Forest footprint disclosure

Last Wednesday, the Forest Footprint Disclosure (FDD) project unwrapped its first report in London. This new organisation, funded in part by the British government, aims to highlight the amount of forest destruction involved in big business. A "forest footprint" indicates the extent to which corporations are relying on unsustainable practices, such as rainforest destruction, to do business.

On the face of it, one might wonder why Fortune 500 companies would be willing to investigate, and then reveal, the extent to which the products they buy are from unsustainable, or even downright illegal, sources. And, true enough only 35 companies participated in the FFD this first year.

It turns out, though, that some companies are interested in doing this. One reason is the reputation risk that may come with their brand, whether it is Clarke's shoes, Dove or Kit Kat, companies have a great deal of money banked on a brand, and they know what damage can be done when the NGOs get nasty.

Another reason, partly related to this, is that dealing with unsustainable ways, or with practices that are likely to bring in bad PR (like cutting virgin rainforest), is also something that asset managers want to know. This sort of project helps investors identify how an organisation’s activities and supply chains contribute to deforestation, and how this links with their forest footprint and their value. FFD says it is backed by 34 financial institutions with $3.5 trillion in collective assets under management.

At the end of the day, companies need to know the provenance of the products they buy. They need to know whether what they sell is legal and sustainable. The issue of child labour harmed parts of the clothing industry, and so there is the possibility that rainforest destruction could become a similar kind of problem. Pictures of dead orangutans are powerful, and shareholders don't like it. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Indices do affect companies. Access to Medicines index, I hear, is already leading companies to change their policies towards drug access.

On a final word, for now, on the FDD. It brought together some quite interesting people from both sides of the fence. From the corporate world and the green NGOs. This conversation, which I caught part of, was overheard...

Paper industry man: Why did you call for a 12-month moratorium on cutting forests?

Green NGO man: We didn't, we called for a 12-month moratorium on cutting virgin rainforest for paper?

Paper industry: But we don't cut virgin rainforest for paper.

Green NGO: What about [unclear name of place in Asia]?

Paper industry: That's degraded land.

Green NGO: We don't think so.

Paper industry: Well why don't I locate the satellite images so we can sit down and show you.

Green NGO: Fine, but you'll also need to look at where the concessions are.

Paper industry: Well we only take out what we call wood residues from these areas.

Green NGO: Well we call it virgin rainforest.

One-third less hungry

It never ceases to amaze me that some pieces of research are necessary. In the latest report from the Annals of Unsurprising Research, comes a study that shows that preventing humans from fishing is good for the other fish-eating animals. A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society says that breeding African penguins spent one-third less time looking for food within three months of closing a 20-km zone to purse-seine fisheries around a major colony, while birds in a comparable colony 50km away increased their foraging effort.

Quantifying this sort of thing is probably helpful, but is it really that surprising?

Ready to melt in 45 minutes

The year has barely started and already life seems to be running along at a fast clip. Glaciers that refuse to melt, biodiversity and ecosystems demanding payment, and a hole under the water line of the deforestation agenda. More, too, on PNG.

Glaciers
So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) messed up and included a bogus fact in its report about melting glaciers. Then it made things worse by not wanting to correct it when it had the chance. Now would be a good time for the IPCC to do a bit of soul searching and confess if there is anything else in its multi-volume tome we might need to know about. The one thing that would kill the IPCC , and the climate consensus dead, would be a damaging drip, drip, drip of stories emerge about legitimate concerns over its reports that were ignored or papered-over. More of this kind of thing and we will see headlines that the IPCC sexed up its reports. With the failure of Copenhagen, and any international action on climate change, that would be bad for any actions to tackle the problem.

For anyone seeking to undermine the current climate change agenda, an obvious line of attack is to steadily undermine the scientific credibility of the evidence and to throw as much mud and confusion that genuine controversy seems to emerge. Then journalists must go back to balancing their stories about climate change (with a climate denier for every climate change scientist). Hacked emails and melting glaciers may only be the start.

