Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation: No hope without forests - Environmental Audit Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question 39)

MR CHARLIE KRONICK AND MS ROBIN WEBSTER

9 DECEMBER 2008

  Q39 Chairman: Good morning and welcome. Just so you can judge the pace of what we are going to do, we hope to finish at about 12 o'clock because some colleagues have got other commitments they have to go to. With regard to the last session, is there anything you would like to say about any of the evidence we received from Mr Eliasch and his colleagues?

  Mr Kronick: What is amazing to me about the Eliasch Review and the work that Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth I am sure, has done is that a lot of the basic assumptions are the same, which is that deforestation and forest protection is an essential part of responding to climate change; that there are some absolute fundamental issues around the role of offsets around what the carbon price can and cannot deliver. I think where it starts to diverge is then how you interpret those basic assumptions. If I was just going to make one point, I think the points that Mr Eliasch particularly made more strongly were that carbon is just another commodity, and if you can replace soya beans, palm oil and timber and the revenues that accrue from the exploitation of that commodity with a well-regulated market in carbon and address the issue of opportunity costs the problem will be solved, and I do not think that is true. I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of forest protection in climate protection. It is not a question of either/or; it is not a question if we can just find some ways to make the delivery of climate change — If he is talking about up to 2030 I would consider that the medium-term to long-term to make them more economically efficient. To Greenpeace it is a completely inadequate response to the problem.

  Ms Webster: What I would add to that is, I think you heard quite a lot over the last hour about the robustness of frameworks, and the capacity-building periods and "We must put these in place before we get the markets". Yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues who is following the negotiations in Poznan at the moment and there is a very long distance between the kind of economic theory you are hearing and actually what is happening in Poznan at the moment. The distance between politics and economic theory is absolutely huge. I think this is where a lot of our concerns come from. You may say, "If we had a robust carbon market; if we had these in place; if we had decent capacity-building this could work"; but when you are in a situation where you do not—and where what you are doing is putting in place a system where you are essentially looking at vast amounts of money and enormous incentives to governments to proceed very, very rapidly with this—this is where a lot of these dangers are going to come from. In monitoring Eliasch's findings I think that is what we have got to think about—the difference between the theories they are developing and the practice we are going to see in politics.



 
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