The recent death of rainforest activist Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva demonstrates that the endemic problem of illegal logging is closely linked with local law enforcement corruption, and no amount of activism will remedy this problem unless the federal government in Brazil takes a firm stance on the matter. 

Brazil remains a difficult country to invest in forestry assets and to fund reliable carbon credits programmes because of this problem. Illegal loggers, often backed by violent gangs, are a threat to landowners wishing to establish a long-term investment in forestry assets, whether it is for the purpose of sustainable timber harvesting or carbon credit origination.

President Dilma Rousseff recently announced she is sending an elite force to provide backup for local law enforcement following the recent spat of killings of activists in the provinces of Para and Rondonia, but given the size of the country and the rainforest itself, this is bound to be a drop in the ocean and it will only drive the problem elsewhere, where law enforcement is corrupt or can be corrupted, to turn a blind eye to illegal logging, as has long been the tradition in Brazil.

Last week, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne made the first annual carbon statement at the House of Commons and presented the 2050 Pathways analysis, an energy policy plan of 6 possible mixes for Britain's energy needs achieving 80% GHG emission cuts.

This is the first time that the Coalition government has presented something tangible on this subject, even though I expected that there would be a carbon budget in the Chancellor's recent emergency Budget, but the environment was conspicuosly absent then.

Mr Huhne proposes that energy efficiency in households should reduce demand (very sensible) (also probably costly). Homes in Britain dissipate a lot of heat and energy and are ill-equipped with all sorts of energy inefficient gadgetry. There is also room for technological advances, as we must move away from inefficient light bulbs but energy saving ones are not yet good enough for most people's needs and have the downside of being packed with toxic by-products, such as mercury.

The government wants the private sector to be the driving force of a nuclear revolution and pay its way to build new reactors and contribute to the significant shortfall that is predicted, as energy demand will double in the next 40 years (with a substantial electrification of households and transport), and North Sea oil and gas runs dry. This is wishful thinking, and there is little chance that the private sector will enter this field without proper incentives, because nuclear energy is immensely costly. Incentives can be in the form of land and technology leases and lucrative energy contracts. Alternatively, given that the state can ill afford to splash on incentives, and must make severe cuts to repay the national debt, the private sector can be pushed into nuclear energy by making other forms of energy generation more expensive.

Undoubtedly, by saying that fossil fuels will remain but only when fitted with CCS, Mr Huhne is implicitly implying just that.  Carbon Capture and Storage is phenomenally expensive, and if utilities will only be permitted to burn coal and gas with CCS, suddenly investing in nuclear energy will be attractive to them.

I believe that nuclear energy is fundamental to the decarbonisation of Britain, and to meet its energy needs in the long term. However, we must not forget that nuclear energy has numerous problems, not least that it is not a renewable resource. We have enough uranium to last us about one century at the current rates of consumption, much less if we engage in a full-fledged nuclear programme. Fusion nuclear energy (when and if ever commercially available), will be a renewable energy source (as there's plenty of hydrogen around) but fission is not.

Therefore, a nuclear programme, though necessary, can only be a plan with a horizon of a few decades at most to allow renewables to catch up with the level of supply that we need.  

The government intends to support microgeneration - great news. Solar energy is a brilliant solution for household supply, also recently it has been introduced to power recharging points for electric vehicles, so it can contribute significantly to decarbonise transport.

DECC has published a site called the 2050 Calculator where people can play energy secretary and design the UK's energy infrastructure, adjust demand and supply, and try to score the final goal: 80% emission cuts by 2050. Have a go!

Mikel Susperregi

mikel@carbonica.org

Indonesia is the world's third biggest CO2 emitter, owing to its forestry emissions. According to the World Bank, its emission figures for 2007 are 3 billion tons of CO2 per annum (about half that of the US), and this is mostly from illegal logging and palm oil plantations for biofuels.

Indonesia is the best example of how key it is to preserve the world's rainforests.

For a population of 230 million, many of whom live under the poverty line, this means the carbon footprint per capita is 11.1 tons p.a. (which is 2.2 tons more than EU emissions).

