Open Happiness

Swidden

It is hard work to cut down a tree, let alone an entire forest. Swidden agriculture, the slashing, felling, and burning of forests for the conversion of land, requires epic sweat. Every year as the treaty is renegotiated, the reasons for and potential restraints on deforestation are both elaborated and clarified. When we talk about forested land, we are also talking about agricultural expansion and food security for a growing population. While an excess of carbon dioxide haunts our atmosphere, we have more than one problem to proactively and reactively solve. We are talking about livelihoods, family planning, land sparing, sustainable farming, the intensification of yield.

Ban Ki-moon arrived in Durban late in the second week of the conference. As Secretary General of the United Nations, he is the man in charge of haloing 194 nations around the singular agreement on climate change. When I saw him speak, he was deferent to his own stature, understating his vast importance to the world. Ban Ki-moon spoke of the forests and the noted improvements to the REDD text. Recently retuned from a visit to Kalimantan, Indonesia, he lauded the success of their pilot program for REDD. In particular, he praised Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, Chairman of the Indonesian REDD+ Taskforce. Kuntoro himself was also at this talk. Later in the evening, a question was posed to him about Indonesia’s REDD program. “How far are you from being able to count the value of a tree standing as being more than the value of a tree cut down?” To which the minister of ministers replied, “It is not about each tree. It is about poverty. If you alleviate poverty, no tree will be cut down.” The ambition of this treaty is that it must address both the causes and the effects of global warming. Which makes it, perhaps, the most important international accord ever to be signed.

Traction

In case anyone is unclear, because it’s hard to get the news from the news, the advancements in Durban mean the process, while incremental, still has traction.

Initial discussions centering on an international climate agreement first began at the Rio Summit in 1992. The agreement was negotiated for five years before being adopted in 1997 as the Kyoto Protocol. It was another four years before detailed rules for the implementation of the KP were approved in 2001. It officially entered force in 2005, thirteen years hence. This year, 2012, marks the end of the KP’s first commitment period. All this scrambling to sign the Durban Platform, twenty years in the making, is another train stop along the way, in essence to say, “what is next and who is still on board?”

It takes this long because we can’t ask for everything at once. The US State Department has a mandate they are not legally allowed to negotiate for something at the international level that they are unable to implement at the national level. In fact, it is a convention truism that countries will not agree inside a negotiation room to anything they were not already planning to do.

In reality, the world as a collective is not ready for the treaty it should be signing. But we will be. In the meantime, we will continue to address all the drivers and respect all the safeguards. We will train the tree measurers and come to terms with true national sovereignty. The pace of this process, both progress and regress, is not for nothing. Redaction, bracketing, and derailment. Word by word. Insertion and accord. 

Not a unicorn

CA's Mary Nichols on REDD, cap and trade: CIFOR Blog

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