Deal to fight deforestation agreed at climate talks

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Climate talks in Bali reached a deal on Friday to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, hailed as a sign of developing nations' commitment to fighting global warming.
The breakthrough might eventually allow poor but forested nations to turn conservation into a tradeable commodity, with the potential to earn billions of dollars selling carbon credits.
But one of the scheme's key architects warned that, if successful, it will create such large emissions reductions that carbon markets could collapse unless rich nations take on more stringent reductions targets.
Destruction of forests produces about 20 percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, so their conservation is vital to limiting rises in global temperatures.
Deforestation had been left out of previous climate deals because of concerns about how to work out which trees were threatened, and that any scheme would reward countries destroying forests rather than those protecting their resources.
"Forests have been the elephants in the corner of the climate change process," said Andrew Mitchell, executive director of Global Canopy Programme, adding that markets were the only way to find the billions of dollars a year needed to protect forests.
"We cannot expect philanthropy or governments to come up with this amount of money sustainably," he said.
The new deal, which has been agreed but is yet to be formally approved, provides a framework for countries to start pilot projects and lay the groundwork for broader programmes.
A planned $300 million World Bank fund will help pay for forest surveys and other groundwork, and finance the first projects but the scheme has been driven by developing nations.
U.S. scientist Peter Frumhoff, Director of Science and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the project -- also known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) -- was a sign of poorer countries' sense of urgency about tackling global warming.
"It sends a very powerful signal to my home country that developed countries are committed to reducing their emissions in a way that we in the United States must also be committed to."

File photo of the opening of the high-level segment of the UN Climate Change Conference in Nusa Dua, Bali island December 12, 2007. Climate talks in Bali reached a deal on Friday to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, hailed as a sign of developing nations' commitment to fighting global warming. (REUTERS/Supri)

CARBON, DIVERSITY CONCERNS
But Kevin Conrad, executive director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and Papua New Guinea's climate change envoy said that when the pace of programmes picked up, they would generate so many credits it would skew carbon markets.
At present under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, rich nations can pay for emissions' reducing projects in the developing world and earn credits to put towards domestic quotas. But Conrad said REDD required tighter targets.
"The only way that we are going to bring in new supplies is if there are deeper cuts (for rich nations)," he told journalists on the sidelines of the U.N.-led climate talks.
"We are not going to flood the market and then drop prices for everybody and not be able to overcome any of the opportunity costs," he added.
Activists also say the deal does not contain a strong enough commitment to biodiversity or offer any way to help poor countries pay for conservation of already-protected forest.
"We will need to find a new mechanism that values standing forests," Mitchell said. "Because ultimately if this does its job, (deforestation) should go down to nothing."
Also vital is preventing "leakage" of logging and deforestation to countries outside the scheme, which would make any carbon sequestration worthless.

By Emma Graham-Harrison
Copyright © 2007 Reuters

Fleeing rising seas, Pacific villagers seek help at Bali climate conference

KILU, Papua New Guinea (AP): Squealing pigs lit out for the bush and Filomena Taroa herded the grandkids to higher ground last week when the sea rolled in deeper than anyone had ever seen.

What was happening? "I don't know,'' the sturdy, barefoot grandmother told a visitor. "I'd never experienced it before.''

As scientists warn of rising seas from global warming, more and more reports are coming in from villages like this one on Papua New Guinea's New Britain island of flooding from unprecedented high tides. It's happening not only to low-lying atolls, but to shorelines from Alaska to India.

This week, by boat, bus and jetliner, a handful of villagers are converging on Bali, Indonesia, to seek help from the more than 180 nations gathered at the U.N. climate conference. The coastal dwellers' plight -- once theoretical -- appears all too real in 2007, and is spreading and worsening.

Scientists project that seas expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melting land ice may displace millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide in this century if heat-trapping industrial emissions are not sharply curtailed.

A Europe-based research group, the Global Governance Project, will propose at the two-week Bali meeting that an international fund be established to resettle "climate refugees.''

Summarizing the islanders' plight, Ursula Rakova said: "We don't have vehicles, an airport. We're merely victims of what is happening with the industrialized nations emitting `greenhouse gases.'''