Indonesia emits 5 times as much through deforestation than other means (energy production), so its emissions problem could be addressed rapidly without a radical transformation of its economy, but simply through forestry preservation. This would bring its emissions down to about 450 million tons p.a.

In Copenhagen the UN-REDD programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries) is going to play a key role in determining emission cuts in countries like Indonesia (as well as other smaller rainforest-owning countries). However, UN-REDD is still at its infancy. At the moment it has only 7 programmes, with a trust fund of $37 million, which was only set up a year ago. This is loose change to even start addressing the problem.

Indonesia has a project approved in the UN-REDD framework for $5.6m and the province of Papua New Guinea another one for $6.4m. Potentially Indonesia should be the main recipient of these funds together with Brazil.

The REDD trust fund is at the moment smaller than the budget of a round-of-the-mill Hollywood movie.

These are tiny figures to create any form of incentive for a country where the palm oil industry is growing at 13% p.a. and there are huge financial interests to continue with deforestation and the drainage of peatlands.

Papua's forests in the island of New Guinea have a vast wilderness spanning 42 million hectares, and its carbon sink capacity is comparable to the EU's annual GHG emissions. At the current rate of deforestation (such as is experienced in Bormeo and Sumatra), most of it will be gone by 2030. This is what we stand to lose - it will cause an alarming reduction of the Earth's capacity to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.

My concern with UN-REDD funds is that this system can only work if the government officials involved make good use of the funds. Indonesia's notoriously corrupt regime is a doubtful candidate to carry out this task and the likelihood is that forest degradation will continue, with or without the REDD subsidies.

Illegal logging is directly correlated with poverty, and the root causes of it have to be addressed. Otherwise loggers are bound to move away from protected areas and carry on logging elsewhere. This activity is virtually impossible to police in large areas of forest.

Indonesia needs to articulate a credible proposal to be a worthy recipient of UN-REDD funds. It must eradicate both illegal and legal logging and confine land conversion to areas of shrub and grassland, where palm oil can be produced, not through the depletion of rainforests. Once it can show it can manage its rainforests as protected carbon sinks and ultimately as financial assets then the case for UN-REDD funds will be a no-brainer.

Brunella

E.ON's decision to shelve plans for a new coal power station at Kingsnorth in Kent has elated environmentalists and activists have been quick to boast victory. But it's obvious that things are not quite what they seem..

Yesterday my Inbox was filling up with messages pouring thick and fast from various groups claiming victory. Most prominently, Greenpeace's Jamie Wooley writes "Kingsnorth shelved but our campaign continues - our campaign and direct actions against dirty coal are only possible with your support - DONATE NOW!". OK, so it's thanks to all this money donated to Greenpeace that this has happened. Mmm.. Let me munch that over. In case we missed the message, it continues: "So we still need your help to make sure we stop ANY new dirty coal power stations and we're already discussing our next steps - in the meantime you can save our climate by making a donation to Greenpeace".

Please do feel free to take a moment to laugh. Thanks God for Greenpeace -- who needs a God if you can have Greenpeace?

So Donate to Greenpeace = save the planet. Very conveniently forgetting that decades ago Greenpeace was, with all good intentions, pivotal in the demise of the use of nuclear energy for electricity generation purposes, which to a large extent got us where we are now, but let's not go into that for the moment.

Next in claiming a share of victory was the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition. They declare: "Well done on Kingsnorth! Bring on The Wave!". Then blah blah about dirty coal, and yes, you guessed, it's not long before we get onto the matter of the Donation.

Funnily enough, the decision at Kingsnorth has nothing to do with these issues and E.ON would have reached the same conclusion regardless. So you can save the donation. E.ON are not saving face when they say that they've reached the decision to delay the project owing to financial considerations, it is quite true - and a very obvious truth to anyone who actually read the nitty-gritty of what the project was supposed to be about.

