-Jagdeo tells UN conference
President Bharrat Jagdeo told a United Nations conference yesterday that climate change is not just an environmental issue, “but one which cuts to the core of social and economic progress everywhere,” and therefore it “demands first order political commitment.”
President Jagdeo was addressing the opening ceremony of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change being held in Poznan, Poland.
Acknowledging that he was Guyana’s Minister of Finance when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed but he had paid little attention to it, he said he is determined not to make the same mistake twice.
“I failed to see that climate change is not just an environmental issue, but one which cuts to the core of social and economic progress everywhere”, he said. The Kyoto Protocol had led to the Clean Development Mechanism which has not been very useful for developing countries like Guyana.
He emphasized that now he wants to continue pressing the case that the next climate agreement must create meaningful incentives to address deforestation although he recognizes that the current necessary action to stabilize the world’s economy will divert attention from the even bigger crisis that climate change presents.
The president noted that understanding what needs to be done is the easier part since it is known that agreement is needed to reduce global emissions to at least 50% less in 2050 than they were in 1990.
“And we know that this means creating market or other funding mechanisms that generate new capital flows of the order of many hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The harder part is building and sustaining the political context needed to make it possible for national leaders to achieve these goals, Jagdeo asserted.
He observed that for years people have been saying that the United States needs to lead, and expressed the view that it soon will as he welcomed President-elect Barack Obama’s strong public commitment to deep cuts in emissions.
But “we must remain vigilant and ensure that other countries do not back-pedal on their existing commitments,” he added.
Jagdeo said that there is “an understandable but ultimately damaging dialogue audible in many countries today” where some politicians are saying that citizens cannot be expected to support action to combat climate change during an unprecedented economic crisis when they are losing their jobs and their cost of living is rising.
The president, however, pointed out that, “The failure of nerve that this represents will drive away those that are starting to invest in climate solutions, and postpone progress for too long.”
“Instead,” he contended, “we need to recognize that strong leadership on climate change is needed now more than ever. Some may baulk at the scale of financial resources required, believing that resources on this scale are unachievable.
But if the political will to stimulate resource flows is there, the money will be found as was proven when the international community quickly raised $7 trillion to deal with the financial crisis.”
Jagdeo further argued that while countries across the world have said that banks and other financial institutions needed to be bailed out because they were “too big to fail”, the climate change challenge is far bigger although this is perhaps not as immediately apparent but the same logic must be applied.
“To build public support for the tough action that is needed,” Jagdeo noted, “we must break the false debate which suggests that countries can either act on climate change or (further) their national development.” Instead, he added, the two imperatives must be aligned.
And this is possible, Jagdeo contended, but there is need for greater efforts to achieve a paradigm shift where the creation of low carbon economies is given incentives not just in today’s developed world, but also in places from which the growth of future emissions would come.
The Guyanese leader said further that “for forest countries like mine, this means creating low deforestation economies where remuneration for forest carbon services under a properly designed REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is sufficient in scale to out-compete the other legitimate economic forces which drive deforestation.”
As things stand, Jagdeo observed, the world economy values the commodities that can be sold by high deforestation economic activity such as harvesting timber or selling agricultural commodities after the forest has been cleared.
But he pointed out that it does not value low deforestation economic development, adding that there is no significant tradeable market for forest carbon storage or other eco-system services. Correcting this, he maintained, is the only way to reduce deforestation.
And entering the REDD debate, Jagdeo said those who are negotiating around a REDD mechanism must recognise that all forest countries share the same goal. “If REDD mechanisms exclude any significant group of countries, REDD will fail so we must therefore work together,” Jagdeo urged.
He said too that REDD must address reducing deforestation and degradation and also focus on afforestation and reforestation.
He also urged stakeholders to recognise that the overall global emission reduction commitments must be deep enough since if they are, there will be room in market mechanisms to effectively address deforestation while simultaneously ensuring badly needed capital flows to some of the poorest countries in the world.
And addressing the suggestion that remuneration for carbon services should not flow to forest countries because there is a risk of corruption and misuse of funds, he cautioned against “jumping to patronizing conclusions that all poor countries are corrupt.”
Jagdeo said too that “as leaders of forest countries we need to ensure that we create policies, institutions and incentives that are financially prudent, transparent and accountable to those who live in, and depend on, the forest for livelihoods.”
He also advocated mobilizing citizens to ensure that they are involved in determining how new carbon resources which flow to their countries might be invested. He said that in Guyana’s case, it is expected that this will mean investment in health, education, clean energy and adaptation investment that will cost several times its GDP.
He concluded that the climate change challenge should be seen as fundamentally one where political will needs to be built to create the foundation that enables the right choices to be made. It is necessary to reach beyond committed activists and mobilize leaders internationally.
He also identified a vital role for the NGO community and the UN process in educating and sensitizing the peoples of the world because when citizens start to understand climate change beyond a vague awareness that weather patterns are now different, they will become champions of change and demand meaningful action.
And speaking directly to the some of the world’s leading experts on climate change who are attending the conference, he challenged them to “play an important role in making it clear to policy-makers that they must now make some historic, strategic decisions.”
On December 5 President Jagdeo unveiled Guyana’s position on avoided deforestation which he was to present to the Poznan conference. It argued that the REDD mechanism must back compensatory economic alternatives which, based on calculations, could be worth US$580M per annum to this country.
It added that any REDD mechanism “must support the creation of economic alternatives that exceed the economic value to a nation (EVN) generated by pursuing rational economic activities involving deforestation”. The glossy 33-page document then proceeded to lay out a methodology for estimating the EVN.
However, the vexed question of how to finance such a mechanism was not addressed.
