The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has the world’s second-largest tropical forest landscape. Here, slash and burn agriculture and charcoal are the main causes of greenhouse gases emissions. Credit: Taylor Toeka Kakala/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 2014 (IPS)

Heads of state, civil society groups and the leaders of some of the world’s largest companies this week urged their peers to sign on to a landmark new global agreement aimed at halting deforestation by 2030, even as others are warning the accord is too lax.

The New York Declaration on Forests was signed last week by some 150 parties at a United Nations-organised climate summit. Outlining pledges and goals for both the public and private sectors, for the first time the declaration set a global “deadline” for deforestation: to “At least halve the rate of loss of natural forest globally by 2020 and strive to end natural forest loss by 2030.”“The 2030 timeline would allow deforestation to continue for a decade and a half. By then the declaration could be self-fulfilling, as there might not be much forest left to save.” -- Susanne Breitkopf of Greenpeace

The declaration offered one of the most concrete outcomes of the U.N. summit, and underscored new global interest in the climate-related potential of conserving the world’s forest cover. The agreement’s text estimates that achieving the goals set out in the accord could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 8.8 billion tonnes per year by 2030.

Yet since the agreement’s unveiling, some groups have voiced stark concerns, particularly around the declaration’s extended timeline and weak enforcement mechanisms. Indeed, the agreement is legally binding on neither states nor companies.

“The 2030 timeline would allow deforestation to continue for a decade and a half. By then the declaration could be self-fulfilling, as there might not be much forest left to save,” Susanne Breitkopf, a senior political advisor with Greenpeace, told IPS.

“Equally, private companies shouldn’t be allowed to continue deforesting and sourcing from deforestation until 2020 – they should stop destructive practices and human rights violations immediately.”

On Wednesday, a Nigerian development group similarly called into question the declaration’s timeframe.

“The declaration seems to make those who have the capacities for massive destruction of community forests to think that they have up to 2020 to continue destruction unchecked, and unencumbered. This is dangerous,” the Rainforest Resource and Development Centre said in a statement.

“Some of these companies have the capabilities to wipe out forests the size of Cross River State of Nigeria in one year. Collectively, they have the capacity to wipe out valuable community forest areas up to the size of India in a few years.”

Instead, the centre says the New York Agreement should have put in place “definite sanctions” starting this year.

Powerful alliance

The declaration was initially endorsed by 32 national governments, though Brazil remains a notable holdout. In addition to halting deforestation, the agreement aims to restore some 350 million hectares of degraded lands by 2030.

The accord was also formally backed by 40 multinational companies and financial firms, and seeks to “help meet” private-sector goals of halting deforestation linked to commodities by the end of the decade. Separately, the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), consisting of 400 large companies with global sales of three trillion dollars, has pledged to remove deforestation from its supply chains by 2020.

“A powerful alliance of business, governments and civil society has come together to sign the New York Declaration to stop the destruction of natural forests and to restore those that have been degraded,” Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said in a video posted Tuesday.

“To deliver on the declaration, companies and communities are asking governments to show strong leadership in reaching a new climate agreement in Paris next year. So we invite all stakeholders to join us in this effort by signing on to the New York Declaration on Forests.”

Clark was joined in this call by the leaders of Norway and Liberia, as well the CEOs of the consumer goods giant Unilever, the palm oil supplier Golden Agri Resources and others. Major civil society voices, including the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) and World Resources Institute (WRI), both U.S.-based organisations, likewise supported the declaration.

WRI, a prominent think tank, has called the declaration “the clearest statement to date by world leaders that forests can be a major force in tackling the climate challenge.” Further, the institute estimates that a restoration of just 150 million hectares of degraded lands could help to feed an additional 200 million people by 2030.

According to U.N. statistics, some 13 million hectares of forest are disappearing, on average, each year. While the importance of those forests is currently receiving new interest in terms of slowing global climate change, forest destruction also has major impact on the economies and survival of local communities.

In many places, illegal forest clearing is closely related to poor governance and corruption. Yet the fact remains that much of today’s deforestation is fuelled by large-scale agricultural production to supply commodities to other countries.

According to findings published last month by Forest Trends, a watchdog group here, at least half of global deforestation is taking place illegally and in support of commercial agriculture – particularly to supply overseas markets. Overall, some 40 percent of all globally traded palm oil and 14 percent of all beef likely comes from illegally cleared lands, Forest Trends estimates.

Years of inaction

As part of the New York Declaration, five European countries pledged to develop new procurement policies aimed at cutting down on the consumption of products linked to deforestation. In addition, the declaration was backed by a second agreement between three of the world’s largest palm oil companies to help protect forests in Indonesia, a major producer.

“We find it very encouraging that the biggest players in the palm oil industry globally are finally acknowledging their responsibility for the tremendous destruction palm oil expansion has and is causing,” Laurel Sutherlin, a communications strategist at the Rainforest Action Network, an advocacy group that is not planning to endorse the New York Declaration, told IPS.