The project was supposed to be subject to fitting the power station with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (CCS). Currently this technology is only in the prototype stage of testing at approx 3 sites worldwide. Tests have encountered with technical problems as well as local opposition and planning hurdles. It is obvious that there's a long way to go before CCS can go commercial and applied by utilities companies for the provision of electricity at competitive prices. It may be a decade before this happens.

Therefore it defies logic why on earth would a company apply for planning or put forward a project at all on an untested technology that is not ready yet?

Quite simply it wasn't going to happen. Clean coal or CCS will be the holy grail when and if it happens, but the problem, and this is the crux of it, is that it may add a cost of somewhere between £20-£70 to the price of the ton of CO2 captured causing a sky-rocketting of the cost of electricity. The challenge therefore, is one of making the financial proposition make sense, and for the time being it looks that it may not.

Now back to Kingsnorth..

Government minister John O'Brien wrote to our chief executive Mikel Susperregi earlier this year saying that Kingsnorth would only be granted permission to go ahead if fitted with CCS technology. He re-iterated the same point even when it was explained to him that the technology could hardly go ahead within the planning timescale as it is still within an early phase of the testing stage/feasibility study. So the obvious conclusion was that either it would be delayed, or..

...my guess is that E.ON intented to make it look like the good intention was to proceed with CCS, get permission, and after it was all done and dusted make an announcement to the effect that they had problems fitting the CCS after all and that it wouldn't happened as planned etc.. so we would eventually get a dirty coal power station through the back door, just like Olympic budgets escalate in an apparently unpredicted fashion.

Someone somewhere has told that E.ON that the government won't play ball with that -- (which obviously they didn't before?) -- and so the hypothetical CCS Kingsnorth is no more (for the time being).

Brunella

www.carbonica.org

The debacle over the sit-in at the Vestas wind turbine factory in Newport highglights the tug of war that renewables companies are facing with local communities in the UK and Europe.  

The "not in my backyard" mentality is pricing these companies out of the market.

Vestas decided to shut the plant earlier this month and issued a statement saying "The local planning process for the construction of new onshore wind power plants in the United Kingdom remains an obstacle to the development of a more favourable market for onshore wind power". "Since offshore wind power is still on a project basis, a large and stable market for onshore wind power is vital to secure a stable production flow."

I think that says it all.

Whilst obviously we all sympathise with those who lose their jobs, we have to accept that renewable companies need incentives to grow from a market at its infancy and they need all forms of help not hindrance. Vestas's workers would have a better chance of securing their jobs if instead of occupying the factory in question they demonstrated against the local authority and did a sit in at the Council's offices, demanding that dimwits in charge of planning applications up and down the country stop holding the renewables industry to ransom.

In order to move forward the commitment to renewables, the UK government needs to find a formula to override local authorities and allow wind power companies like Vestas to expand their operation without any hurdles.

Carbon capture experiments are meeting the same type of opposition in Europe. In an excellent article that we've cited today ("Public wary of carbon capture"), Joshua Chaffin in the FT describes how people in the  Netherlands are opposing a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) experiment with the fear that the CO2 stored underground could be a serious health hazard (if not fatal) if it's suddenly released into the air. Oil companies have been injecting CO2 in the seabed for decades and no one has paid any attention but now it becomes an issue when people feel CCS coal stations may be too close for comfort.

As it is, CSS experiments are running late and over budget, and no one seriously expects that they can deliver emission cuts for less than £20 per tonne. This is a crazy figure. One can plant so many trees for that amount and effectively capture via Nature's way many more tonnes of CO2 for the same amount of money, at the same time restoring forests and lifting communities out of poverty. With the opposition of local communities, unless governments take a tougher stance, there will be no chance to deliver any commercially realistic form of CSS on time.

Brunella

All comments are welcome, will be immediately displayed and this forum is not moderated. Your feedback is appreciated.

In view of the recent report by Friends of the Earth against the use of carbon offsetting and the inclusion of forestry programmes in a future Copenhagen treaty, Carbonica wishes to make the following statement in defence of forestry (REDD) carbon offset programmes (and carbon offsetting in general).

