Nigel Sizer’s 4th post from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, which kicked off on Monday, December 3rd.
This afternoon, I stepped out of the side events on science, poverty and climate change impacts, and headed round the corner to the meeting hosted by the International Emissions Trading Association. What a different crowd — mostly older men, well dressed, and with a lavish buffet luncheon. Having eaten well, I joined their session on, “State and Future of the Carbon Market”…and quickly dozed off to sleep. The key message I took home was that the value and price of Carbon is volatile but generally rising quite fast.
Seriously though, this is stunningly different from the (many) UN meetings I have attended on biodiversity and on forests. The private sector is here in force and a great deal of money is already at play. The Carbon market over the past 12 months has been worth over $30 billion. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and many others are getting into the game, and this is great – the more money people can make out of protecting the climate the more likely we will solve the problem quickly.
The evening before my wife Antika and I, together with WWF Indonesia’s Mubariq Ahmed and the World Bank’s Gerhard Dieterle, joined the “Gala Dinner” hosted by Sindicatum Carbon Capital, a boutique investment bank, based in London, that has raised over $1 billion for Carbon offset deals and is busy in China and Indonesia setting up programs to capture coalmine methane and cap massive landfills. The evening included a wonderful dance performance, the presenting of a check for $100,000 to the UN World Food Program and a banquet. Intriguingly they announced the first major investment by a Middle Eastern fund in the climate change business.
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Mrs. Antika Sizer, with the World Bank’s Gerhard Dieterle
at the Sindicatum Carbon Capital gala
We need to build a bridge between this global market and conservation, poverty reduction and climate change adaptation efforts on the ground. More on that tomorrow!
I started my career as a field ecologist in the Brazilian Amazon. While I was there a major research program was just beginning to analyze the Amazon’s relationship with weather and climate. Some results of this work were presented today by Dr. Antonio Nobre of Brazil’s National Amazon Research Institute.
Get this: each DAY the Amazon rainforest evaporates 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere, which, if we did it ourselves, would take the equivalent of 145 years of power generated by the world’s largest hydro dam, Itaipu (which also happens to be in Brazil). Think about the value of that ecosystem service, which produces the rain that works its way down the Andes and eventually ends up watering southern Brazil and neighboring countries, where 70 percent of Latin America’s economy is based. Maybe conserving the Amazon ecosystem would be a good idea after all!
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Modern dance performance at the gala dinner.
Note the trees being symbolically planted to sequester Carbon!
Finally, in case we lose site of biodiversity, there is an emerging scientific consensus that the complexity and species richness of Earth’s ecosystems are key to their resilience and fundamental function. It is so complex we will NEVER understand it, and most of it we never see. New research found, for example, THREE MILLION UNDESCRIBED SPECIES OF BACTERIA LIVING ON JUST SEVEN SPECIES OF TROPICAL TREES. We may, however, be on the verge of being able to monetize the value of the services of these ecosystems as the political and economic system finally notes that their conservation is vital if we are to survive (strange it took so long for them to realize that we have only one planet). In other words, climate change, while the greatest threat to life on Earth, could ultimately end up being the trigger that leads humanity to conserve the biosphere in all its richness and beauty.
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