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Climate Change – We Can’t Solve the Problem without Forests

Negotiations on a new climate change agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol (it expires in 2012) will reach a critical milestone this December in Copenhagen at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The objective for the Copenhagen meeting is to reach agreement on a framework for a post-Kyoto agreement by the end of the conference. There will be many details that will remain unresolved until after Copenhagen – but the idea is that the core architecture of the agreement, including the all-important question of emissions reductions targets, will be settled.

A key issue for conservationists – for everyone in fact – is whether the post-Kyoto agreement will recognize the important role of forests, and wild nature generally, in preventing climate change and helping life on earth adapt to the effects of rising temperatures. There have been a few positive signs lately that a new agreement will include a more comprehensive approach regarding forest protection. REDD has been elevated from a mechanism designed to finance sustainable forestry, to a mechanism that can finance conservation as well. Though REDD designs under discussion continue to have serious flaws, this is important progress.

More recently, negotiating text recently released by the UNFCCC Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action had strong language on the importance of using ecosystem based adaptation to build the resilience of vulnerable ecosystems and species “including through an ecosystem-based approach to adaptation.” This is the first time that ecosystem-based adaptation language has been included in official negotiating text, and given that what makes its way into negotiating text tends to stay in, this is a significant step in the right direction.

This is welcome but incremental progress. A recent study by MIT should provide some motivation for doing better. Adding new and better data to their Global Integrated System Model and re-crunching numbers since they last ran the model in 2003, researchers found that median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is now projected to be 5.1°C higher than 1990 levels, more than double the projection of 2.4°C in the 2003 study. The MIT study also projects concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2095 of 896 parts per million. To put this in perspective, scientists are currently debating whether a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide should be 350 or 450 ppm, with growing support for 350 ppm (see 350.org). In other words, under business as usual emissions we are easily exceeding the worst case scenarios anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: without rapid and deep emissions cuts, we are headed for disaster.

We also know that we can’t reduce global emissions to an acceptable level fast enough without reducing , or better yet eliminating the roughly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions that come from deforestation and degradation of tropical forests. There are signs this message is starting to get through to government negotiators, but the upcoming UNFCCC intersessional negotiations in Bonn in early June will be an important test. It’s not a test we can afford to fail.

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