London, 3 June 2009 

Carbon credits and carbon offsets are an integral part of the Kyoto protocol and have enabled an entire sector of the economy to invest in emission reduction programmes, contributing to the mitigation of climate change. Furthermore, CDM has contributed to raise awareness among companies and individuals about their priority to reduce emissions and pay the cost for the environmental damage caused by GHG emissions, in particular CO2. Putting a price on carbon is a good way to manage our environmental damage.

CDM is far from being a perfect mechanism and the forthcoming Copenhagen treaty gives us the opportunity to improve the framework. There are obviously fundamental questions that must be addressed. The principle that an emissions reduction programme generates a "carbon credit" which in turn legitimises a company to pollute and entitles it to emit a permissible amount of GHG gases into the atmosphere must be completely dismissed. In order to mitigate climate change we must start from the premise that the only permissible level of emissions is zero and our net global GHG emissions must be negative. The reason for this is very simple: the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high and for our mitigation efforts it is mandatory that we capture CO2 from the atmosphere, not simply reduce our emissions.

However there is a very good reason why CO2 emission quotas are allocated within the Kyoto framework. It helps us keep our emissions under control. These quotas, however, should not be interpreted as "permissible" emission levels within our mitigation efforts, and within the Kyoto protocol's main remit every conceivable measure must be adopted to gradually reduce them.

For this reason, cap-and-trade mechanisms where companies gradually and continually try to find ways to reduce their emissions and overall carbon footprint, will be the more realistic foundation of a future Copenhagen agreement, and will pave the way to an orderly and gradual transition to a low-carbon or decarbonised economy.

Carbon offsetting is an umbrella term that is used for many different products. It is important to distinguish carbon offsets that are created from emission reductions and those that stem from carbon capture and result in a net negative amount of GHG emissions. Forestry carbon offsets are the only type of offset where net GHG emissions are negative, and therefore the only ones that play an active role in mitigating and reversing global warming. Other offsets, such as renewable energy projects, contribute to net emission reductions and make no more than a neutral contribution to our mitigation efforts.

One could ask the question of why a carbon credit is created by investing in, say, a hydro project in developing countries, whilst investing on a wind turbine in the UK would not entitle a company to create an emission credit that it can sell on. It is an interesting question. 

One answer is that by placing a price on emissions, developed countries can fund emission reductions and green energy projects in the developing world. This can only be positive.

Forestry projects on the other hand, are very different instruments. They are pivotal to climate change mitigation and for this reason not only should they be high on the agenda of the Copenhagen talks, they must be the cornerstone of our global climate change mitigation and reversal strategy.

Carbonica dismisses the claims contained in the FoE document that offsetting contributes to global warming and forestry projects will lead to land grab and poverty in developed countries. On the contrary: the only sustainable forestry carbon offset programmes are those carried out in collaboration with local communities, by enabling them to make a living out of the forests and the environment around them, and empowering them to look after the land and have a vested interest in protecting it. For these projects to work, local communities must have sufficient autonomy and there can be no land purchase for the purposes of creating the offsets. The local farming communities will look after these assets best when they work on their own land. These carbon offsets are a fundamental vehicle for developed countries to protect the rainforests, and provide local communities with the skills to make a living and protect the wildlife, biodiversity and the living environment around rainforests. 

Other rainforest projects that are based on land purchase are not sustainable in the long term; they create fenced-off areas that entail a greater financial liability to the owners of the asset than the ecological service derived from it.

In order to takle climate change and draw a significant mitigation and reversal strategy, REDD programmes must be extensive and well funded to permit reforestation in quite an unprecedented scale. Forest owning countries will benefit from this cash flow and their deprived communities will reap greater benefits from reforestation than illegal logging, which is a problem directly correlated with poverty.

Mikel Susperregi

Chief Executive

mikel@carbonica.org  

A study published in Nature last week shows that the extra CO₂ in the atmosphere is causing trees to grow bigger in the rainforests, absorbing a net extra 5bn tons of CO₂.

