Today’s national consultation on a draft low carbon development strategy entitled `Transforming Guyana’s economy while combating climate change’ is exceedingly important and all stakeholders – particularly those in forestry – and those who would aspire to govern the country should treat it with the importance it deserves.
Much of the credit for the convening of this consultation should be attributed to President Jagdeo who in the last two years has championed the attractiveness of the low carbon economy and the monetizing of the climate services provided by Guyana’s vast and mostly pristine forests. By his own admission, President Jagdeo is a latecomer to the campaign for avoided deforestation but the mission is a noble one even if studded with serious pitfalls. Indeed, very early on its now 17-year tenure in office and when Mr Jagdeo had an influential position in the Ministry of Finance, the PPP/C had resisted the pleadings of several environmental groups and development institutions over the awarding of forest concessions for logging. The PPP/C’s then position was that it should not be hamstrung in the degrees of freedom needed to advance the economy and concessions were duly handed out even if the veneer of the implied sustainable logging was so thin as to be embarrassing. The PPP/C had of course already inherited an economy in which its predecessor, the PNC, had made an injudicious but irresistible decision to award a large swathe of forests in the northwest to Samling of Malaysia and Sunkyong of South Korea – leading to the formation of Barama Company Limited. Various other concessions were also handed out but the one forest which would have fit hand in glove with the President Jagdeo’s pioneering zeal – the Iwokrama rainforest was left to an uncertain fate for several years and is still struggling to find a major development role. Ironically, Iwokrama was the vision of the late PNC President, Mr Hoyte – perhaps for the same reasons that President Jagdeo is now pursuing his mission. Then President Hoyte conceived of the central Guyana forest becoming a laboratory for sustainable forest development and a crucible for the nurturing and the economic development of the potentially lucrative bio-medicines that might exist therein. Because the politics of the country is the way it is, there were lukewarm feelings by the PPP/C to Iwokrama in the initial years. A million acres of pristine forest was offered up by President Hoyte in the undemocratic years to the global community at the 1989 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia without any consultations with Guyanese. That act had an ironic companion in this era when President Jagdeo took the Commonwealth Finance Ministers meeting in Georgetown in October 2007 by storm when he announced that Guyana would be prepared to make almost all of its forests available in the global fight against climate change. There had not been any publicly known consultation with anyone prior to the President pulling this out of his hat and as fate would have it there was very little progress on the initiative in the months that followed as the UK was unable to fast-track it. Today’s consultation will go a long way towards redressing this initial deep flaw in the President’s strategy and full advantage of the forum should be taken as there is a real chance that decisions which could have lasting and significant impact on the country might be taken.
There are two things that stand out in the draft that should concern all Guyanese. First, much of the viability of what is being proposed is predicated on the developing world stepping up to the plate at the Copenhagen United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December and agreeing conclusively that Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) provides the basis for monetizing the climate preservation services of the forests of Guyana and elsewhere and these countries would be handsomely rewarded. While there is undoubtedly an unmistakable convergence that urgent solutions are needed to global warming and that avoided deforestation is important to this battle, the will to finance this matrix to the expectation of the developing world is not guaranteed. Speaking to Reuters recently Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said there was a clear movement in the direction of encompassing REDD in Copenhagen and that annual revenue could be US$5B to US$20B – far less than what is anticipated by the developing world. The European Union – a key player in an ensuing market, is worried that cheap REDD credits could flood the market and discourage developed nations from making the necessary emissions cuts at home. Norway – which is now playing a role in shaping Guyana’s case – has also said that emissions cuts from REDD projects should be additional to any abatement efforts by developed nations. REDD projects are therefore being conceived as only an aspect of the Kyoto Protocol successor.
Quantum
According to Boer “Part of the challenge for Copenhagen will be to find an adequate balance and such a balance could be found, saying, for example, that REDD-related credits may only represent a certain percentage of an industrialised country’s reduction effort.”
Reuters noted that there is also debate as to whether a REDD scheme should be funded entirely by the market, only by public funds or a mixture of both and this is likely to be a key determinant in the quantum of climate change financing that will be available to countries like Guyana. A major point of debate Reuters pointed out was how to calculate real emissions reductions from REDD projects. There is also real apprehension about how a carbon market could be easily undermined by corrupt carbon brokers and doubts about tenure rights. De Boer did make the key point that “Forest countries like Indonesia, where deforestation is taking place on a massive scale, are never going to be able to stop that deforestation unless they manage to offer poor people an economic alternative. People don’t cut down trees because they think trees are ugly. People cut down trees because there’s an economic advantage to doing that.”
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 had already flubbed its promise to developing countries via the much vaunted Clean Development Mechanism which became a cash cow for projects emanating from India and China at the expense of deserving countries like Guyana. For all these reasons, hitching Guyana’s wagon to the REDD promise could have its disappointments and frustrate development openings if the promised financing did not materialize. The consultation today needs to carefully assess how to hedge Guyana’s prospects under any REDD scheme so as not to freeze reasonable and timely development of Guyana’s resources. How the Iwokrama forest fares with its Canopy Capital climate services deal could be a useful barometer of where the carbon market is headed.
Second, the draft document underlines unwittingly how Guyana’s leaders have breached their covenant with the people from the year of independence. Undoubtedly because of Norway’s stringent transparency requirements prior to any forest financing, a rigorous monitoring, reporting and verification system has to be implemented by Guyana. For a country with a long history of commercial and community forestry it is a sad admission that what exists at the moment is anything but that. Hopefully, despite the formidable hurdles, we can develop this verification system as it will be pivotal to establishing whether this country is committed to REDD or risks being red-faced with embarrassment at the not infrequent violations of sustainable and sound foresting that have occurred. But it isn’t the imposed need for this system that jars, it is the recognition in the draft that 43 years after independence the oft talked about reorienting of the economic bases of the country is still a dream and one which we now hope REDD will facilitate as we ourselves have failed.
In the section of the draft on the creating of a low-carbon economy, the government blithely posits that with REDD financing streams Guyana could become a competitive global producer of high-end fruits and vegetables. How many similar asseverations accompanied by a bevy of plans, policies and strategies haven’t fallen by the wayside including during the last 17 years of PPP/C governance. Ditto to aquaculture and Guyana having an “opportunity to provide fresh and frozen fish to its Caribbean neighbors and other importing nations”. The same can be said of the assertion that Guyana can sustainably extract value from its forest resources by “moving up the lumber chain” – meaning value adding. How many incarnations hasn’t this aspiration seen?
Ironically, this section underlined the absence of a globally recognized verification of Guyana’s forest extractions when it said “In order to ensure that its forestry practices are in accordance with global sustainable forest management practices, Guyana has begun to establish a framework for national-level environmental certification with the long-term goal of achieving Forest Stewardship Council certification”. Ironically it was this same certification which a major logger – Barama – recently lost.
Yet another of the long talked-about projects which has not materialized is hydropower sufficiency and this is also among the possible recipients of REDD financial flows. There were sundry other points of note in the draft that raised eyebrows such as the projection that the annual loss to flooding in Guyana by 2030 will be US$150M per annum and the estimating of adaptation costs at US$1B.
Today’s consultation deals with weighty issues but they must be tempered by the sobering truths that there is no guarantee of stable financing from REDD and that we have failed ourselves in being masters of our own destiny.
