The Governator is back. “Action is needed now, and action is what we’re taking with R20,” said Arnold Schwarzenegger at a meeting this week at the University of California, Davis. But there may be less to it than meets the eye. China did not sign on. The Guardian reports that a Dutch official, who did sign on, said he thought it was just another empty promise.
R20 stands for the Regions of Climate Action. R20’s first action was to announce two sub-national REDD projects, one in Chiapas in Mexico, the other in Acre in Brazil. Under the R20 deal, the two states will be able to sell carbon offsets through California’s cap and trade scheme.
Schwarzenegger, Governor Arnobio Marques de Almeida, Jr. from Brazil and Governor Juan Jose Sabines Guerrero from Mexico signed a Memorandum of Understanding to set up a REDD working group to develop recommendations aimed at bringing sub-national REDD projects into California’s cap-and-trade scheme, which is due to start in 2012. Up to 8% of California’s emissions reduction targets can be met by carbon offsets, including from REDD projects.
The first meeting of the REDD working group will take place during the COP 16 meeting in Cancun and the first set of recommendations are expected by October 2011.
The meeting at the University of California, Davis was the third Governors Global Climate Summit. On the Climate Summit website, is the following statement explaining why the governors believe that action should take place at the sub-national level:
As progress on climate change has stalled at both national and international levels, there is growing consensus that new actors must help tackle the climate challenge. Subnational governments are key actors for many reasons:
- According to the UNDP, most investments to reduce GHG emissions and adapt to climate change—50 to 80 percent for reductions and up to 100 percent for adaptation—must take place at the subnational level;
- Subnational governments implement national policies, and can also provide solutions to climate change when national-level action stalls;
- Subnational governments, such as California, are global leaders in reducing emissions and creating green jobs and these efforts could be replicated and scaled up in both developed and developing countries;
- Subnational governments are politically close to where projects must be implemented yet remain sufficiently elevated to achieve wider benefits by integrating projects into regional planning; and
- Subnational governments provide a perfect interface for addressing both urban and rural issues and thus cover all key aspects of the fight against climate change.
To say that the whole endeavour is fundamentally flawed would be too generous. Before AB 32 was signed, Schwarzenegger said
“I say the debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now. Global warming and the pollution and burning of fossil fuels that cause it are threats we see here in California and everywhere around the world.”
Which sounds great. Except that AB 32 only requires reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. And it allows carbon offsets to create loopholes in an already weak target. Currently, REDD credits are the only offsets specifically proposed in the regulations.
There is an explanation of California’s Air Resource Board proposed regulations to implement the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) on the Tropical Forest Group’s blog. Tropical Forest Group outlines the requirements for REDD credits to be traded under California’s cap-and-trade scheme as follows:
Proposed California Sectoral Requirements for REDD
- Historical deforestation emissions must be calculated for “gross” deforestation over the past 10 years.
- Jurisdictions & ARB [Air Resource Board] must approve plans to lower emissions below historical emissions by 2020.
- Forest carbon inventories must follow IPCC guidance, likely at Tier 2 or higher.
- Jurisdictions that use nested-REDD projects must have accounting systems to reconcile nested project-based GHG reductions with sector-level accounting.
- Jurisdictions must plan to retire and ensure permanence of the REDD credits.
- Mechanisms must be in place for public consultation and participation in the program design.
In other words, the loophole (carbon offsets) is full of loopholes. Leakage will be a serious problem – as deforestation might be reduced in one province or state, but could increase in neighbouring states or in other countries. Calculating deforestation baselines is almost inevitably fraught with error, estimates and room for fraud. Ensuring permanence of REDD credits is particularly difficult. REDD-Monitor looks forward to reading the reports written by experts fitted with 20/20 future vision goggles who can accurately predict the future for us – particularly in a changing climate, where the likelihood of the Amazon going up in smoke is increasing rather than decreasing.
I can see that there are problems with improperly used carbon offsetts, especially when combined with weak reduction targets, but this issue of permenance of REDD confuses me. Are other types of offsett, for example renewable energy projects, also required to demonstrate permenance?
Presumably this would mean it would have to be demonstrated that any fossil fuels that were not burnt because of the alternative energy source would remain in the ground. This seems a little unlikely.
At best any offsett represents a delay in emissions (that oil will get burnt one day regardelss of how many wind farms there are) rather than an avoidance. So why is there so much concern about permanence of REDD?
