lima, Peru, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and finally in Doha, Qatar at the margins of the annual UNFCCC gathering. Immense capacity has been built to enable Indigenous Peoples’ representatives to proactively engage in relevant discussions, rather than merely being on the receiving end of information dissemination.

However, the process of engaging Indigenous Peoples is still far from perfect – in particular in countries with large, often heterogeneous and difficult-to-reach indigenous populations, where the question of the “representativeness” often arises.

At the World Bank, a newly appointed Senior Advisor for Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities, Luis Felipe Duchicela, a former National Secretary of Indigenous Affairs of Ecuador who is of Quechua descent, will tackle these and other related challenges as he embarks on a number of ambitious projects. These will include a public consultation process with Indigenous Peoples on our safeguard policies and developing the idea of an Indigenous Peoples Advisory Council at the World Bank. With these tasks at hand, he reached out to the audience to ask for their support and input.

I would like to cite his wise words as I could not have formulated better the importance of involving Indigenous Peoples in the REDD+ agenda as we continue the partnership of the FCPF:

“I truly believe that our engagement as Indigenous Peoples in matters related to climate change, biodiversity, conservation and social development is critical to the wellbeing of our communities and our own livelihoods. Our ancestral knowledge, wisdom and deep relationship with Mother Earth are treasures that will help all of humanity in its quest for a better future for the generations to come”.

A self-introduction and speech from Luis Felipe Duchicela at the FCPF workshop can be found here.

More on Engaging Indigenous Peoples and Forest-Dependent People in the FCPF can be found here.

Benoit Bosquet is a Lead Carbon Finance Specialist and Coordinator of the FCPF at the World Bank’s Environment Department.

This story has been adapted from Rachael Petersen’s blog. You can view the original here.

31 January 2013 | Cacoal | Rondí´nia | Brazil | Here are three things you should never leave home without in the Amazon: water, insect repellent, sunscreen.

And if you’re Chief Almir Narayamoga of the Surui, make sure to remember your high-tech video recording sunglasses.

New field sites often require weeks of cultivating trust, understanding, and the relationships to yield interesting work. Which is why when I first arrived at the Associacao Metareilí¡ headquarters outside the city of Cacoal in the state of Rondí´nia, Brazil, clad in a long flowing skirt and Chaco sandals, I expected a calm day of office humdrum: researching, talking to my Surui colleagues, reading over their 50-year plan. But when Almir invited me to track down reported illegal logging in the territory, I couldn’t say no.

Hours and kilometers into the jungle, I realize: the Amazon itself is now my office. And I should never leave home unprepared to face it.

Things in the territory are tense. Loggers continue to lodge death threats against Almir, the leader of the indigenous Paiter Surui people, due to his efforts to protect the forest in his territory, La Sete de Setembro. As I write this, one of Almir’s ever-present personal bodyguards from the Brazilian Força Nacional sits to my left polishing his automatic weapon with a pink toothbrush.

How absurd, I thought to myself as we trekked together through the oppressive humidity of the Amazon, that preserving nature has become a matter of life or death, the source of animosity and aggression. The situation speaks to the specific importance of exploiting natural resources to the local economy as well as to the general human tendency to overvalue immediate gains and underestimate long-term costs.

“People think the forest will never end, like they think water will never end,” Almir says. “But one day, the forest could end. We need to have that vision.”

At a distance- from planes and satellites imaging-the Sete de Setembro territory looks like an island of trees amid a sea of historical deforestation. So for many local loggers, the Surui sit on a pot of gold to be exploited at all costs. But for Almir, the forest- of priceless importance to the Surui life and culture- can be protected by stimulating economic alternatives to logging. This vision’s supported by countless partners like USAID and Google and strengthened by the use of digital tools-has earned the Surui international attention. Their visionary 50-year life plan calls for an end to the unsustainable logging that serves as the historical financial lifeline in the territory and proposes economic alternatives such as commercialization of agricultural and artisanal goods and payment for ecosystem services. The Surui hope that others will pay them for preserving the forest in the form of carbon credits for avoided deforestation. This money will enter a locally administrated fund that will support an environmentally and socially-sustainable future in the territory.