“But so much time has been lost due to inaction that we are now at a point where a 2030 voluntary deadline is simply not sufficient to address the urgency of the problem. The fact is, deforestation rates in Indonesia are continuing to rise, conflicts between companies and communities are escalating, and reports of labour abuses are increasing.”

Greenpeace, too, has publicly declined to back the New York Declaration. The group’s Breitkopf points out that the agreement is weaker than certain existing deforestation accords, and thus could even dampen forward momentum.

“Most governments long ago signed up to the Convention on Biological Diversity,” she says, referring to the 1992 treaty. “That agreement obliges them to halt biodiversity loss and manage forests sustainably by 2020. Now, the New York Declaration threatens to undermine previous commitments.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Cutting trees in Nicaragua. Deforestation is inherent to the predatory economy, whether for the exploitation of the timber itself, the soil beneath the trees, or resources in the subsoil. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, May 7 2013 (IPS)

More than two dozen environmental organisations are urging California Governor Jerry Brown to disregard recommendations from a United Nations task force to include so-called forest “offsets” in the state’s new emissions-trading scheme.

The offsets would serve as a mechanism by which emissions-producing companies in California could continue to pollute if they compensate foreign governments for the protection of their own forests."The carbon market is just proving to be extremely complicated, and not benefiting people at all." -- Bill Barclay of Rainforest Action Network

But critics say the consequences of such a policy would have repercussions that extend far beyond the environment.

“Independent investigations into the promotion of international forest offsets have raised serious concerns related to human rights violations and there is major opposition from indigenous peoples and local communities in both Chiapas, Mexico and in Acre, Brazil,” the groups said in an open letter sent this weekend.

Environmental groups say the move would simply shift the pollution from one country to another, rather than addressing the root causes of deforestation and climate pollution. The scheme would also create another set of economic and social problems for the communities in the regions paid to preserve their forests.

“Offsets are problematic in a number of ways,” Jeff Conant, director of the International Forests Programme at the U.S. office of Friends of the Earth, an activist network, told IPS. “First, they don’t actually reduce emissions. They just misplace emissions.”

The recommendations to include the offsets in new climate change-related legislation in California (known as AB-32) came from the REDD Offset Working Group (ROW), formed to implement a collaborative effort designed by the United Nations called REDD (which stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

As described by the U.N., REDD is “a mechanism to create an incentive for developing countries to protect, better manage and wisely use their forest resources, contributing to the global fight against climate change.”

Although California’s AB-32 already has a domestic offset exchange programme, the move to expand it globally prompted a vehement response last week from groups in Mexico worried about the possibility of “land-grabbing”.

The REDD programme “allows Northern polluters to purchase forest carbon offset credits from the global South,” the 15 groups, from Chiapas, Mexico, wrote in late April.

“This Agreement is underpinned by the logic of capitalist accumulation: it enables the purchase of carbon credits that will legally allow the continuation of the predatory and consumerist model.”

The response recommends instead that the “consumerist countries of the North … implement urgent mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without substitutions or offsets, and with a focus on the reduction goals of their own countries”.

‘Gaming, corruption, error’

“In Chiapas, you have customary titles and [land] rights that haven’t been fully resolved,” Bill Barclay, climate policy advisor at Rainforest Action Network, and advocacy group based here, told IPS.

“It’s a very complicated situation, and when you bring in someone who might come in and impose that and do it quickly and cheaply, it elevates social conflict.”

These critics are also wary of the potential pitfalls that could accompany payments to countries with little oversight and government accountability.

“Once you involve international entities – especially the most impoverished states in the hemisphere – you’re getting to a state … with a lot of gaming, corruption, fraud and error,” Jeff Conant says.

Activists say these problems shine a light on the broader complications that tend to lurk in a system as complicated as emissions trading or “carbon markets”.

“This is about the most complicated way you could come up with to try to bring money into the market to reduce emissions and generate innovations,” Conant says.

“There’s an ideology that says that allowing the markets to fix the climate problem is the most efficient way to go… Unfortunately, [the market] does not work in the favour of the most marginalised communities that are on the front lines.”

In fact, carbon offsets have critics even among pro-market economists. The new letter references the findings of a 2011 report that examined REDD from a “market perspective”, using the authors’ “experience in derivatives trading and systems architecture”.

Known as the Munden Report, it found that “using carbon markets to finance REDD… is likely to be a drain of resources, both in terms of money and time, away from the very serious problems REDD seeks to address.”

The letter from environmental groups also comes just as new reports have emerged on collapsing carbon prices in Europe, where the world’s first and most established carbon market is floundering.

Although the European system decided not to rely on forest offsets, many are still suggesting that the collapse of the E.U. carbon prices could have ripple effects for similar markets worldwide, particularly as advocates push for interlinking these systems down the road.