The sands of Rakova's islands, the Carteret atoll northeast of Bougainville island, have been giving way to the sea for 20 years. The saltwater has ruined their taro gardens, a food staple, and has contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands now suffer from chronic hunger.

The national government has appropriated US$800,000 (euro545,479.34) to resettle a few Carteret families on Bougainville, out of 3,000 islanders.

"That's not enough,'' Rakova told The Associated Press in Papua New Guinea's capital, Port Moresby. "The islands are getting smaller. Basically, everybody will have to leave.''

In a landmark series of reports this year, the U.N. climate-science network reported seas rose by a global average of about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) annually from 1993 to 2003, as compared with about 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) annually for the previous 10-year period.

But a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher, almost 2.5 centimeters (one inch) every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

"It turns out the ocean sloshes around,'' said the University of Tasmania's Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. "It's moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean's movement is causing sea-level variations -- ups and downs.''

Regional temperatures and atmospheric conditions, currents, undersea and shoreline topography are all factors contributing to sea levels. On some atolls, which are the above-water remnants of ancient volcanoes, the coral underpinnings are subsiding and adding to the sinking effect.

The oceanic "sloshing'' is steadily taking land from such western Pacific island nations as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. In Papua New Guinea, reports have trickled in this year of fast-encroaching tides on shorelines of the northern island province of Manus, the mainland peninsular village of Malasiga and the Duke of York Islands off New Britain.

International media attention paid to the Carteret Islands, the best-known case, seems to have drawn out others, said Papua New Guinea's senior climatologist, Kasis Inape. "Most of the low-lying islands and atolls are in the same situation,'' Inape said in Port Moresby.

Here in Kilu on the Bismarck Sea, on a brilliant blue bay ringed by smoldering volcanoes, swaying coconut palms and thin-walled homes on stilts, the invading waves last year forced some villagers to move their houses inland 20 or more meters (yards) -- taking along their pigs, chickens and fears of worse to come.

It did, on Nov. 25, when the highest waters yet sent them scurrying.

"We think the sea is rising,'' said 20-year-old villager Joe Balele. "We don't know why.''

The scene is repeated on shores across the Pacific, most tragically on tiny island territories with no "inland'' to turn to.

Preparing to head to Bali to present her people's case Tuesday at the U.N. climate conference, Rakova searched for words to explain what was happening back home.

"Our people have been there 300 or 400 years,'' she said. "We'll be moving away from the islands we were born in and grew up in. We'll have to give up our identity.''

Greenpeace applauds New Zealand fossil fuel ban for power generation

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP): New Zealand introduced legislation Tuesday to ban new power plants that burn fossil fuels for a decade, winning rare plaudits from environmental activist group Greenpeace.

The bill introduced to Parliament Tuesday also proposes an emissions trading scheme for reducing greenhouse gases.

New thermal electricity generation above 10 megawatts whose fuel source is more than 20 percent oil, coal or gas, will be banned under the 10-year plan, Climate Change Minister David Parker said.

Already 65 percent of the nation's electricity is generated from renewable resources, mainly hydroelectric plants. Wind, geothermal power and other renewable fuel sources will be key for future electricity generation, Parker said in a statement.

Greenpeace immediately congratulated New Zealand for "leading the way on renewable electricity.''

"This is unprecedented internationally,'' said Greenpeace climate campaigner Susannah Bailey. "The ban sends a clear message to power generators that fossil fuels have no part to play in New Zealand's future.''

Parker, who is also energy minister, said some exemptions will apply: The fuel source can contain more than 20 percent fossil fuels if the remainder is made up of waste, when the needs of isolated communities are "most logically'' met by thermal generation, or in time of emergency. He did not define emergency.

The emissions trading part of the legislation will establish New Zealand emission units, linked to Kyoto emission units for transfer to offshore buyers.

The scheme will apply to the forestry sector from January 2008, transport fuels from 2009, industry from 2010 and the agriculture and waste sectors from 2013.

