– David Singh

The Linden to Lethem road will have one of the biggest impacts on the forest and figures show that about two million hectares of forest will be lost through the project unless there is a framework to pay for and provide alternative development to what would traditionally occur along such a road.

Dr David Singh

An improved road will increase accessibility for Guyanese and also increase accessibility from Brazil and once access is better, it is easier to extract natural resources, said conservationist Dr David Singh. The corridor is slated for upgrading and is part of the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) project. The IIRSA project represents a vision set out by South American governments to physically integrate their countries to help overcome geographic impediments to development, strengthen markets and open new economic opportunities.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has funded a project, Climate Change and Biodiversity Mainstreaming through Avoided Deforestation – Guyana Case Study, for the Guyana Government. The project sought to provide a conceptual and analytical framework for assessing the needs, challenges and opportunities for Guyana in the context of REDD and to assess the application of a REDD framework on national development and biodiversity, with specific focus on the Georgetown-Lethem Transportation Corridor (GLTC). With deforestation and forest degradation the second leading cause of global warming, responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) is a concept that refers to avoiding the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and using forests as carbon sinks to abate future CO2 emissions.

The loss and depletion of forests is a major issue for global climate change discussions and countries such as Guyana have been lobbying for the inclusion of forest conservation in this framework. With regards to the project, it focused on understanding and documenting the potential carbon emissions that would result from deforestation directly and indirectly attributed to the Lethem-Georgetown road, highlighting the related threats to biodiversity. The results and deliverables were developed and presented to enhance the government’s ability to analyze and address possible carbon emissions from other potential land use activities. It ties in with Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.

A workshop was held on Friday at the Regency Hotel on the project and its implications for Guyana. Conservation International (CI) along with several other partners executed the project and Friday’s workshop was to present findings and recommendations from the study and to discuss options with a “broad audience” for their consideration and comments.

Speaking with Stabroek News, on the sidelines of the workshop, Dr Singh, the Executive Director of CI-Guyana, said that their job was to examine how Guyana can implement REDD so that the country could maintain its development. They focused on the GLTC because the road’s development will create one of the biggest impacts on the forest. One of the findings is if there isn’t an effective REDD framework, the level of forest loss that will occur over a period of time will be substantial, Singh said. The timeframe projection the team utilized was 30 years.

He explained that the project included an assessment of the present situation, looking at the biodiversity value and at the biomass of the area. A projection of deforestation, based on what is happening in the region was done. The team then looked at scenarios, which showed that with an effective REDD, the projected deforestation that will occur will come down quite substantially, as opposed to the scenario when there is no REDD mechanism. The scenario showed that instead of two million hectares of forest being lost over 30 years, this can be reduced to a 0.1 percent rate of deforestation, which is minimal, and is happening now, Singh said. He noted that the figures show that about two million hectares of forest out of 16 million hectares countrywide will be lost through the road, unless there is an effective REDD framework to pay for and to provide alternative development to what developments would traditionally occur along a road.

In this regard, he pointed to the Amazon, where road development has seen people come in and start building, and said this will happen in Guyana as well except if there are mitigation measures in place that could help people to improve their livelihoods so they would not have to resort to “going in the forest and destroying it.”

They have determined that an effective REDD framework can generate revenue that would not only be enough to maintain the road and the forest but also to pay for other kinds of activities, he said.

The project also looked at the policy and legal framework- the enabling environment to access and implement a REDD project. The financial aspect was also looked at, the cost of setting up the institutions, reforming legal structures and whether it could be matched with the expected revenue from REDD. “The amount of money that people are talking about for REDD is quite a lot”, Singh said adding that the financial structures that need to be in place to make it work were examined. He pointed out that REDD can provide as much as US$130M. “So that is why we have to set up institutional arrangements to be able to manage, distribute and monitor the use of those funds”.

Bottom line

However, the conservationist noted that the major issue facing Guyana in relation to REDD is the inclusion of forest conservation or carbon stocks in a global climate deal. With the country’s forest pretty much intact, he said, there isn’t much (of deforestation and degradation) to reduce.  Singh asserted however, that while Guyana does not have a high rate of deforestation now, in the future, there will be a high rate for several reasons namely the road and the declining levels of the world’s resources. “The resources of the world are diminishing so as the resources in one part of the world goes down and gets less and less, people will start looking for other resources and they will come to places like Guyana which still have resources intact,” he declared. Guyana needs to be included in a REDD framework, he argued. “Because if we don’t do that now, if we don’t benefit now, it means that the gains that will happen in reducing deforestation in other parts of the world will be countered by the growth of deforestation and degradation in countries like Guyana.” Countries that have high forest cover and low deforestation rates, in the future, will have high deforestation rates unless the REDD framework provides incentives for maintaining those forests in the first place, he commented.

Several presentations on the project were made by the consultants and following the workshop, the project team will re-group for a few days to integrate the feedback received at the workshop into a final Action Plan. This will be submitted to the IDB and the government.

An important part of this is to let not only Guyana but the international community know that without an effective REDD framework, one that works for Guyana, the country’s forests are going to be degraded or lost over a period of time, Singh declared. “Guyana as a country stands to lose a substantial amount of its forest unless an affective REDD framework is agreed on by the international community. That is the bottom line,” he observed.