The breakdown and controversial ending of the Copenhagen climate talks was predictable from the outset in a conference which was marked by secret texts, closed door meetings and walk-outs. Negotiations were halted several times over the rumoured plans to introduce a ‘Danish text’ which was outside of, and did not build upon, the official negotiation process of the ad-hoc working groups of the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and long-term cooperative action (AWG-LCA). The Danish Presidency of the conference led to further confusion and increased levels of hostility, due to an overall lack of both clarity on the process and consultation with countries. In the end, the most cited outcome of the Conference, the Copenhagen Accord,¹ was a document drawn up in the final days by a select group of countries, and only ‘noted’ by the Conference of the Parties to the UN climate convention (COP) due to the lack of consensus to adopt it as a UN document. The Accord was strongly rejected by several parties, including Tuvalu, Bolivia, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, both for the lack of substance and the undemocratic nature in which it was drawn up. This raises concerns about the long term implications for multi-lateral negotiations under the UN process.

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Peter spoke about LUCAS, the Land Use and Carbon Analysis System of New Zealand which is used to meet New Zealand’s reporting requirements under Kyoto. LUCAS uses LiDAR, a remote sensing technique, to inventory forests and to derive land-use change maps.

The presentation slides with voice over can be viewed below.

Protecting forests offers a quick and cost-effective way of reducing emissions, but agreeing a means to do so won’t be easy.

Click here for a good general commentary on the climate negotiations from a forest perspective.  REDD Plus that would deal with deforestation and degradation as well as efforts to protect and enhance existing forest carbon stocks is also detailed.

Forests cover around a third of EU land and are highly important for many reasons, including carbon regulation. Although deforestation is responsible for approximately one quarter of global GHG emissions, forests globally capture and store a large amount of carbon. Climate change has already affected forest ecosystems and will continue to jeopardise their health and stability.Under extreme scenarios, it is predicted that the carbon regulating services of forests will be impaired to the extent that forests would cease to be a sink if global warming rises 2.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Several projections indicate significant risks that current carbon regulating services will be entirely lost, as land ecosystems turn into a net source of carbon beyond a global warming of 2.5°C (upper stable scenarios and beyond) or more relative to preindustrial levels. Moreover, since forests also release large quantities of carbon if deforested or impacted by other degrading stressors, they exacerbate climate change further.

To elaborate on the policy implications of the findings of the assessment, a policy brief has been prepared.

Tropical trees have grown bigger over the past 40 years and now absorb 20 percent of fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere, highlighting the need to preserve threatened forests, British researchers said Wednesday.

Using data collected from nearly 250,000 trees in the world’s tropical forests over the past 40 years, their study found that tropical forests across the world remove 4.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

“To get an idea of the value of the sink, the removal of nearly 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by intact tropical forests, based on realistic prices for a ton of carbon, should be valued at around 13 billion pounds per year,”said Lee White, Gabon’s chief climate change scientist, who co-led the study, said in a statement.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that human activity produces 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide worldwide each year, but only about 15 billion tons actually stays in the atmosphere and affects climate change.

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