They are in business together etc. At Bali PNG national government officials were pushed outside of their rightful places for ConRat to speak on behalf of PNG (Husait makim em?. Em boi bilong Somare tasol.

Redim na tingim. take special note of the last paragraph. When they have finished with a Carbon financing framework, it will be good enough to robe our people of their benefits as in logging.

Read following:

Save the climate by saving the forests
22 March 2008
Fred Pearce

KEVIN CONRAD was brought up in Papua New Guinea, the son of American
missionaries. He spent his childhood "shooting birds, cutting down trees and
burning things". His name might not be familiar, but at the Bali climate
conference last December he drew applause and worldwide TV coverage for
taking on the US. If it wasn't willing to lead the world in combating climate
change, said Conrad, head of the Papua New Guinea delegation, the US should
"get out of the way".
There is more to Conrad than those 15 seconds of fame. He is an academic
and an investment banker. He is also the founder and director of an organisation
called the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, which has almost single-handedly
persuaded the world that one of the best ways to tackle climate change is to
offer developing countries huge cash incentives to stop destroying their
rainforests.
Conrad runs the coalition out of a small office at Columbia University in New
York. But it began, he says, in 2005 on a beach in Papua New Guinea. "I went
for a walk by the ocean with the prime minister, Michael Somare, who comes
from the same home town as me. He talked about how he wanted to save our
rainforests, but how we depended on them for our income. We agreed there
had to be a way of paying to save the forests. So we set up a group of nations
with the same ideas - Deforesters Anonymous, we called them at the start - and
got those ideas on the agenda of the climate negotiations."
Two years on in Bali, delegates from more than 100 countries agreed to
establish a system of compensation for reducing deforestation. The aim is to
have a deal ready for signing at a climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. If
it works, it will cut a source of greenhouse gas emissions that is second only to
the burning of fossil fuels.
"Bali achieved more than we ever expected," says Conrad. There is
widespread support for the plan, dubbed Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). It extends from green non-
governmental organisations and forest scientists to aid experts and a new
breed of carbon capitalists keen to make money out of cutting carbon
emissions.
No doubt it helps that reducing deforestation is the cheapest way of cutting
global emissions. At about $10 per tonne of CO2 it works out at around half the
cost of replacing coal with renewable energy.
This is, however, a radical plan. The "good guys" will get nothing. The money
will go not to those trying to conserve forests or harvest them sustainably, but
rather to bribe the "bad guys" who are destroying them. The most prolific
deforesters are already lining up.
Some will find this idea hard to stomach, but with CO2 levels rising fast, the
important question is whether REDD will work. Can forest scientists measure
how much carbon is locked up in the jungle accurately enough to police deals
that hand out dollars in return for keeping it there? Or will REDD be a recipe for
corruption that ends up accelerating climate change rather than slowing it?
The world's forests hold 50 per cent more carbon than the atmosphere.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the net loss of forests
releases around 1.1 billion tonnes of this carbon to the atmosphere each year,
or more than a seventh of total annual man-made emissions.
At least, that's what the official numbers say. Alan Grainger of the University of
Leeds, UK, recently concluded that the UN figures are so poor it is unclear
whether tree cover is declining at all. "I'm not saying it isn't declining, just that
the data don't prove it," he says. The national forest ministries who compile the
data are simply not up to the job and methodologies keep changing, making
comparisons difficult.
Luckily, however, the virtual monopoly of governments on forest data is being
broken by breakthroughs in remote sensing. Until recently, satellite monitoring
relied on the visible spectrum. That meant satellites could only capture
occasional glimpses of rainforests through the clouds. Even when the skies are
clear these images are poor at revealing the more insidious processes of forest
degradation - and resulting carbon loss - as humans invade.
Now satellites such as the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS),
launched in 2006, can use radar to peer through the clouds and assess
changes in biomass. "This marks a new era. We can get complete cloud-free
observations three times a year from ALOS," says Josef Kellndorfer of the
Woods Hole Research Center at Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Such technologies could be used to create an independent World Forest
Observatory, says Grainger: "If a global forest monitoring system is to be
scientifically credible, it must be non-governmental." Will governments accept
its conclusions? That remains to be seen, but the potential returns are so great
that they might. Indonesia, one of the countries keenest on REDD, reckons it
could earn $3.75 billion a year from the scheme.
The bigger question is whether the scheme really can turn things around. Many
other attempts to save the forest have foundered. In 1990, for instance,
industrialised nations agreed with Brazil a $1.5 billion rescue package for the
Amazon rainforest. Between 1990 and 2004 deforestation rates doubled.
There is one exception: Costa Rica (see Maps). This small country has
achieved a dramatic turnaround with a mix of conventional measures - such as
creating national parks, banning deforestation and planting trees - and cash
incentives akin to those envisaged by REDD. Its expanding forests are now
absorbing so much carbon that Costa Rica expects to be carbon-neutral by
2021 - the first country to achieve this.
"Costa Rica's expanding forests show that a dramatic turnaround is possible"
Can REDD repeat the Costa Rican success on a global scale? Pilot projects
are already being launched to test the ideas, but there is no shortage of
problems. One of the most obvious is "leakage".
Consider: country X announces a large REDD project in a forest being wrecked
by loggers or cattle ranchers. It collects the compensation, gives the cash to
the loggers and ranchers, and the forest is saved. But the loggers and ranchers
don't sit around doing nothing: they move into a neighbouring area of forest, and
plunder that instead. Overall there will be just as much deforestation.
To avoid leakage, says Conrad, countries should only get payments if they can
show that the destruction did not relocate. That means working out a national
rate of expected forest loss. Only countries that reduce deforestation below this
