George Soros
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute.
Photo : © AFP PHOTO / ERIC PIERMONT
Connie Hedegaard is EU Commissioner for Climate Action.
Achim Steiner est le directeur exécutif du Programme des Nations Unies pour l'Environnement (PNUE). Auparavant, il a exercé de hautes fonctions à la Commission mondiale des barrages puis à l'Union...
The French climatologist Hervé Le Treut is in charge of the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute which is made up of several environmental research laboratories. He is part of the Intergovernmental Panel...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It was founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. In 1951 its...
Jean François Mouhot is historian. He has a long-standing interest for environmental and energy issues, in particular for climate change. He published one book about Past Connections and Present...
Fondée en 1993 et présente dans 80 pays, Transparency International est une ONG qui lutte contre la corruption.
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute. Photo : © AFP PHOTO / ERIC PIERMONT
Denis Loyer is a climate adviser at the Agence française de développement, AFD. AFD is France’s development bank.
Jeff Goodell is an author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His book on geoengineering, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate, will be released...
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His fifth book, The Forgotten Forest, about...
Michael D. Lemonick is the senior writer at Climate Central, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to communicate climate science to the public. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a...
Khadija Sharife is a South African journalist. She is also an activist and a scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and a contributing author...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Prem Shankar Jha is the author of Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West? In 1985-1987 he was a member of the energy panel of the World Commission for Environment and...
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz a reçu le prix Nobel d’économie en 2003. Il a travaillé pendant des années à la Banque mondiale. Il est aussi connu pour ses ouvragest : Quand le capitalisme perd la tête et La...
Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France and a former leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament.
Joss Garman est un militant écologique britannique. il est chargé de campagne à Greenpeace et a aussi participé à la fondation du mouvement Plane Stupid qui s'oppose à l'extension du trafic aérien....
a été conseiller éditorial de la fondation GoodPlanet.
Figure du militantisme altermondialiste et surtout anticapitaliste depuis la sortie de No Logo en 2000, Naomi Klein est une journaliste engagée. Elle concentre son travail sur les dérives du...
Jacques Mirenowicz est co-fondateur et rédacteur en chef de LaRevueDurable, revue franco-suisse de vulgarisation sur tout ce qui touche à l’écologie et au développement durable. Elle offre vise à...
Achim Steiner est le directeur exécutif du Programme des Nations Unies pour l'Environnement (PNUE). Auparavant, il a exercé de hautes fonctions à la Commission mondiale des barrages puis à l'Union...
Pavan Sukhdev est un économiste et banquier indien qui a notamment travaillé pour la banque centrale allemande en Inde. Il a été chargé par la commission européenne de diriger une étude mondiale sur...
Claus Leggewie is director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (KWI) and a member of the Global Change Council of Germany (WBGU). Photo : Stefan/wikipedia under Creative...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Professor Virgílio Viana is one of Brazil’s leading experts on forestry, environment and sustainable development. He served as Secretary of State for Environment and Sustainable Development and is...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Bjørn Lomborg is an associate statistics professor at the Copenhagen Business School and former director of the Environmental Assessment in Copenhagen. He discussed his thesis of “environmental...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
Patrick Luganda is chairman of the Network of Climate Journalists in the Greater Horn of Africa Secretariat based in Kampala, Uganda.
Born on May 8th, 1950, in Tampico, Mexico, Angel Gurría is OECD Secretary-General, since June 2006. He was Mexico’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 1994 to January 1998, and Mexico’s...
Olivier BOUYER est Ingénieur du Génie Rural, des Eaux et Forêts. Il a participé à la conférence de Poznan (en 2008) avec la délégation française comme chargé de mission “effet de serre et forêt””...
Olivier Godard is currently a research director of economics at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In 1998 he joined the econometrics laboratory, part of the École...
Seeing REDD on Climate Change
22/12/2010 10:54 am
The official communiqué from the Cancún climate-change conference cannot disguise the fact that there will be no successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires at the end of 2012. Japan, among others, has withdrawn its support for efforts simply to extend the Kyoto treaty.