Tropical trees are absorbing more carbon than they would naturally, grow bigger, and unwittingly provide a helping hand in the fight against climate change.

It is very much a case of eat as much as you can, while food is abundant and readily available. It appears that trees, like humans, do have a good go at the buffet while it's there. It's not surprising that in areas such as the tropics, where rain is abundant and growth can be sustained, the excess of CO₂ can just be the thing for the largest tree specimens to go supersize.

This emphasises the importance of the rainforests as carbon sinks and how urgent it is that we restore them to their past glory. The earth has lost over three quarters of its forests during the last century, so we do have quite a lot of ground to recover. This is the challenge to combat climate change.

It's good news that governments are now talking about REDD (reduction of emissions by preventing deforestation) to include reforestation and prevented deforestation in the successor to the Kyoto protocol. For a while reforestation projects didn't have a good reputation but this is fortunately changing and there's now talk of financial commitments to prevent deforestation.

The UK government commissioned a report, the Eliasch Report, on financing global forests and the cost of preventing deforestation. Indirectly, all this has a lot to do with the financial incentives for countries such as Brazil and Indonesia to prevent illegal logging. I think this might be the wrong angle - paying people to stop destroying their own forests doesn't address the issue of why they are doing it in the first place. Illegal logging can move elsewhere and the subsidies will be money wasted. The real solution is to turn deprived communities into skilled farming communities who will benefit from sustaining the rainforests. So long as everyone can have a vested interest and views the rainforest as an asset of greater financial value than its timber content, then we will have a solution.

I believe, as we all do in Carbonica, that reforestation is the only acceptable form of carbon offset. The rainforests are the only mechanisms we have to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Other projects, such as renewable energy projects are often a disguised form of deception. For example, if I was to put a wind turbine on my roof and sell carbon offsets from the emissions I have saved (by not connecting to the national grid and being self-sufficient in my electricity consumption), I would probably be able to get CDM certification, the Gold Standard and all possible rubberstamped "certified" and "authenticated" credentials one can imagine. However, it does seem ethically objectionable. Why should I pay for my own wind turbine by allowing other people to emit CO₂ into the atmosphere with these so-called carbon "credits"?

How can we talk about "credits" or "allowances" to release CO₂? It is a farce in this day and age of global warming. 

I don't know how my wind turbine differs from some hydroelectric project in the developing world. Such a project would be deemed as contributing to "renewable energies" but it would create tons of CO₂ in carbon credits because the local community is no longer using a coal-fired station. Well, my question is that they shouldn't be using a coal-fired station in the first place. If they stop doing that, then that's great, but that does not entitle someone else to spew into the atmosphere all the junk that the coal-fired station would have emitted. Otherwise the end result is the same, and we have gained absolutely nothing in terms of addressing climate change.

If, on the other hand, we restore the rainforest as a form of carbon offset, we recapture the CO₂ emitted and in the long term even more than was emitted, as well as adding to the planet's biodiversity, and helping local communities earn a living. And it's important that we talk about reforestation and not only about prevented deforestation. Reforestation means progress in the fight against climate change, because we increase the capacity of the planet to absorb CO₂. Prevented deforestation simply leaves us where we are.

In my opinion deforestation can be prevented by turning illegal loggers into farmers and effectively the drivers of reforestation.  

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

Obama's presidency is expected to mark a U-turn in Climate Change policy in the US administration. The choice of Prof Steven Chu as US energy secretary is great news. Known to despise coal as his "worst nightmare", the new Obama team of scientists has the potential of being the environmentalist's dream team.

Coal is certainly deserving of being phased out as a source of energy as soon as possible. It is historically the one fossil fuel that has brought us where we are. It has been used for much longer and more extensively than oil, and even today it is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of emerging economies.

There is no such thing as "clean coal". The fiction that "carbon capture and storage" (CSS) technologies will be imminently available is a dream. These are supposed to capture and trap CO₂ produced in the combustion of coal, and store it safely underground. Each stage of the process comes with a big "if" and a big "untested". It promises to be a much more expensive alternative than anything else conceivable, including nuclear energy.