In early October, Prime Minister Helen Clark unveiled an ambitious plan to halve transport greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 and generate 90 percent of New Zealand's electricity supply from non-carbon renewable resources by 2025.

The Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill must pass through four debating stages in Parliament, plus a study by a Select Committee, before it can become law.

Australia buoys hopes at Bali climate talks

By David Fogarty

BALI, Indonesia (Reuters) - Australia raised hopes of global action to fight climate change on Monday by agreeing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, isolating the United States at U.N.-led talks in Bali as the only rich nation not in the pact.

Australia's decision won a standing ovation at the opening of tough two-week negotiations on the Indonesian resort isle. The talks aim to pull together rich and poor countries around a common agenda to agree a broader successor to Kyoto by 2009.

A Greenpeace activist dressed in a polar bear costume hugs a globe outside the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Nusa Dua, Bali island December 3, 2007. (REUTERS/Supri)

"I think I can speak for all present here by expressing a sigh of relief," conference host and Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar told the opening session of Australia's steps to ratify the Protocol.

New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took the oath of office on Monday. His first official duty was signing documents to ratify Kyoto, ending his country's long-held opposition to the climate agreement that runs until 2012.

About 190 nations are in Bali seeking a breakthrough for a new global pact to include the United States and developing countries to fight climate change to avert droughts, heatwaves and rising seas that will hit the poor hardest.

"The world is watching closely," Witoelar told delegates at the Dec. 3-14 meeting.

"Climate change is unequivocal and accelerating," he said. "It is becoming increasingly evident that the most severe impacts of climate change will be felt by poor nations."

A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

TOP EMITTER

The United States, as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, has been feeling the heat from developing nations demanding the rich make stronger commitments to curb emissions.

Australia, the world's top coal exporter and among the world's highest per-capita greenhouse gas polluters, has been criticised for years for refusing the ratify Kyoto.

"It was an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat, said of the ovation.

The United States was unfazed.

"We respect Australia's decision," Harlan Watson, head of the U.S. delegation, told reporters. "We're not here to be a roadblock. We're committed to a successful conclusion here."

The United States has backed voluntary targets to fight climate change, but was viewing a new deal with an open mind, Watson said, who didn't rule out legally binding commitments.

De Boer told delegates rich nations had to agree to axe emissions from burning fossil fuels to encourage poor countries to start braking their own rising emissions.

"Bold action in the north can fuel clean growth in the south," he said, urging a sharing of clean energy technologies such as solar or wind power. "I fervently hope you will make a breakthrough here in Bali by adopting a negotiating agenda."

Others urged caution.

"At the opening ceremonies for the climate talks in Bali, there was lots of good will and optimism, but there is clearly a challenging road ahead," said Angela Anderson, at the Washington-based National Environmental Trust.

And governments' opening remarks hinted at tough talks ahead. China insisted rich countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, while Japan said China's active participation in a new climate deal was "essential".

Climate change talks have been bogged down by arguments over who curbs their fossil fuel use and carbon emissions most, and how to share that burden between rich and poor nations.

China and India, among the world's top emitters and comprising more than a third of humanity, say it's unfair that they agree to targets when rich countries contributed most to the problem, and as they try to lift millions out of poverty.

(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle, Gerard Wynn and Adhityani Arga in Bali and James Grubel in Canberra)

Copyright © 2007 Reuters

Climate change may wipe some Indonesian islands off map

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Many of Indonesia's islands may be swallowed up by the sea if world leaders fail to find a way to halt rising sea levels at this week's climate change conference on the resort island of Bali.

Doomsters take this dire warning by Indonesian scientists a step further and predict that by 2035, the Indonesian capital's airport will be flooded by sea water and rendered useless; and by 2080, the tide will be lapping at the steps of Jakarta's imposing Dutch-era Presidential palace which sits 10 km inland (about 6 miles).

An aerial view of an unnamed Indonesian island in Riau province October 6, 2007. Many of Indonesia's islands may be swallowed up by the sea if world leaders fail to find a way to halt rising sea levels at this week's climate change conference on the resort island of Bali. (REUTERS/Yuli Seperi)

The Bali conference is aimed at finding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, on cutting climate warming carbon emissions. With over 17,000 islands, many at risk of being washed away, Indonesians are anxious to see an agreement reached and quickly implemented that will keep rising seas at bay.

