Storm brewing in forestry and land use negotiations

We've been getting little peeks and rumours about the revised draft text on Land use, land-use change and forestry that developed countries are working on. It may come out tomorrow or maybe Thursday. Sounds like developed countries have figured out amongst themselves how they want to account for wood stored in harvested wood products and are making progress on how to remove the effects of big natural disturbances like fires from the forest carbon accounts.

The biggest and most troubling news is that they are compiling a new option on how to account for changes in forest management emissions. From what I hear it sounds like all the loopholes any country could want cooked up into a couple of paragraphs. It will be interesting to see how China and other developing countries respond to this game.

You can read an article I wrote about one of these loopholes in Climate Action Network's ECO Newsletter yesterday; it's called Show Us the Emissions!

You can also watch today's media conference by CAN. From 10:10 - 15:50, Jeff Fiedler of The Nature Conservancy talks about this issue as well.

Backroom LULUCF Negotiations Continue

We woke up in Bangkok this morning to oppressive heat and the expectation of a new draft text agreement on the rules for forestry and land use under a revised Kyoto Protocol...but that didn't happen!

Parties continue behind closed doors to come up with the next version. We've been hearing that there is convergence around a number of the key issues but the most important question remains: what are the baselines against which performance is judged. Some developed countries are still trying to create what I think amounts to a meaningless accounting framework: they will tell the world what they expect their emissions to be from forest management in the future and only be punished if they perform worse than this. Countries should take responsibility for any increase in emissions from past levels. What is this whole process about if not about reducing emissions from the past?

Forest Negotiations Begin at Bangkok Climate Change Talks

The first closed-door session on accounting rules for forests and land use is now underway at Bangkok. There will be six negotiating sessions here over the next couple of weeks. It is widely felt that negotiators will be under pressure to make real progress here - without clear rules for how forest emissions affect the compliance of developed countries with emission reduction commitments, there can be no agreement.

At the opening session yesterday, the Chair of the negotiating process under the Kyoto Protocol cited three main issues of consequence:

• How emissions from natural disturbances are dealt with;
• The overall accounting approach for forest management and whether limits need to be placed on what countries can claim;
• How carbon stored in harvested wood products are dealt with.

I have other questions: will there be a commitment to protecting reservoirs of GHGs in intact forests? Will the new rules make countries accountable or a will they create a new slush fund of credits that suit particular national circumstances?

A few parties have started posting their submissions for this session (Canada, Japan and New Zealand so far). These submissions are starting to be heavier on data, so people can see the possible implications of rule changes.

Party Submissions on LULUCF Revealed

Think of this post as a public service announcement: the submissions from Parties on land use, land-use change and forestry are up on the Climate Change Secretariat's website: Australia, Belarus, Canada, Chile, China, EU, Iceland, Japan, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland. I have not yet read these submissions so I cannot yet offer any perspective or response.

The Chair of the negotiations has also released a note on possible text related to these negotiations. See page 6 and pages 14-15.

And post your comments here!