From Russia With Gas

The disruption of gas supplies from Russia has not been exactly surprising. Especially since the tap was turned off once before in 2004 and Mr Putin's Russia is rapidly decaying into a rogue state. As Mr Kasparov rightly puts it in his columns in The Wall Street Journal, it is impossible to maintain the status quo with people who have such contempt for the rule of law, so no one can expect that state-owned gas giant Gazprom will be a reliable supplier of gas for Europe.

We need more people like Mr Kasparov in Russia to speak up and save that great nation from this gangster culture.

I wonder if Obama will Google "how to deal with Al Capone" in preparation for a meeting with Russia's premier.

In a way, the shortage of gas in Europe can be seen as a piece of good news. If gas was cheap and abundantly available then it would be much trickier for Western Europe to think about switching to alternatives. It is handy to have the main supplier playing uncool customer so that European countries can begin to think of phasing out gas and look for alternatives.

We must create "power hubs" of wind turbine farms throughout the continent to power the central heating and hot water of domestic households. This will be expensive, but the switch from domestic gas use to electricity can not happen too soon. 

Heathrow airport

The decision to expand Heathrow airport in London has come as a great disappointment to many. Especially since it was known that the UK government was split over the issue, with the energy secretary Ed Miliband opposed to the project, so the least that was expected from a mature democracy was a Commons debate with a free vote. Alas, no such thing.

The project was given a "behind-closed-doors" OK, on the grounds of being the pro-business thing to do. Obviously the Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not there to take anti-business decisions. Nor has anyone asked him to.

The only business that this will favour is the airport operator BAA and its airport retail operations, and the construction companies that are already salivating at the thought of a mega-project of olympic proportions up for grabs.

Those are the winners and the losers will be the millions of Londoners who will have to withstand an escalation of noise and pollution nuisance, an increase in night flights. The expansion will bring nothing to London's economy and will not increase or decrease the importance of London as a financial centre. By the time the new runway comes into operation Heathrow will be congested again, and more runways will be needed to catch up with competitors.

At some point the growth will have to stop, unless we want to transform London into a vast airport with a bit of a city attached to it.

The future is in rail transport. The pro-business choice is in rapid city centre to city centre high-speed rail transport.

Brunella Bell

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

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George Monbiot writes in yesterday's Guardian ("The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us", 25/11/08) saying that to prevent runaway climate change we need a total decarbonisation of our economy. 

 This is correct. Emission cuts on their own will not deliver the mitigation of climate change that we need.

"Mitigation" is a widely brandished term to talk about how to combat climate change. We talk of a "mitigation model" to prevent our planet from warming, and usually this involves CO₂ emission cuts, in the hope that we lessen the damage we are causing to the environment. This is not the same as reversing it.

We can take the analogy of an obese person who is getting fatter and fatter every day because they eat 20 hamburgers a day. Telling them to cut their intake and eat 10 burgers a day instead, will help them decrease the rate at which they are putting on weight, but it will not be a recipe for slimming. If they are more drastic and cut their intake to just a few a day, that will bring them closer to a stable situation, but to reverse this and start slimming requires other ingredients in their life, such as physical exercise.

Our atmosphere has a concentration of greenhouse gases of 430 ppm in CO₂ equivalent, which is tremendously high, and very close to the threshold of 450 ppm that is widely accepted to be a point where climate change can begin to take a very dramatic turn. It is time to start slimming. Eating fewer burgers or cutting down our emissions will not do the job. Any threshold of CO₂ emissions, however low, is a form of environmental vandalism and adds to the already existing problem.

The high concentration of greenhouse gases is already retaining an excess of heat in our planet and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (see our article on global warming).

Even if the UK's Climate Change Bill delivers the target of 80% emission cuts by 2050 and the world joins in with the successor of Kyoto (to be decided in Copenhagen next year) delivering the same level of cuts as the UK (which is very unlikely and over-optimistic), then all we will be able to say is that we have vandalised the environment much less than we would otherwise have done, but the problem of global warming in 2050 will still be much worse than it is now in any event, because during 4 decades of emission cuts there will be emissions nonetheless.

