Climate and Forest Talks Resume
American Lands
December 6, 2000
Full Call-In day again next Tuesday
This week has brought great news for efforts to curb climate change. Rushing to finalize some sort of climate agreement prior to the end of the Clinton Administration, today the U.S. and the E.U. will resume talks on how to use and credit forests for soaking up and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), as well as other important aspects of implementing the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change. Disagreements over forests - greatly exacerbated by the preposterous initial U.S. demand to use "business-as-usual" forestry to account for up to half of its obligation to reduce CO2 emissions - caused the collapse and official "suspension" of the climate summit in The Hague just nine days ago.
The first phase of the new round of talks will occur this week in Ottawa. If all goes well a ministerial level of talks will occur next week in Oslo, with the goal producing an actual written agreement. Will the Europeans, angered by U.S. attempts to create a business as usual forestry "loophole" in the Treaty, refuse to allow even the protection and restoration of native forests to receive credit and financial encouragement as an emissions reduction? Will the U.S. continue to hold out for credit for business as usual, rather than improved, forestry - thereby avoiding both real emissions reductions from cars and power plants and real increased protection for the world's forests? With negotiations resuming tomorrow, these are immediate questions, and only immediate action can move the U.S. position and increase the likelihood that forest protection is in the final deal, while the business-as-usual forest loophole is not.
Activists' good work by phone and fax has been paying off. We have already motivated the Administration to work for rules that contain no perverse incentives to log old growth.
Calls and faxes are needed immediately to the Administration to influence this week's first phase of talks. Next Tuesday there will be a full-blown, open-the-floodgates, call-in day to move the ministerial round. On both occasions, please call Frank Loy, the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, at 202/ 647-6240, or fax him at 202/ 647-0753.
Faxes on letterhead will carry extra weight. Here are two principle points to move the U.S. position in the right direction:
1) Forest rules under the climate change treaty should protect and restore native forests all over the world. 2) Business-as-usual forestry isn't a valid emissions reduction and shouldn't receive any credit at all.
BACKGROUND - WHY BUSINESS-AS-USUAL FORESTRY IS A LOOPHOLE
The easiest way to understand what business-as-usual forestry is to consider what it's not. It's not protecting more forests, particularly private ones, by reducing the amount of land we log every year. That step would be a bona-fide emissions reduction because logging converts most of each felled tree's wood into carbon dioxide rather than wood products. Since it would be a change in the way we do things, it's called "additional to business as usual".
Business as usual forestry (BAUF), by contrast, is continuing to manage forests exactly the same way we do now. Overall, U.S. forests are absorbing CO2 because we have a lot of tree growth on abandoned farmland in the east. This more than offsets our emissions from logging elsewhere. While it does cause our emissions to be lower than if the U.S. contained no growing trees, BAUF can't make next year's emissions any lower than this year's, as we committed to doing in the Kyoto Treaty. Business-as-usual forestry can only keep our emissions the same.
Or can it? Due to loopholes left in the Treaty when it was negotiated, the door wasn't slammed on counting BAUF as an emissions reduction by ignoring its absorptions when calculating 1990 emissions but then using them, for accounting purposes, to decrease reported emissions in 2008 and beyond! This loophole is known as "gross-net forestry accounting".
The cure would be to credit only forestry that is clearly additional to business as usual as an offset to what we spew out of tailpipes and smokestacks. The permanent protection of both primary and recovering native forests clearly qualifies. The financial incentives that come with the credits could be a boon to protecting forests worldwide, particularly those on private lands or in countries without meaningful environmental laws.
For more information please contact: Darcy Davis, American Lands, 503-978-0132, darcydavis@americanlands.org Aaron Rappaport, American Lands, 202-547-9098, arappaport@mindspring.com
Steve Holmer
Campaign Coordinator
American Lands
726 7th Street SE
Washington, D.C. 20003
202/547-9105
202/547-9213 fax
mailto:wafcdc@americanlands.org
http://www.americanlands.org