This sounds like bad news, because it means that there will be no international price on carbon, and, without a market price, it is difficult to see how the reduction of carbon emissions can be efficiently organized. But appearances can be deceiving.
Even as the top-down approach to tackling climate change is breaking down, a new bottom-up approach is emerging. It holds out better prospects for success than the cumbersome United Nations negotiations.
Instead of a single price for carbon, this bottom-up approach is likely to produce a multiplicity of prices for carbon emissions. This is more appropriate to the task of reducing carbon emissions than a single price, because there is a multiplicity of sectors and methods, each of which produces a different cost curve.
The market price of anything is always equal to the marginal cost. When there is a single price, all the various cost curves are merged into one and low-cost projects enjoy large rents. This makes the cost of reducing carbon emissions much larger than it needs to be.
This was amply demonstrated by the working of the Kyoto Protocol in practice. The carbon-trading scheme that it established gave rise to many abuses. For example, formerly communist countries earned emission credits at zero cost on the heavy industries that they had to shut down and reaped windfall profits by selling them. So the demise of the Kyoto Protocol will be no great loss.
The same applies to the protracted negotiations between developed and developing nations. The developed nations promised to pay reparations for their past sins at the Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992 but kept deferring their obligations by negotiating. Meanwhile, conditions changed with the passage of time: China, following decades of booming growth, replaced the United States as the largest emitter.
The negotiations have taken on an increasingly unreal air. Currently, the dispute revolves around how governments will deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing countries confront climate change, given that even the $10 billion Fast Track Fund cannot be cobbled together without using smoke and mirrors. By failing to make any progress beyond keeping the talks alive, the Cancún summit has given the impression that nothing is happening, and that the situation is hopeless.
That is not the case. Individual countries like Germany are making binding unilateral commitments that are not conditional on what other countries do, and “coalitions of the willing” are being formed to tackle particular sectors. The REDD+ partnership (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), an effort to create financial value for the carbon stored in forests, is the prime example here. Indeed, the greatest progress is now being made where the problem is the most urgent: it is much easier to preserve forests than to restore them.
The case of Indonesia deserves special attention. Indonesia has become the third largest polluter in the world, after China and the US, because much of its forest grows on peatlands. When the trees are cut and peatlands drained, the carbon accumulated over millennia is exposed and oxidized – often in the form of fires that envelope neighboring Singapore and Malaysia in smoke.
Today, half of Indonesia’s peatlands remain intact; if they were exposed, emissions would double. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is determined to prevent this, and he has received financial support for his efforts from Norway. Their partnership has already been joined by Australia, and others will soon follow.
The partnership is path-breaking in several ways. Yudhoyono is introducing a moratorium on the exploitation of peatlands and virgin forests. A REDD+ agency will be charged with treating rain forests as a natural resource that is to be preserved and restored rather than exploited and destroyed. This will also transform governance and the delivery of official development assistance (ODA).
The REDD+ agency will have a domestic governing board that will coordinate the activities of all the governmental units concerned with rain forests, and an international board that will authorize and monitor the spending of ODA funds. This means that ODA will support home-grown institutions instead of administering projects introduced from the outside.
These efforts can serve as a prototype for assisting other countries such as Guyana, where the current forest-preservation scheme does not work so well. Eventually, it should lead to the establishment of a global fund for rain forests and agricultural adaptation because the benefits of carbon abatement accrue to mankind as a whole, not to individual countries. The global fund would introduce two prices: one for carbon saving by restoring forests and one for avoiding carbon emissions by preserving them.
This in turn sets an example for other sectors. In this way, carbon pricing will be introduced and international cooperation established from the bottom up, on a sectoral basis rooted in demonstrated results.
Thus, despite the widespread impression that the climate-change agenda has stalled, there are grounds for hope. But realizing that hope requires keeping pace with global warming, and that means speeding up the process of putting a price – or prices – on carbon emissions.
by George Soros
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
Signaler un abus