The crux of the matter is that to reverse the problem we must have negative net emissions. This means that our target must be to go beyond zero emissions, beyond decarbonisation and being simply carbon neutral, we must look into capturing carbon from the atmosphere on quite a gargantuan scale.

The world has lost most of its forests in the last century. Redressing the balance involves a reforestation process on a vast and fast scale, in order to dramatically increase the Earth's ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere. The UN's working group on Climate Change has suggested financial compensations to tropical countries who halt deforestation and illegal logging. This is encouraging but not strong enough. Deforestation must stop immediately and we ought to be putting all our financial resources on a very ambitious and long-term reforestation effort.

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and its successor will be determined next year in Copenhagen. There is every sign that Copenhagen 2009 will not be ambitious enough to tackle climate change.

The UN is convening under the Framework Convention on Climate Change next month in Poland to discuss an action plan, following the "Bali action plan" for a framework of cooperation and mitigation that will pave the way to the Copenhagen treaty.

In preparation for this meeting, a UN working group has published a document that puts together the submissions of different countries, their expectations and wish-lists of what the future agreement should be like. The document is not very encouraging reading. As everything with the UN, a gigantic slow-moving organization, whose policies have a decades-lag of where we ought to be to see to the current needs, the document is a toned-down and unambitious action plan that is the outcome of putting together many conflicting interests.

The document suggests a "level of stabilization" of 2^oC for the global temperature increase, and states that we should make sure that temperature rises do not exceed 2.4^oC. This is amusing. We hope the UN knows that we do not have any control over temperature rises, not least because we cannot even predict them with entire certainty. We have in principle control over the level of greenhouse gas emissions, but not over how our atmosphere will react to this and the temperature increase that will follow.

Furthermore, emission cuts will diminish the rate of warming of our planet, but the temperatures will continue increasing over time for as long as the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (currently 430 ppm) remains high. Therefore the concept of any "level of stabilization" makes no scientific sense until the concentration of CO₂ returns to a sustainable level. In order to achieve that, we need to go beyond emission cuts and deep into the territory of carbon capture.

The document also discusses that the concentration of CO₂ should be kept below 450 ppm for as long as possible. However it is entirely possible that even within the current projected emission cuts, we will reach this level in about 10-20 years, at any rate much before 2050.

Norway makes the encouraging suggestion of offering financial help to tropical countries who commit themselves to halt deforestation. The importance of this is enormous. The document also makes the important point that rainforest restoration as a form of carbon capture is to be encouraged. We very much believe that it ought to be a key ingredient of the future agreement.  

New research demonstrates the key role of rainforest restoration to offset carbon emissions. In a research article published in the journal Environmental Research Letters,  a group of researchers found that forest restoration in the tropics is most efficient to combat climate change because carbon capture assists the water cycle, creating cloud feedbacks and decreasing the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

We have always believed in the beneficial impact of our rainforests in fighting global warming, and it is nice to come across research articles endorsing this view. The full article can be read here: http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/-search=59298093.1/1748-9326/3/4/044006/erl8_4_044006.pdf?request-id=c66ad5b9-243f-47f2-b72a-854c7674e6f8 (in PDF format).

The authors emphasize the importance of scientifically assessing the geographical location, specimens of trees and habitat prior to planting, to ensure that the ecosystem will be efficient as a carbon sink.

Without a scientific assessment, tree planting can result in unexpected side effects. For example in temperate climates such as Western Europe and North America, and more specifically in snow covered land, trees can contribute to the darkening of the landscape and increase sunlight retention, increasing regional warming. It is important to assess these factors to manage the forest as a carbon sink and to combat global warming, not to contribute to it.

For this reason Carbonica only supports reforestation and afforestation (conversion of open land into forest) in the tropics (specifically Central America), where the scientific case to consider these as efficient carbon capture and global cooling mechanisms is strong and well documented.

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

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