It is a high-stakes game of indigenous peoples, governments, international NGOs and investors. It is a game that requires extensive monitoring of the forest to document illegal incursions that compromise this sustainable vision. Traditional knowledge of their territory must be writ digital through photographs and gmapping to render public forest conservation progress. So when the Metareilí¡ office received an anonymous tip last week that someone cut down trees in the territory, Almir and team had to conduct the due diligence that puts such incidents on the literal and figurative map.

Our trip from the Metareilí¡ office to the territory’s border lasted a grueling hour and a half. The Força Nacional truck shook as it passed over pocked dirt roads. A cocktail of antibiotics, antimalarial medication, and coffee stirred in my stomach; I was sure I would vomit. “Don’t do it don’t don’t do it,” I chanted to myself, acutely aware that such a sign of fragility could mark me as a woman incapable of tolerating Amazonian conditions. Surprisingly, I deep-breathed my way through the journey and we reached the village of chief Almir’s family, Lapetanha. After a short conversation, we were on our way again, off to search out the loggers.

We ran into trouble when our two trucks reached a bridge, or really, two deteriorating logs aligned with the wheels of the truck. Almir’s truck crossed first, but the front left wheel quickly fell between the logs. Using a cable mounted on the front of the Força Nacional truck, we towed the fallen truck from out between the logs. Deciding we could not cross, we-Almir, two guards, myself, and four other Surui-continued on foot.

Which is how I found myself ankle-deep in reddish clay mud last Friday with Chief Almir and other Paiter-Surui colleagues, hiking fifteen kilometers on the tails of illegal loggers. The sun beamed threats at my fair skin, made even more sensitive by a daily dose of antimalarials. The humidity rivaled a Houston summer. Almir joked about my sweat-soaked hair; others would later express surprise that a young American girl made it through the exhausting hike.

The path we traced through the territory was fresh, recently trampled by loggers. Two hours into the walk, we encounter freshly-cut logs, their shameless tan nakedness a startling interruption in the surrounding deep-green abyss. I waited behind talking with a colleague while others followed a small path to find a patch of stumps. Having found the evidence we sought, we returned to our abandoned trucks a few hours later, exhausted, having gone without food or water for hours. We stop in Almir’s aldea for water, chica, and bananas before making the long return to Cacoal.

The next evening, Almir invited me to his house for roasted wild boar. On the way, we also picked up Steve Zwick, an American journalist and the managing editor for Ecosystem Marketplace, who had arrived to work on his biography of Almir, to be published this year.

Steve asked if Almir video recorded our mission the previous day. “Yes,” he responded. But I was certain I saw no video cameras on our trek.

“Uh, he didn’t record anything in my presence,” I interjected.

“I recorded it all with my eyes, with my glasses,” Almir insisted. He must be joking, I thought, speaking metaphorically, or perhaps making light of his lapse.

But after dinner, he retrieved a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses from his living room. “I recorded everything with these,” he stated, indicating a small, unmistakable camera lens in the middle of the nose bridge. He had bought them during a trip to Switzerland, he confessed, aware they could aid in documenting the forest.

I launched into laughter. “You had no idea I was filming?” Almir asked me. “No!” I said, half afraid he caught embarrassing footage of my mud-covered huffing and puffing from the previous day. He modeled the sunglasses for us and began recording,joking that he was creating an informational video about Americans.

He removed a small memory card from the sunglasses and inserted it into his computer. The video from our trek-of surprisingly high quality- revealed the destruction of the forest we witnessed, including the roads, freshly cut wood, and stumps bespeaking invasion. Indeed, Almir had captured our jungle trek through his eyes, branded in memory but packaged in MegaBytes.

“This shows that indigenous peoples are doing their job,” Steve admired, “they’re doing the work.”

Almir has witnessed tremendous turmoil within his tribe, which was first contacted in 1969. He now hopes to witness a brighter future- one in which his peoples financial riches do not depend on depleting their remaining natural riches. And with the help of technology, the Surui will not witness this change alone. Their traditional knowledge and surveillance of their lands can be transmitted to the world via videos and maps. But Steve is right: it is not the technology or fancy camera-sunglasses that do the work in the territory, it is the people. And despite being the subject of flashy headlines ( Tribe saves the forest using internet), the Surui have a lot of work ahead of them. I certainly have the sunburn, insect bites, and muscle aches to prove it.

