Pubic pressure enabled international policy shift
BY JOSE CHINGU
BRASILIA, BRAZIL – While the whole world will benefit from the global warming treaty signed by world leaders at the U.N. climate talks, another big winner in Copenhagen this week was the Amazon.
Brazil has pledged to ensure zero deforestation of the Amazon under the international treaty to combat global warming and all of the participating nations have pledged to provide the funds to make that possible.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, announcing the zero deforestation pledge said, “This pledge is important not only because it will save forests, but also because it is good for the climate. Deforestation causes more climate pollution than all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world combined. Saving the Amazon protects the Earth’s richest natural treasure and also protects us all in a vulnerable time.”
Lula’s government had to overcome fierce lobbying by the agribusiness industry to make the zero deforestation commitment. Cattle ranchers in particular are one of Brazil’s strongest and wealthiest industries and also the chief cause of deforestation in the Amazon. It is estimated that the cattle industry clears thousands of acres every year to create new grazing land for its livestock.
Defying the cattle industry, therefore, could well have been political suicide for Lula, whose term ends in January of 2011, and for his loyalists when they run for office.
Mass public support, however, gave Lula the political cover he needed to strike a sweeping deal to protect the Amazon. Here in Brasilia as well as in cities and forest villages throughout Brazil, demonstrations called on the president to protect the Amazon. Environmentalists, human rights activists and indigenous groups found common ground on this issue, and they were finally listened to at the global climate deal reached in Copenhagen. The new deal now has a mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation, known as REDD in the language of the treaty. This puts Brazil into negotiations with developed countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Norway, who will provide money and resources to keep the Amazon standing. In a kind of reciprocal back-scratching arrangement, the forests now help those countries to meet their ambitious emissions reductions targets.
The fund-based approach is being praised for its robust measures, which recognize indigenous peoples and local communities that depend on tropical forests. The deal has been championed by environmental groups for an immediate halt to emissions from forestry and because it safeguards clean water and protects biodiversity.
It wasn’t all group hugs in the international negotiations, however. There were moves to try to insert forestry ‘credits’ into the international carbon market, which could be bought and sold between polluting nations.
But rapid action from human rights advocates, financial experts and environmental groups squashed the proposal by demonstrating that the forests and markets don’t mix. Their view is that the move would have created a large pool of low-priced “forest offsets” that would depress carbon prices and undermine investments in clean technologies.
Protesters in Copenhagen likened the relatively unreliable and low-quality offsets to the “sub-prime” mortgages, threatening the integrity of the new carbon trading systems created by the international climate treaty.
Human rights groups also lobbied against the offsetting approach. “If you let someone save a forest in Indonesia but keep on polluting at home, there is not really a net gain as far as the climate goes,” said Joe Greene of the Alliance to Protect Our Kids’ Future.
At the eleventh hour, the treaty negotiators dropped the proposal, and created an independent fund for forests, which all signatories to the climate treaty have agreed to pay into to protect this vital source of carbon storage.
Photo credit: /GREENPEACE / DANIEL BELTRÁ
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