My colleague Oliver has composed a fine article on the non-melting glaciers earlier this month.


Biodiversity
2010 is a big year for biodiversity. Biodiversity has always been the poor sister of climate change. Always the bridesmaid, and never the bride. But this year it get its shot at the limelight, with a meeting of the biodiversity convention coming up, and it being 'International Year of Biodiversity" as well as the bi-annual CITES meeting in March, we can expect plenty of media coverage of the biodiversity crisis, extinctions and international trade bans.

The Biodiversity Convention is an international treaty that seeks to conserve and make sustainable use of biodiversity, as well as to make sure there is a fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of genetic resource. There is a big meeting of the parties later this year, in Japan.

Practically every country in the world signed up in 1992. The US signed but never ratified. It now keeps company with Andorra and The Vatican as the non-signatories. The question on my mind is whether it would make any difference if the US did ratify? Most of the meeting will likely be taken up with reports documenting the decline of biodiversity around the world, how none of our targets for stemming this decline have been met, and a promise to do better next time. Then everyone will eat some sushi and fly home. Are these big meetings really the answer or should we be addressing the drivers of environmental damage, such as the systematic undervaluation of environmental goods and services?

I published something online this month about ecosystem services (the things that nature provides, like clean water and pollination) and biodiversity. Its about attempts to value the environment are worried about by people who care about biodiversity.

Price fixing: Why it is important to put a price on nature. Jan 18th, 2010.

Deforestation Finally, what has happened to the deforestation agenda? While Copenhagen got agreement on what a global deal on deforestation might look like, and some (but nowhere near enough) money.. it failed to get an agreement to cut emissions, which is what was needed to create demand for slowing the rate of deforestation in the first place.

So the United Nations "REDD" agenda (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) looks to be fatally holed beneath the waterline. But if REDD is dead, it may also be a case of long live REDD.

There is still a lot of activity in various fora, so it is not at all clear where things are and there are still likely going to be huge sums available for various forest-related activities. I'll blog about this a bit this year, with the tidbits I pick up here and there. The bad news is that things are looking messy, which is not what everyone wanted at all. More soon on this. I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts on this.

To those of you who have written, and for whom I have failed to blog particular items or respond, my sincere apologies. I have a day job, and many other responsibilities, and time can be hard to find.

As for Papua New Guinea, I think it is time the government announced what it wants to do about its failed investigation into the Office of Climate Change. Last year, a scandal emerged involving forest carbon credits that appeared to have been endorsed by the government, on behalf of the United Nations, and issued to a private company. Besides reports by Ilya Gridneff and myself, there have been two television documentaries about the carbon cowboys.

A film is being made about deforestation and climate change called Two Degrees, which features PNG.

Everyone has been waiting for the report from this committee, but it looks like it may never come. I understand that all the key documents have vanished.

It is time that the international donors, the Australians, the Norwegians, the British and the World Bank, read PNG the riot act: clean up, or we will move out. If the report never appears, and the previous head of the office of climate change is merely bumped on to a cosy job in some quiet corner somewhere, perhaps in the diplomatic service, then the donors need to be ready to walk away. The point about getting a good deal is that you have to be prepared to walk away if the other side isn't playing by the rules. If there is no credible threat of a deal failing, then there is no chance of a credible deal.

The failure of Copenhagen

I'm not intimate with the climate change negotiations, and have not reported on them or climate change except for a stint in November, but quite a few people have asked me what I thought of Copenhagen so here are my thoughts..... I'm disappointed, Copenhagen was a washout. You know that an event, or a deal, is a failure when people start redefining what success is after the event. Especially when success had been quite clearly defined to begin with as something else entirely.