Both the price collapse in Europe and the social consequences of an international carbon offset exchange have bolstered support for the more direct carbon tax. Although this has been the preferred mechanism by environmental groups, it continues to be thought politically unviable in the U.S., at least for the time being.

“I think there is going to be a greater shift to carbon fees and away from carbon markets,” Barclay of the Rainforest Action Network told IPS.

“The carbon market is just proving to be extremely complicated, and not benefiting people at all. There’s just too much gaming and speculation, and it’s been too poorly regulated.”

A street in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc along much of the East Coast. Credit: May S. Young/CC by 2.0

By Rebecca Hanser
NEW YORK, Nov 1 2012 (IPS)

As the East Coast deals with the havoc and devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, climate scientists are seeing yet another reason to put climate change and global warming on the current political agenda.

The storm has reignited the hotly debated topics of climate change and global warming, which environmentalists blame for Hurricane Sandy. With recovery an immediate concern, environmental groups also worry about different forms of pollution resulting from the storm.

“Sandy is what happens when the temperature goes up a degree. The scientists who predicted this kind of megastorm have issued another stark warning: if we stay on our current path, our children will live on a super-heated planet that’s four or five degrees warmer than it is right now,” said Bill McKibben, president and co-founder of the climate advocacy movement 350.org, in a press release.

Global warming is caused mainly by human activities such as burning fossil fuels like coal. This operation and others lead to higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses that raise the temperatures of both the oceans and the earth’s atmosphere.

“The fossil fuel industry is causing the climate crisis, leading to more extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy,” McKibben said. “We’re calling on Big Oil to stop spending millions to influence this election and donate the money to disaster relief instead.”

A recent report published by the Rainforest Action Network demonstrated that banks that finance and invest in carbon intensive companies are also responsible for the deteriorating global climate. They also do not properly measure their carbon footprints, despite sufficient and available guidelines to help them do so, according to the report, “Bankrolling Climate Disruption: The Impacts of the Banking Sector’s Financed Emissions“.

Climate change controversy

Not everyone agrees with the claim that global warming and climate change alone have paved the way for Hurricane Sandy.

“It’s a probabilistic issue. You can’t say that Sandy occurred because of climate change, but what you can say is that that such storms are much more likely to happen with contributing factors that include things directly related to climate change,” Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at Environmental Defence Fund, told IPS.

“Could Sandy have happened without climate change? Sure. Is it likely? No,” Hamburg added.

David Biello, an environmental journalist and associate editor at Scientific American, agreed. “Global warming didn’t spawn Sandy but it certainly contributed to the impact, with a couple of features definitely worsening it,” he told IPS.

“Higher sea surface temperatures have made the storm surge stronger,” he explained. “Normally hurricanes come up to the coast and turn right back into the ocean, but as a consequence of the major meltdown of Arctic sea ice this summer, there was a weather pattern preventing Sandy from taking that course, and [it] steered it back into land.”

One conclusion on which experts do agree is that the frequency and intensity of hurricanes like Sandy will increase over time.

“Global warming was probably a small but significant factor for Sandy. But it’s a factor that will grow over time,” Michael Oppenheimer, climate scientist and professor at Princeton University, told IPS.

“Such massive storms only happen once every 100 years, and now this kind of event is becoming more frequent, which is a huge challenge for human adaptation and resilience of our infrastructure,” Biello elaborated.

Hamburg agreed, noting, “we’re not seeing more hurricanes…It is more the different types of storms, the intensity of the storm surge.”

A political storm

Hurricane Sandy has broken the so-called “climate silence” of this year’s elections. The storm has thrown a wrench into campaign efforts, halting activities Monday and Tuesday as it became impossible to ignore the topic of climate change, which has penetrated the national dialogue.

“The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, in a press release.

Biello, the environmental journalist, believed otherwise. “I’d like to think so, but we’ve had several wake-up calls along the way, of which the biggest was Katrina, which wiped…New Orleans of the map. Unfortunately, up until now, not much progress has been made.”

Immediate concerns

The New York-based organisation Riverkeeper expressed concern about the increase in water pollution due to floating debris, oil spills, and other chemicals leaking from the fuel tanks of swamped vehicles and boats, all of which are contaminating the waters of the Hudson River and New York Harbour.

Riverkeeper also stressed the danger to public health caused by sewage overflows, which are already considered a “chronic problem”.

In a press release, the group explained that although sewage overflow is common during moderate or heavy storms, the contamination with Sandy was different because during the storm surge sewage, spilled back onto roads and into homes instead of being discharged into the river or harbour.

“This storm is not yet over,” said U.S. President Obama in a speech Tuesday at the Red Cross headquarters. “There is no time for inaction. Recovery is going to take a significant amount of time.”