Top UN Climate Scientist Worried by Forests Plan
Reuters, Copyright 2000
November 24, 2000
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The United Nations (news - web sites)' top climate scientist expressed serious concern on Friday about a U.S.-backed plan to use forests to fight global warming, saying it would harm indigenous peoples and the environment.
``Using forests to fight global warming without environment and social safeguards is absolutely unacceptable,'' Robert Watson, an American who heads the U.N. Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, told reporters.
``It's a very serious concern,'' added Watson, who is also the World Bank's senior scientist, speaking on the sidelines of a U.N. conference trying to agree ways of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases implicated in climate change.
The conference grouping 180 nations was examining the proposal on Friday.
``Replacing virgin forest with plantations would have serious consequences for water resources, soils and for indigenous people,'' Watson said.
A former expert at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he is the world's most authoritative and influential figure on climate change, diplomats and technical experts at the U.N. talks in The Hague say.
The talks are stalled over steps to implement a 1997 pact agreed in Kyoto, Japan, that set a five percent average cut in developed nations' 1990 levels of emissions by 2010.
The conference also seeks to help poor nations avoid becoming big emitters themselves as they develop, for example by adopting clean energy technologies or planting forests to soak up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
But green groups say compromise proposals tabled on Thursday would in effect provide incentives to clear virgin forests worldwide and to replacement them with monoculture plantations.
The proposals go a long way toward meeting U.S. demands to allow both itself and developed nations to count carbon dioxide soaked up by forests, so-called carbon sinks, against emission reduction targets set in Kyoto, experts say.
``Using the world's forests is a good way to fight global warming but only if it is done with safeguards to protect biodiversity,'' said Watson, adding that safeguards had to be agreed.
Watson's panel coordinates and reviews climate research by top government and private institutes around the world to help members of the United Nations formulate climate policy.