We knew what we wanted: a legally binding deal over climate change, one with targets for emissions cuts and finance. Since November, the climate talks have been a car crash in slow motion. No doubt, behind the scenes, this crash has been going on for far longer. For me, the beginning of the end started on the penultimate day at the previous climate talks in Barcelona this November. It was apparent by Thursday that it was too late to get the legal deal that everyone had been aiming for over two years. I got very drunk that evening in a tapas bar that evening with environment correspondents from The Guardian, The Times, The Irish Times and The Telegraph. There was also someone from the RSPB, and a young man from Greenpeace who had travelled from the UK by train because he was ideologically opposed to travel by air. That evening, over one of many countless glasses of red wine I wondered how history would judge us, and judge this moment. I wondered whether I'd ever have to explain to my children why we couldn't agree to fix the world.

Will the next generation be laughing at us because some magic technofix solution solved the problem in a decade? Or will they be able to trace problems of climate, food and water supply and losses of biodiversity to our failure to master a global environmental problem of this kind?

In Barcelona, Yvo de Boer said that we could still get a legal deal but through a different route. First would come a political deal but a strong one with targets and commitments [sound of hollow laughter], which is then turned into a legal deal later on. In the end, five nations went into a huddle, had a group hug, took a collective bow and then went home for Christmas.
Although, lets be clear: it wasn't just hatched in the final hours. Negotiations over a political deal have been going on for some time during 2009, the only question is: how long?

If I were to guess, and this is a guess. I would suppose that the existence of a political deal had to remain secret until the UN talks were close to failure. Then the political deal could be produced like a rabbit out of the hat. Revealed too early, a political alternative suggests that some of the major players might not be quite so committed to the difficult and costly UN legal deal, when a lovely, fudgy, largely meaningless political deal is far preferable. A political agreement can be announced with great fanfare and everyone can go home with a warm feeling.

Avoided deforestation (REDD) as a climate reducing strategy, ironically, seems to be going strong--although without a commitment to cuts that Copenhagen was supposed to produce the market for carbon offsets related to forestry there is a big question of how much demand there will be for these.

If I were part of the political process, what I'd do next would be to try and put the blame squarely on the UN. Lets not blame the UN, everyone signed up for this process two years ago and to walk away with so little to show for all the effort is simply a testament to the failure of leadership by the world's largest carbon emitters.

As ever Kevin Grandia, at DeSmogBlog.com, puts it all far more pithily.

More of the green stuff wanted

COPENHAGEN

Everyone loves trees. A lot of people think that climate change could be mitigated if we cut fewer of them down and left more standing.

Over the last few years, around the edges of the struggling climate change discussions, one of few areas of agreement has been on the merits of slowing down the rates of deforestation, and the costs of doing so. The Prince's Rainforest Project has been doing some important work in crystallising discussion around the sums of money needed to kick-start interim finance. So there are high hopes that some kind of agreement can come out of Copenhagen on forestry.

Against this backdrop, the Centre for International Forestry Research, has held a series of forest discussion days at the sidelines of climate change meetings of the last few years. One at Bali, one at Poznan and one at Copenhagen. Tomorrow is Forest Day 3. I will be chairing a subplenary on Mitigation.

"2009 is possibly the most important year for forests in living memory. We are in the final stretch of the road to Copenhagen, and COP 15, where negotiators expect to finalise a post-Kyoto global climate agreement in December. To coincide with the conference, CIFOR, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF) and the Government of Denmark will host Forest Day 3. Forest Day 3 will build on the success of Forest Day 1 and 2 in helping to ensure forests are high on the agenda for future climate outcomes, and will pave the way forward in making these outcomes work beyond Copenhagen." Full Programme.

