Week 1-Day 5: UN Climate Change Conference
Nigel Sizer’s 5th post from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, which kicked off on Monday, December 3rd.
Can we connect the poor with global carbon markets?
The poor are already suffering from climate change and they are most vulnerable to future changes in rainfall patterns and temperature, and to the resulting impacts on farming, fisheries, water availability and quality, shifting diseases, storm surge, salinization of coastal soils, floods and droughts, and the list goes on.
Adding insult to injury, as many have noted on the sidelines of the UN climate meeting, the poor are excluded from accessing the flows of funds resulting from the UN climate convention and the association Kyoto Protocol. Billions of dollars is flowing, but it is going to large-scale industrial investments such as landfill and coal mine methane capture, cleaning up coal plants in China, and the new hot option, protecting vast swathes of forest in the tropics. Small projects can’t cover the transaction costs involved. But it may be even worse than this. There are probably cases where large-scale efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions actually make the poor even poorer. Perhaps the clearest example is cases where rural people are pushed off their land as developers move in to establish oil palm or other plantations for biofuel production. Local activists claim that this is already happening in Indonesia.
Rare is deeply concerned about the opportunity that is perhaps being lost to help communities conserve forests, use healthy clean energy instead of smoky woodfuel and kerosene, expand productive agroforestry systems, and even to reduce poverty. We are therefore starting a feasibility analysis of a concept we call the “CO2mmunity Carbon Bank.” Our vision is to develop low cost tools and capability to channel carbon financing to small-scale development projects that also enhance biodiversity conservation.
>>Click here to read more about Rare’s “CO2mmunity Carbon Bank” pilot program.
With this in mind, last night I hosted a brainstorming dinner for ten leading thinkers and entrepreneurs from the world of climate change, community development and conservation. Guests included the founder and president of Ecosecurities (one of the leading companies in the sourcing, developing, and trading of emission reduction credits); Pedro Mauro Costa, and his wife Ruth Nussbaum (he leads a top-flight forest and conservation consulting group); Gerhard Dieterle, senior forestry advisor with the World Bank; Jonathan Wootliff, former head of communications for Greenpeace International; Bill Breed, top climate change advisor with the US Agency for International Development; and Adrian Wells, who leads the UK government’s efforts to partner with Indonesia on climate change issues.
Four hours of non-stop debate provided great input. By the end of the evening we agreed that we had a complex jigsaw puzzle of ideas, opportunities, challenges, and issues on the table in front of us, and that if we can assemble those pieces in the right way we would be onto something extremely important. Sonia Media, who supervises all of Ecosecurities’ emissions reduction partnerships globally (over 500 projects), helped us end discussion on a position note. “Now is the time to try to do this,” she said, adding, “There is a rapidly growing demand for carbon offsets that also help the poor and have other benefits.”
Rare will now roll out the feasibility analysis for the CO2mmunity Carbon Bank, and if it’s favorable, we plan to develop the tools and pilot the program in Indonesia starting in 2008.