baseline figure will get compensation. "National accounting is essential," he
says.
Forest scientists, however, throw up their hands in despair at the idea of
working out baselines. The rate of forest loss can change greatly from year to
year, depending on the state of the forests, the price of forest products and
land, corruption and law enforcement.
In the Philippines deforestation rates are falling fast - because there are not
many trees left to cut down. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however,
rates look set to rise as civil war subsides. And what about Brazil, where the
deforestation rate doubled from 1990 to 2004, then fell by two-thirds till the
middle of 2007, and is now climbing sharply again as food prices rise?
Here science is likely to take a back seat to politics, especially as countries'
involvement in REDD will be voluntary. Rainforest nations could end up
determining their own baselines. If the system ends up rewarding countries with
rising rates of deforestation, however, it will rapidly fall into disrepute.
Many hope that REDD will at least help the poor inhabitants of rainforests who
take the trouble to protect their own forests, as happens in Costa Rica. But the
carbon market is unlikely to be that benevolent. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon
or central Africa, who have lived in harmony with their forests for generations,
will almost certainly receive nothing. They have not been deforesting, so what
could they be compensated for?
What about small farmers? There is a great deal of uncertainty about how much
real damage to forests is caused by shifting cultivators, who clear forest, farm
the land for a couple of years and then move on as soils lose their fertility.
Conventional forest surveys blame them for destroying large areas, but much of
the cleared land swiftly regenerates.
"Poor people are usually too poor to do much damage," says Frances
Seymour, director of the Center for International Forestry Research, a World
Bank-backed research agency based in Indonesia. She fears that such farmers
will be thrown off their land by entrepreneurs intent on claiming compensation
for "protecting" the forest.
Meanwhile, some huge forest destroyers are drawing up plans to get
compensation. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for instance, giant pulp
mills are responsible for vast amounts of carbon being released into the air as
they log rainforests and drain peat bogs to plant new trees. One of them, Asia
Pacific Resources International (APRIL), wants to set up a REDD pilot project
under which it will block the canals that now drain the Kampar swamp. APRIL
could receive tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation for protecting
the forest and not releasing the peat carbon. The project is genuine and is
based on sound science, but the reductions are only possible because the
company has been so destructive in the past.
At the national level, too, it is the prolific deforesters who have most to gain.
Costa Rica will go penniless, while Indonesia could cash in. And countries that
reduce deforestation now, before the baselines are set, could lose out. "Each
country will have a direct financial incentive to set deforestation baselines as
high as possible, in order to qualify for larger REDD transfers," Seymour says.
Some say we cannot be too squeamish. That there are bound to be failed
projects and scams, but any reduction in deforestation is a good thing. If the
compensation is paid in cash, then this will be true: REDD should make a
difference even if some money goes into the wrong pockets. One way to raise
cash, favoured by the European Commission, is through government-to-
government aid, perhaps funded by a levy on the growing trade in carbon
credits among rich-world polluters.
State aid, however, could be limited. Instead, the rainforest nations want
compensation in the form of carbon credits, which they can sell to rich countries
or companies that need the credits to meet emissions targets. Economists say
this system should be the most cost-effective, with competition delivering the
cheapest ways of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
However, this could let the developed world off the hook. Preventing
deforestation could become a substitute for cutting industrial emissions.
It is also risky. Suppose a power station in the US or Europe offsets its
emissions by buying carbon credits from a deforestation project in the tropics.
If that project is a failure, then more carbon will have been released than would
have happened without REDD.
Another danger in linking REDD to a global carbon market is that the value of
carbon credits will depend on supply. As more and more rainforest is
earmarked for saving, the market could be flooded with carbon credits, causing
a price crash. Cheap credits would provide little incentive to cut emissions or
protect more forests.
There are solutions. One is to ring-fence REDD from the carbon market.
Another is to dramatically toughen emissions targets in the industrial world, so
that the demand for credits rises in line with supply. But there were no signs in
Bali that governments have factored this into their calculations of emissions
targets.
What's more, many analysts say that REDD is unlikely to save the rainforests
unless it is combined with a crackdown on the economic drivers of
deforestation. "We have to address the drivers, or it won't work," says Conrad,
despite his fervour for market solutions. "That's the big task now."
Seymour agrees. "REDD finance to Indonesia, for instance, must prompt
decisions to mothball pulp mills in Sumatra, or to reject proposals to convert
forests into oil palm plantations." Yet many developing countries still hope that
funds from REDD can be secured without them having to make sacrifices
elsewhere in their economies.
And what of Papua New Guinea, birthplace of the plan? While the country is still
largely forested, much of it is licensed to loggers. The World Bank estimates
that around 70 per cent of current logging in the country is illegal. The
government's own audits reveal that politicians are complicit in the illegality and
profiting from it. "REDD [will] pour money in one end, and corruption will just
siphon the whole lot off," says John Burton at the Research School of Pacific
and Asian Studies of the Australian National University, Canberra.
Papua New Guinea's government has already entered into an agreement with a
bank called Pacific Capital Limited to lay the groundwork for carbon trading.
There have been allegations in the country's parliament that Conrad has
received payments in connection with this, an accusation he denies. "I don't
benefit personally from any of this. One of the foreign logging companies here
doesn't like my ideas, and they have hired people to make allegations about
me."
It would not be seemly for an international climate diplomat to have a large
personal financial stake in what he is pushing for. But we all have a stake in a
stable climate. And, most likely in the modern world, this will only be achieved if
there is money to be made along the way.