Forest Day 3 will be held on 13 December at the Radisson Blu Falconer Hotel & Conference Center, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Mitigation

11.00 – 12.45

Falconer Room

Co-hosts
CIFOR
World Agroforestry Centre

Abstract
Carbon emissions from land-use change are estimated to account for one-fifth of current global carbon emissions. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been promoted as an effective and efficient climate change mitigation option. Much of the debate has focused on the global architecture and how REDD+ can be included in a post-2012 climate agreement. Now is the time to increase the focus on national and local levels where the forests are found. The success of REDD+ in reducing emissions will depend on tackling profound market and governance failures. REDD+ policies must strengthen the institutional alignment of economic actors and the public interest, a challenge made more difficult by the complexity of the issues behind deforestation and the fact that many causes are external to the forest sector. Can this really be done? How do we introduce a transitional change instead of incremental improvements? Are global players and mechanisms up to the task? What about the resistance in countries and local communities? This subplenary will debate these controversial issues, seek answers to these questions and look to designing national REDD+ strategies that ensure climate-effective and cost-efficient reduction of carbon emissions with equitable impacts and co-benefits.

Moderator
Natasha Loder, The Economist

Panellists

• Arild Angelsen, Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
• Vicky Corpuz, Executive Director and Chair, United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous People
• Sara S. Kendall, Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety, Weyerhaeuser Company
• Agus Purnomo, Head of Secretariat, National Council on Climate Change, Indonesia

Unpredictable weather: from Mojave to Copenhagen

I've just returned from Mojave, California, where I attended the unveiling of a new spaceship, and have arrived in Copenhagen for the climate change meeting.

In Mojave I was lucky enough to witness the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's new spaceship, VSS Enterprise. It was an astonishing evening, with gale force winds rocking the marquee erected to shelter the 800 people (press, VIPs, astronauts) who came to witness the event.

In June 2004, I witnessed the flight of SpaceShipOne from this very runway in Mojave, in the full heat of the desert. The event on December 7th could not have been more different. A storm had blown in over the west coast of America, and the band of low pressure seemed to have its active edge right above the Mojave high desert plateau. Throughout the day, patches of blue skies fought with rain and clouds, until the end of the evening when the storm finally moved in.

When SpaceShipTwo was finally unveiled, it arrived from out of the darkness of a stormy night. There was dry ice and lighting, but nature threw more of a display than event management ever could. Wind and fog swirled around her as she appeared from the gloom. When Holly Branson (Richard Branson's daughter) smashed a champagne bottle it shattered into thousands of glittering green pieces which were instantly whipped across the runway. Burt Rutan's (designer of SpaceShipTwo) wife said she would be one of those who would be painstakingly picking these off the runway the next day.

I had to leave the party early to write a piece for The Economist. The next morning, Richard Branson told me that the marquee had to be evacuated when they were warned that winds of 115mph were coming. Only a few minutes after the area was cleared the entire marquee, all its contents (lighting and speakers) were blown away. It is very lucky that nobody was hurt. Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, told me afterwards that the only thing they found afterwards was the scale model of SpaceShipTwo.

A few days later and Copenhagen, by contrast, is windless. But the political weather is not too far from the gale force winds of Mojave. Walk outs, demonstrations, barbed comments from chief negotiators. What kind of climate deal will the world get from Copenhagen remains impossible to say. Even forestry, where it might be argued negotiations are more advanced and with greater agreement, the text is a mess and still a long way from being done according to insiders.

An interesting side note, one of Burt Rutan's hobbies (when he isn't designing innovative aeroplanes and spacecraft) is climate change. He thinks that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is overblown. I wish I thought he was right about this, it would make everything so much easier if climate change were a fiction. But for it to be true one would have to argue that thousands of the world's scientists, and many of the world's major scientific organisations, are involved in a conspiracy of silence.

Of course all this begs the question, should we be getting off the planet or saving it?

Award for coverage of climate change

Ilya Gridneff of AP Australia and myself have just been awarded a Bronze medal by The Prince Albert Foundation/United Nations Correspondents Association Global Prize for coverage of Climate Change.

The award was made at UNCA's 2009 awards in New York and presented by Ban Ki Moon.

The award recognises our joint work on the subject of forestry in Papua New Guinea in the context of climate change negotiations, and was written in The Economist, Associated Press, as well as within this blog.