Just last week, tides burst through sea walls, cutting a key road to Jakarta's international airport until officials were able to reinforce coastal barricades.

"Island states are very vulnerable to sea level rise and very vulnerable to storms. Indonesia ... is particularly vulnerable," Nicholas Stern, author of an acclaimed report on climate change, said on a visit to Jakarta earlier this year.

Even large islands are at risk as global warming might shrink their land mass, forcing coastal communities out of their homes and depriving millions of a livelihood.

The island worst hit would be Java, which accounts for more than half of Indonesia's 226 million people. Here rising sea levels would swamp three of the island's biggest cities near the coast -- Jakarta, Surabaya and Semarang -- destroying industrial plants and infrastructure.

"Tens of millions of people would have to move out of their homes. There is no way this will happen without conflict," Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said recently.

"The cost would be very high. Imagine, it's not just about building better infrastructure, but we'd have to relocate people and change the way people live," added Witoelar, who has said that Indonesia could lose 2,000 of its islands by 2030 if sea levels continue to rise.

CRUNCH TIME AT BALI

Environmentalists say this week's climate change meeting in Bali will be crunch time for threatened coastlines and islands as delegates from nearly 190 countries meet to hammer out a new treaty on global warming.

Several small island nations including Singapore, Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Caribbean countries have raised the alarm over rising sea levels which could wipe them off the map.

The Maldives, a cluster of 1,200 islands renowned for its luxury resorts, has asked the international community to address climate change so it does not sink into a watery grave.

According to a U.N. climate report, temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cm and 59 cm (seven and 23 inches) this century.

Under current greenhouse gas emission levels, Indonesia could lose about 400,000 sq km of land mass by 2080, including about 10 percent of Papua, and 5 percent of both Java and Sumatra on the northern coastlines, Armi Susandi, a meteorologist at the Bandung Institute of Technology, told Reuters.

Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, has faced intense pressure over agricultural land for decades.

Susandi, who has researched the impact of climate change on Indonesia, estimated sea levels would rise by an average of 0.5 cm a year until 2080, while the submersion rate in Jakarta, which lies just above sea level, would be higher at 0.87 cm a year.

A study by the UK-based International Institute for Economy and Development (IIED) said at least 8 out of 92 of the outermost small islands that make up the country's borders are vulnerable.

TOO MANY ISLANDS TO COUNT

Less than half of Indonesia's islands are inhabited and many are not even named. Now, the authorities are hastily counting the coral-fringed islands that span a distance of 5,000 km, the equivalent of going from Ireland to Iran, before it is too late.

Disappearing islands and coastlines would not only change the Indonesian map, but could also restrict access to mineral resources situated in the most vulnerable spots, Susandi said.

He estimates that land loss alone would cost Indonesia 5 percent of its GDP without taking into account the loss of property and livelihood as millions migrate from low-lying coastlines to cities and towns on higher ground.

There are 42 million people in Indonesia living in areas less than 10 meters above the average sea level, who could be acutely affected by rising sea levels, the IIED study showed.

A separate study by the United Nations Environment Programme in 1992 showed in two districts in Java alone, rising waters could deprive more than 81,000 farmers of their rice fields or prawn and fish ponds, while 43,000 farm labourers would lose their job.

One solution is to cover Indonesia's fragile beaches with mangroves, the first line of defence against sea level rise, which can break big waves and hold back soil and silt that damage coral reefs.

A more expensive alternative is to erect multiple concrete walls on the coastlines, as the United States has done to break the tropical storms that hit its coast, Susandi said.

Some areas, including the northern shores of Jakarta, are already fitted with concrete sea barriers, but they are often damaged or too low to block rising waters and big waves such as the ones that hit Jakarta in November.

"It will be like permanent flooding," Susandi said. "By 2050, about 24 percent of Jakarta will disappear," possibly even forcing the capital to move to Bandung, a hill city 180 km east of Jakarta.

Copyright © 2007 Reuters