PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo has announced that the national consultation on Guyana’s position on avoided deforestation and climate change will start later this month.

He made the announcement to the media at Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Tuesday morning, prior to his departure for New York in the United States (U.S.) where he is slated to address the United Nations (U.N) Commission on Sustainable Development Third Implementation Cycle: Policy Session.

At that forum, Mr. Jagdeo will continue to lobby the important role this country can play with regard to climate change.

He said he would use the opportunity to highlight what Guyana is doing in the forestry sector and how it can become a very important part of the climate change solution.

President Jagdeo outlined the Guyana policy on avoided deforestation last December and advocated how solutions may be found and Guyana can ensure that the world acts in a timely manner while protecting its national interest.

Noting that the consultation process is quite a packed programme, the Head of State assured that “…within a matter of two weeks, you are going to see the documents that will be used as the basis for the consultations.”

He recalled that he had promised this when he adumbrated the strategy sometime ago.

Since then, President Jagdeo met with several non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including three Amerindian ones and representatives of an international one and, when he returns from the U.S., he plans to meet with the Private Sector and the Labour Movement.

“We hope to launch the consultations for the national strategy that is transforming Guyana’s economy whilst addressing climate change sometime later this month,” he reiterated.

He said this will start off with a national stakeholders meeting in Region Four (Demerara/Mahaica) that would gather together all the stakeholders, among them politicians, labour leaders, private sector representatives, the indigenous people, forestry users and miners.

SEPARATE

“We hope to have a day long discussion there. Then we plan to hold separate consultations in Regions Two (Pomeroon/Supenaam) and Six (East Berbice/Corentyne),” Mr. Jagdeo disclosed.

He said a series of consultations will be held in Regions One (Barima/Waini), Seven (Cuyuni/Mazaruni), Eight (Potaro/Siparuni), Nine (Upper Takutu/Upper Essequibo) and Ten (Upper Demerara/Berbice) where the bulk of the indigenous people live.

“We plan to then bring all the toshaos out to have another national conference,” the President elaborated.

“We will, throughout this period, maybe a two-month period, to stimulate active debates on television and radio about climate change and its impact on countries like ours and our model.

“Then we will have a debate in the National Assembly, so that Members of Parliament can get involved in these discussions, too.

“There is a highly technical document and then I am doing a user friendly version, so it will ask some key questions and there will be answers to those questions,” he indicated.

Meanwhile, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Task Force on Climate Change and Development met last weekend and agreed that the Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development, which has been in the forefront of research and development into best practices for sustainable forest management, would be featured as a best practice for climate change at a scheduled meeting of CARICOM Heads of Government here in July.

Asked about his thoughts on this, President Jagdeo said: “I do not know who is going to put that to the Heads.

“I know Iwokrama is important for us but what we are trying to achieve goes beyond Iwokrama.

“It encompasses our entire rainforest and the approach is very different because Iwokrama is a micro-project.

“Not small but micro in terms of the national scale activity that we have embarked upon and it is only through the national scale activity and a major initiative of that sort that you can shift the economy from one traversing high carbon growth path to one that emphasises low carbon growth and this is what we are trying to do,” he explained.

Explaining further, he said: “In the Guyana experiment, we are trying to demonstrate to the world that you do not have to sacrifice prosperity in the country to address climate change – that these two goals can be compatible.

“Iwokrama has recently been doing a fairly good job but it never realised its promise from the time that Mr. (Desmond) Hoyte (former President) give the Commonwealth this large track of land, because of the unwillingness of the international community to provide the resources.

REPLICATED

“We had to turn around many times to intervene from our own budget, to keep Iwokrama alive and it was supposed to be an international research centre so that best practices identified in this centre could be replicated across the world,” President Jagdeo revealed.

He maintained that the intention was good when Mr. Hoyte gave the Commonwealth but the international community failed us over the many years.

“So what I will be discussing in July is not Iwokrama but the Guyana strategy,” Mr. Jagdeo clarified.

He said, last December, that the world needs to emit 80 per cent less greenhouse gases by 2050 in a 90/90 baseline.

“Achieving these deep reductions will require today’s biggest polluters to cut emissions sharply. Per capita, countries like ours already emit far less than the average needed to stabilise global temperatures but, as we become more prosperous, we, too, have a responsibility to find ways to avoid high pollution development path that today’s richer countries follow,” President Jagdeo observed.

He said he believed, therefore, that a more ambitious global agreement is required when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, an agreement that must be reached in Copenhagen in December.

President Jagdeo remembered that he had earlier said, unlike Kyoto, Copenhagen must create proportional incentives for all causes of greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, it is essential that it creates incentives to reduce tropical deforestation.

Deforestation causes about a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than the U.S. or the entire global transport sector and, although the Kyoto Protocol created one mechanism with small incentives for some countries to reduce deforestation, the President said it excluded countries like Guyana that have maintained their forests in a pristine state and introduced perverse incentives which made it more viable to destroy forests and re-grow them than to preserve them in the first place.

President Jagdeo has been in the forefront of the international lobby for avoided deforestation to be a key component in the Copenhagen Agreement and it has taken him to such as the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and to meet with several prominent persons, among them Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Britain’s Prince Charles.