Over 30 representatives of Indigenous Peoples worldwide have gathered at a Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s (FCPF) workshop on REDD+ which, Benoit Bosquet of the FCPF says was less focused on the possible worrying impacts and more on how Indigenous communities can benefit and become active participants in the REDD+ process.

This article was originally published on the World Bank’s blog page. Click here to read the original.

The views are those of Benoit Bosquet and not necessarily those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, or its affiliates.

6 March 2013 | A little while ago, I blogged about an unprecedented meeting of Indigenous Peoples’ representatives from 28 countries that took place on the idyllic islands of Guna Yala, Panama, in September 2011.

One and a half years later, it is fair to say that we have come a very long way as we welcome over 30 representatives of Indigenous Peoples and southern civil society organizations from Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific for a workshop on the Carbon Fund of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) here in Washington, DC this week. The Bank serves as the Trustee and the Secretariat of the FCPF, a global partnership that is helping countries draft REDD+ readiness plans and will provide carbon payments to countries that meet certain targets.

Since our initial meeting in Panama, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives adopted an Action Plan, travelled the world to meet, dialogue and learn, and gathered in regional follow-up meetings to build capacity and prioritize demands.

When I look back at the beginning of the series of dialogues with Indigenous Peoples, I remember that discussions mainly revolved about the role of Indigenous Peoples in REDD+ (which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Indigenous Peoples were concerned that REDD+ could become a means for pushing them off their ancestral lands. With their livelihoods and cultural identity deeply connected to the forest and the land, losing access to them would mean losing everything. At the time, our engagement centered on broad questions such as, How do we ensure that REDD+ will not undermine customary rights to land?

While the complete response to these questions is bound to evolve slowly as countries implement REDD+, and in-step with the development of the global negotiations on REDD+, the focus of the discussions has matured tremendously. They no longer revolve around the basic question of whether there should be REDD+ or not, but of how Indigenous Peoples can participate fully and effectively in REDD+ design and benefit from implementation. Indigenous Peoples have turned from critics of REDD+ to critical actors for REDD+. And they are now fully engaged in the FCPF at various levels.

Yesterday and today, representatives provided their inputs into highly technical aspects of the FCPF’s work, such as how to assess a country’s REDD+ readiness and how to develop the methodological framework for the FCPF Carbon Fund, one of the leading multilateral results-based REDD+ financial mechanisms.

This shows just how much has been achieved at the regional dialogues held in Arusha, Tanzania, in Lima, Peru, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and finally in Doha, Qatar at the margins of the annual UNFCCC gathering. Immense capacity has been built to enable Indigenous Peoples’ representatives to proactively engage in relevant discussions, rather than merely being on the receiving end of information dissemination.

However, the process of engaging Indigenous Peoples is still far from perfect – in particular in countries with large, often heterogeneous and difficult-to-reach indigenous populations, where the question of the “representativeness” often arises.

At the World Bank, a newly appointed Senior Advisor for Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities, Luis Felipe Duchicela, a former National Secretary of Indigenous Affairs of Ecuador who is of Quechua descent, will tackle these and other related challenges as he embarks on a number of ambitious projects. These will include a public consultation process with Indigenous Peoples on our safeguard policies and developing the idea of an Indigenous Peoples Advisory Council at the World Bank. With these tasks at hand, he reached out to the audience to ask for their support and input.

I would like to cite his wise words as I could not have formulated better the importance of involving Indigenous Peoples in the REDD+ agenda as we continue the partnership of the FCPF:

“I truly believe that our engagement as Indigenous Peoples in matters related to climate change, biodiversity, conservation and social development is critical to the wellbeing of our communities and our own livelihoods. Our ancestral knowledge, wisdom and deep relationship with Mother Earth are treasures that will help all of humanity in its quest for a better future for the generations to come”.

A self-introduction and speech from Luis Felipe Duchicela at the FCPF workshop can be found here.

More on Engaging Indigenous Peoples and Forest-Dependent People in the FCPF can be found here.

Benoit Bosquet is a Lead Carbon Finance Specialist and Coordinator of the FCPF at the World Bank’s Environment Department.