The prestigious New York Times yesterday featured Guyana’s climate change model noting the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) is unique because it is countrywide.

The article headlined ‘Guyana offers a model to save rainforest’, points out too that support from Amerindians for the LCDS is particularly important because, collectively, the Amerindians are Guyana’s second-largest landowners, after the state.

The New York Times said elements of the Guyana and Norway partnership signed last month that might offer lessons for others include the setting up of a transparent financial transfer mechanism that allows Guyana to maintain sovereignty over its resources; the creation of a system to measure, monitor and report changes in forest cover; and the organisation of consultations with all Guyanese, including indigenous people, to generate nationwide support.

In an interview with the newspaper, Foreign Affairs Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett said the world’s growing motivation to tackle climate change could mean sustainable economic opportunity for this country as well as a cost-effective investment for the world. “The fastest way of reducing carbon emissions is keeping the forest standing,” she said in an interview in New York in September, ahead of

the United Nations conference on climate change under way in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“All of the other measures we could take would take technology, time. But this we can do immediately. We just stop. We just stop cutting.”

That recognition, and advances in satellite imaging and carbon measurements over the past decade, have made a proposal for forest preservation, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), an important part of the climate treaty talks, the newspaper said.

It notes that Guyana argues that forest conservation is critically important and if incentives are aimed only at encouraging countries with high deforestation, like neighbouring Brazil, to curtail logging, timber clearance will simply migrate from protected to unprotected countries.

Pursuing that concept, President Bharrat Jagdeo last year commissioned the international management consulting firm McKinsey to help calculate deforestation’s economic value to his nation — that is, the amount Guyana could earn by selling its forests for timber and using the land for agriculture.

After all, said Mr. Jagdeo told the newspaper, deforestation is not a result of irrationality or ignorance; people get economic benefits when they log and farm. For preservation to work, “the incentives must be at a level that will out compete alternative activities,” he said in an interview.

To help convince developed countries, Guyana has undertaken a pilot project, largely funded through the deal signed with Norway. The agreement will provide Guyana US$30 million in 2010 for forest conservation and up to US$250 million by 2015, based upon its success in limiting emissions. Guyana will use the money to begin protecting its rain forests and implementing its Low Carbon Development Strategy.

“I think the partnership between Norway and Guyana is absolutely vital in building lessons in order to have a really good REDD mechanism,” said Florence Daviet, a senior associate for the World Resources Institute, who is taking part in the climate treaty talks. Amerindian leader Sydney Allicock said, “This might be something we’ve always been looking for because of our belief of the forest.” “We don’t look at the forest as just a money-making thing in terms of lumber. We look at it as life.”

The Guyana project promises to allow Amerindians to continue their traditional way of life in the forest where, Mr. Allicock said, they are an integral part of the ecosystem. When they cut trees to farm, they use the land for about three years and then let it go fallow. “You would be amazed to see after five, six years, that different types of trees that were not even there — but seeds were probably in the ground – are now able to evolve,” he said. “That sort of understanding with the forest is what we have.”

Guyana’s LCDS and an effective REDD programme would provide a rare opportunity to protect that relationship, while simultaneously offering benefits of development like better health care and education. Experience suggests the alternatives, including gold, oil and hardwood extraction, would be less benign, the newspaper said.

Yet, whether a binding agreement can be reached at Copenhagen, on REDD or anything else, remains at best uncertain.

“The science is clear,” Mr. Jagdeo said. “Every government in the world now agrees that climate change is real, and it has a huge impact on development, and it threatens our future. The solutions are clear. Where we have become deadlocked is on the question of political will.” The developed world is willing to acknowledge responsibility for having gotten to this point, but as yet, it has been unwilling to bear the cost of corrective action, he said. As an economist, he is most haunted by the numbers.

“It will take less than 1 percent of G.D.P. now to fix the problem, when in the future we could lose as much as 20 percent of G.D.P.,” he said.

Still, at least for Guyana, “the good news is that the framework on forests is actually doing better than many other sectors,” said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an international rain forest research alliance based in Oxford, England. “It’s possible that we will get a good agreement on REDD in Copenhagen.”

“The forest-owning nations, instead of receiving aid, would become suppliers of a global service that is paid for or rented by the international community,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It changes from an aid relationship into a trade relationship.” (GINA)