By Chris Lang, REDD MONITOR

7 December 2015 - Today marks the start of the second week of the UN climate change negotiations in Paris. After a week of negotiations we have a Draft Paris Outcome.

The draft outcome contains 940 pairs of square brackets. There’s nothing in there about fossil fuels. The word forest appears 11 times and the word deforestation once. REDD appears 11 times.

There’s a REDD paragraph (Article 3 bis), which does little more than refer to the Warsaw Framework for REDD Plus.

Negotiations on REDD were completed in June 2015, so there’s no real need to mention REDD in Paris. But Kevin Conrad and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations have spent a large part of the last ten years telling us how important REDD is, and they are not likely to stop any time soon.

New carbon markets to be created in Paris?

The word “market” only appears once in the Draft Paris Outcome, and its in the context of enhancing “non-market-based approaches”. However, as Oscar Reyes points out, this is partly because markets have been replaced by variations on the theme of internationally transferred mitigation options. Clever, eh?

 

Pablo Solón notes that a new carbon offset mechanism could be created under a mechanism to support sustainable development (Article 3 ter). One of the aims of the Sustainable Development Mechanism would be to:

“[Provide for net global emission reductions through the cancellation of a share of units generated, transferred, used or acquired]

“In other words,” Solón writes, “carbon credits from different kinds of projects can be bought and traded, to offset emissions.” The Sustainable Development Mechanism would build on the mechanism defined under Article 6 and Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. Article 6 created carbon offsets and Article 12 created the Clean Development Mechanism.

Land and forests

Kate Dooley is in Paris, and has written an overview of the negotiations so far from a forests perspective for FERN. Here is her report in full:

As we enter the second week of the Paris climate summit, four years of technical negotiations (under the working group of the Ad-hoc Durban Platform (ADP) have finally drawn to a close with the production of a Draft Paris Outcome. This document now passes to Ministers who will spend the next five days locked in political negotiations aimed at turning this draft in to a new global climate treaty, by December 11th.
 
Despite this milestone, there are still major outstanding issues to be agreed.
 
Political momentum is growing for agreeing to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, (or to at least reference this alongside the more widely known 2C limit), with the objective of protecting the countries most vulnerable to the worst effects of runaway climate change. Yet so far this increased ambition has not been followed up with bolder measures for supporting (especially developing) countries to deliver the rapid emissions reductions needed to achieve it (in the parlance of the Paris climate conference, these measures are called ‘means of implementation’ (MoI), and include finance, technology transfer and capacity building support).
 
This disconnect has led to some strange positioning. Some of the historically lower per-capita polluters, such as India, are refusing to support a 1.5C temperature limit, while high per-capita polluters such as Australia support 1.5C, but refuse to discuss climate finance.
 
On Friday, the G77 walked out of a negotiating session on adaptation, after a number of industrialised countries bracketed all reference to adaptation finance (‘bracketed’ is another piece of climate summit parlance, meaning highlighting certain sections of text as contentious, up for negotiation or even complete removal). The G77 has raised concerns that developed countries are refusing to engage in negotiations of key issues that would empower developing countries to cope with climate change and contribute to the global response.
 
The overall ‘purpose’ of the Agreement also contains a reference to human rights and gender equity. Previous language which included the rights of indigenous peoples, gender equality, intergenerational equity, a just transition, food security and the integrity of ecosystems has been moved to the preamble, therefore weakening reference to these crucial issues, amid a strong civil society backlash against Norway and the US for speaking out against including human rights in the text.
 
Some of the main issues to watch out for in the coming days:
 
Long-term global goal, raising the spectre of flawed forest carbon offsets.
 
A contentious issue which Ministers will need to resolve is the long-term goal of the agreement, supposed to provide a collective target guiding long-term action. Options range from more ambitious quantitative goals of peaking and rapid emission reductions, to zero greenhouse gas emissions or decarbonisation, to more qualitative language such as a ‘low emissions transformation’. A much debated goal of net-zero emissions is no longer in the text; welcome news for civil society which has widely opposed net-zero, seeing it as a green light for using land and forests as ‘carbon sinks’ to mitigate emissions, risking land grabs and threatening food security. However, ‘climate neutrality’ is still there in the text, which carries essentially the same meaning (that emissions are offset by removals), and could even be interpreted to support dangerous geo-engineering approaches which try to limit warming despite emission increases.
 
Forests, Agriculture and food security
 
The EU, in line with its Council Conclusions, has been supporting a reference to food security in the agreement, along with a handful of other countries. Achieving food security is an integral part of the UN sustainable development goals and refers to physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food. A number of developing countries prefer to reference ‘food production’ over ‘food security’, as production does not imply any restraints on industrial agricultural practices. Leaders in the ‘production’ camp are countries like Argentina and Uruguay, which are net-agricultural exporters. For the same reason, these countries are also resisting any reference to the land sector or land-use, fearing the term could imply mitigation obligations on the agricultural sector.
 
Land-use, forests and human rights (and carbon trading)
 
At the moment there are still references to accounting rules for land use, and internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (which is the new euphemism for carbon trading). It is likely that both of these will be lost from the text. In particular there is a lot of opposition to mentioning land (as mentioned above), and the final result is likely to be a reference only to emissions and removals. The problem here is that this emphasises the role of land in removing carbon from the atmosphere (a carbon sink), but does not clearly link this role with the other crucial roles that land plays in the lives of billions of people. There is risk in focussing on using land to sequester carbon, without explicitly recognising that this could impact the human rights, land tenure rights and food security of local communities and indigenous peoples living on and using that same land.
 
A group of countries – most notably the Philippines, have supported language that recognizes existing international obligations and seeks to develop principles after Paris that would ensure the integrity and resilience of natural ecosystems, respect customary and sustainable land use systems, respect indigenous peoples’ and communities’ tenure rights and ensure food security. While the EU has shown support for food security, it has not gone so far as to support a work programme to develop principles on how food security and other multiple uses of land would be protected.
 
REDD+
 
There has been some debate over whether to include a reference to REDD+ in the new agreement or not. REDD+ is currently in the text, in what is called Article 3 ‘bis’, which defines a REDD+ mechanism and refers to the existing Warsaw Framework for REDD+. While the majority of countries do not want to see any reference at all to REDD+ in the text, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, a group of rainforest nations led by Panama, want to establish a new REDD+ institution, which would centralise REDD+ finance. Brazil in particular is concerned that any reference to REDD+ could be seen as redefining REDD+ or requiring reinterpretation of the existing decisions. Negotiations on REDD+ officially finished in June, and should be formally adopted by the COP this week. There is no clear substantive need therefore to refer explicitly to REDD+ in the new climate treaty, and such a move could be interpreted by the outside world as support for forest carbon markets, when in fact there is no direct link between REDD+ as defined in the Warsaw Framework and financing REDD+ via carbon trading.