Little meaningful progress seems to have been made at the UN climate summit in Poznan, Poland, says Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2. In this week's Green Room, he calls on world leaders to back a deal that will raise the serious funds needed to deliver a low carbon future.
Little meaningful progress seems to have been made at the UN climate summit in Poznan, Poland, says Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2. In this week's Green Room, he calls on world leaders to back a deal that will raise the serious funds needed to deliver a low carbon future.
Progress at the UN climate summit in Poznan, Poland, appears to have ground to a halt.
As the global gathering enters it second and final week, there has been a dismal lack of progress to date.
One of the key stumbling blocks is how all the things that we need to tackle the climate change problem will be financed.
Here are some of the key topics being debated:
Forests and soils
Forest destruction and degradation contributes up to 20% of human greenhouse gas emissions.
To have a hope of bringing climate change under control we need to bring these emissions to a halt, and make forests (as well as soils, peatlands and other terrestrial sinks) into major carbon sinks.
But how can we bring about the change we need?
The answer has to be to make forests worth more alive than dead to governments and forest owners.
As things stand we are happy to pay for palm oil, beef, soya beans, rubber and timber from deforested land.
To persuade countries like Brazil and Indonesia to change their ways, we need to pay them more keep their forest than we are already paying them to destroy it.
Currently the main idea, which goes under the acronym of REDD, is to create carbon credits by reducing deforestation in poor countries, and selling the credits to rich countries so that they can let their industrial emissions rip.
But this suffers from the grave defect that we need to reduce emissions from both forests and industry at the same time, not trade one off against the other.
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