President vows…
GUYANA can justifiably take pride in what it has achieved in trying to help the world avert the disastrous effects of climate change, and President Bharrat Jagdeo is determined that it will continue in this leadership role. He last week noted that Guyana was going through some tough climate change model-building experiences, but pledged, “We have strong shoulders; we can fight and deal with this.”
“My concern is that this evolves into a credible model that everyone can accept, [Hopefully] developing countries won’t have to go through the same pathway, because we would have paved the way for them,” he told reporters at the Office of the President after returning from the United Nations climate change negotiations in Cancun, Mexico.
President Jagdeo’s unrelenting lobby for building this country’s low-carbon economic development thrust gained new ground in Cancun, and his stand in presenting Guyana’s case at the meeting was widely reported by mainstream international media, including Time magazine, The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Guardian newspaper of London.
Guyana’s Low-Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) has already garnered much international backing, including US$250M over the next five years from Norway as payment for preserving this country’s forests.
The LCDS is based largely on the UN-backed Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) which has been expanded to REDD+ which goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks
Given the work Guyana has done to get this far, including investing political capital, it must be tedious for Mr. Jagdeo to also have to find time to deal with attempts here to disparage the LCDS and denigrate the country’s contributions to the global cause.
On a panel in Cancun, convened by the Avoided Deforestation Partners non-governmental organization (which included Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, international philanthropist George Soros, and President Barack Obama’s Advisor on Energy and Environment, Joe Aldy), President Jagdeo explained how Guyana and Norway’s experience could provide valuable lessons for how multilateral institutions like the World Bank could be modernised to provide the financial intermediary services required for climate finance.
But this, he stressed at a press conference in Georgetown last week, was distorted by the Kaieteur News newspaper which resorted to sensationalising points brought up in the panel discussion.
“Here we’re speaking about an initiative, a system moving forward, a model moving forward. And I understand when some people cannot comprehend that – using an example to illustrate movement or lack of movement in a model. Clearly, we are the most advanced of any country in the world developing the REDD plus model,” he said.
The President added that while Norway has also developed models for Indonesia and Brazil, these do not include monitoring, reporting and verification, nor are they situated within the framework of a low-carbon development strategy.
“I was sharing our experience; I said that it doesn’t only take a generous donor – Norway – and a committed and willing country – Guyana – to make a model work. For the model to work, there are several other institutions that form part of the system, including the World Bank. [I said] until now, a year after we have fulfilled the conditions to Norway, [that country] has the money to deliver to Guyana and Guyana has the projects ready, that the money has not been delivered as yet…we have the money from Norway now. I was making the point that it took us from September last year to now to negotiate what is basically the setting up of a current account,” he said.
“If you can’t make this work with a country like Guyana, which was prepared to pioneer a model, what example are you sending to other countries that want to become part of a REDD+ mechanism?”
At the press conference called to report on the Cancun discussions, he also announced that Guyana is to receive US$70M in the first and second tranches of the Norway funds by the end of the first quarter of 2011.
“Hopefully by January, we would see money starting to go to various projects in Guyana,” he said.
Guyana is getting US$30M for 2010 and US$40M for 2011 for projects already identified in the climate change agreement with Norway, including financing equity in the Amaila Falls hydro-project, demarcation of Amerindian lands, solar panels for Amerindian villages, and transforming the economies of those villages, among others.
Grant funds for village projects earmarked under the agreement are due to start flowing to the villages by February next year, the President said.
He said the Cancun discussions covered several areas, including work on the fast-start financing, a financing mechanism, technology transfer, REDD+ and a Green Fund.
“These were the five areas that made some progress…However, if you look at these decisions themselves, you would see that they have been significantly watered down in order to get the COP (Conference of Parties) decision on them. Take for example REDD+, a concept that we fought for, and because of our lobby, we expanded from REDD to REDD+. It was decided [in Cancun] that there would be a three-phase approach to REDD+. There was agreement that we will go with the first two phases, and that it will come from public funds. The first two phases are capacity building and institutional strengthening, while exploring the possibility of finding other sources of funding for phase three: actually funding initiatives,” he said.
“In Guyana’s case, we have gone way past phase one and phase two; we’re actually funding a large-scale initiative to minimise forest carbon from getting into the atmosphere. Clearly, if 20 per cent of emissions come from deforestation, you are not going to stop deforestation through capacity building and institutional strengthening; you are going to stop it only if there is large- scale financing available to the forested countries to create alternatives for their people, and there was no commitment to doing that,” he said.
“My big fear is that because the COP decision spoke only of phases one and two, many developed countries are going to use this as an excuse [to say leave the large projects for phase three]. It could become a setback for some countries that want to move directly to phase three. I hope that this is not the case,” President Jagdeo said.
He said that there will be quite a number of countries continuing along the same pathway that leads to more forests being destroyed, simply because they don’t have alternatives; “not because they don’t have the will.”
“Whilst overall people are happy that there was a REDD+ decision, standing from our perspective it does not advance the process the way we would have wished. We wanted to move other countries to get to where we are today,” he said.
He said that in the long term it would be impossible to stabilise global temperature without a binding global agreement “whatever form it takes.”
The efforts will be clearly unsuccessful if the developed countries try to shift the burden of financing to the developing world, he reiterated. 
“Overall, my assessment of Cancun is that it delivered on its expectations, and the expectations were low, and we should be happy about that. It would have been worse. We can’t give up…we have to build on this. I am sure that by the time we get to South Africa (the next meeting in December 2011), we have a greater momentum and movement forward, but it’s a bit disappointing, because we are not addressing the issue of [stabilising] greenhouse gases now,” he said.
Apart from the progress on REDD+, the Cancun meeting also reached agreement on a new fund for climate finance that will benefit from some of the US$100 billion in “long-term finance” that the agreements see flowing from north to south every year by 2020.
This fund will not be directly under the control of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but will instead be run by an independent Board. The World Bank will function as a trustee for the fund, but in a way as yet to be fully defined.
In Cancun, Mr. Jagdeo highlighted the need for international mechanisms to facilitate the flow of climate finance from the developed world to the developing world.
He reiterated that having commitments of finance would be insufficient if these were not matched by the mechanisms to intermediate them.