@Nick – Thanks for your comment. I’ll try to explain why permanence is such an important issue in REDD. Forests store carbon which would be released to the atmosphere if the forest were cut down. Under an offset scheme the amount of carbon not emitted is traded, allowing fossil fuel emissions to happen somewhere else. Excluding permanence for a moment, if all goes according to plan (i.e. the baseline is accurately measured, the amount of carbon is accurately measured, there is no leakage and the counterfactual story made up to justify the sale of the credits is something like what actually happened – all of which amounts to more or less a miracle) then the carbon emitted by the company buying the carbon credits is equal to the carbon stored in the forest (that would otherwise have been emitted if it wasn’t for REDD). And the result is zero emissions reductions.
No we come onto permanence. If the forest ends up being cut down, burnt or converted to a eucalyptus plantation then there are the emissions from the burning forest plus the fossil fuel emissions from the sale of the carbon credits. Bad news all round.
I’m no fan of any carbon offsets. I’m not even sure that REDD offsets are the worst type of offset – there’s a lot of competition out there. But I am sure that the permanence issue is crucially important with REDD.
@Chris and Nick, the issue of permanence is exceptionally critical when considering REDD. The overarching objective is to focus upon the conservation of resources that absorb or mitigate the damage we do when burning both renewable and non renewable energy resources. Additionally, we can also say that in many instances preservation of resources in terms of REDD objectives also leads to the conservation of habitat biodiversity for many threatened species. However; one has to feel that Nicks observations are quite correct. We should not fail to understand that we should be aware that the burning of any carbon based fuel (renewable or not) has to stop if we are to avaoid the predicted disasters associated with climate change caused from the combustion of carbon.
Permanence of forest carbon is a little misleading. The idea is to tie up some carbon in the trees and soils only long enough to bridge the time needed to develop better energy sources than fossil carbon, not forever. In theory for sure, and in practice if done well, the role forests play in the carbon cycle is taken best advantage of to buffer the worst effects of emissions based climate change. As a tree guy, I will go out on a limb here and predict that it will soon be discovered that forests mitigate and buffer climate change at many more levels and in ways hitherto not known to us…Go REDD!
The issue of permanence is also addressed by retaining say, 20% of the credits in a pool, insurance style, on the theory that probably less than 20% of the forests in projects will be compromised.
@Ric Thanks for your comment. You state that “The idea is to tie up some carbon in the trees and soils only long enough to bridge the time needed to develop better energy sources than fossil carbon, not forever.”
This sounds, at least in theory, like a good idea. But let’s think through what REDD offset credits do in practice. The offset credits will be bought by companies that do not want to reduce their emissions, but would rather pay to be allowed to continue polluting. Other companies might buy carbon credits at a time when the price is cheap (for example during the freefall stage of the ongoing economic and financial crisis) in order to build new coal-fired power stations at some point in the future. So what REDD (and other carbon credits) are actually encouraging is the locking in of dirty technology. REDD credits provide no incentives whatsoever to develop clean energy.
Incidentally, Jago Wadley has a couple of questions for you on a different comment thread (click here).
Tropical Forest Group has posted the MoU between Acre, Chiapas and California, on the TFG blog. The MoU is dated 16 November 2010:
Predictably enough, Environmental Defense Fund loves this deal. It’s a “a historic achievement to reduce climate change,” according to EDF’s gushing press release. It won’t reduce emissions (just shift them from one place to another), it will allow pollution to continue in California and it will lock in polluting technology. I suppose that is a “historic achievement” but not in the sense that I suspect EDF meant.
Steve Schwartzman demonstrates his utter failure to grasp the issues in EDF’s press release:
So black is white, redd is green and not reducing greenhouse gas emissions means “climate leadership” and “effectively combat[ing] climate change”.
@Chris…I couldn’t find any questions from Jago on the link you gave…
@ric – sorry the link was wrong. I’ve corrected it. Jago’s questions are here:
http://redd-monitor.org/2009/11/17/what-would-a-4%c2%b0c-warmer-world-mean-for-the-amazon-rainforest/comment-page-1/#comment-65090
Ric and Jago both make great points. Additionally, there is a whole plethora of issues related to equating CO2 being extracted from sedimentary reservoirs (fossil fuels) with CO2 stored in the atmosphere or biosphere.
This, along with additionality, leakage and permanence issues (to name a few), easily render REDD useless at best, and dangerously evasive and unjust at worst.
Sorry, I meant Chris and Jago :), rather than Ric
Governor’s Climate and Forests Task Force is over?
@Carolina – No, the Governor’s Climate and Forests Task Force is not over – at least as far as I know. Here’s the website: http://www.gcftaskforce.org.