GUYANA has gained such credibility on the international stage where climate change discussions are concerned, that from July this year, the country will co-chair the International REDD plus Partnership, a voluntary alliance of rainforest countries and donors, aimed at scaling up REDD-plus actions and finance.
This is according to President Bharrat Jagdeo, who delivered the feature address at the opening of a seminar to mark UN International Year of Forests, held on Monday at the Guyana International Conference Centre (GICC). He noted that Germany was the other co-chair from the developed countries, as the structure allows for a co-chair each from developing and developed nations.
Speaking to the Guyana Chronicle on Monday, Guyana’s lead negotiator to the UNFCCC, Andrew Bishop said Guyana announced its candidacy some months ago, but was formally elected at recent meetings in Bangkok, Thailand, in the margin of UN climate change talks there.
“The decision for Guyana to serve as co-chair from July 1, 2011 was unanimous, from a field that included all of the major rainforest countries of the world and REDD donors,” Bishop said.
Through its ascension to the co-chair, Guyana will seek to ramp up the Partnership’s activities from its current baseline work to greater advocacy for scaled up REDD actions and results-based payments for rainforest countries.
Bishop said the International REDD Partnership will neither replace the formal UNFCCC negotiations on REDD-plus, and neither will it prejudice them. “It will help to inform the UNFCCC negotiations,” he said.
“This alliance includes close to 40 rainforest countries, and approximately 10 to 15 other partners on the donor side,” he said, adding: “One of the things that the partnership has done is to establish a database system that could be shared by all rainforest countries, so we can see what each other is doing, we can share experiences, we can share data.”
Giving an example of what he meant, he said Guyana’s avoided deforestation model could be put on the database for other countries to learn from.
He said the body has been doing a lot of baseline work, such as what the needs of the countries are, assessing what the current level of resources are for REDD-plus, and assessing what the gaps are.
“So the partnership is involved in what [we refer to] as a needs assessment and a gap analysis with regards to what is needed by REDD countries to conserve their forests and practice sustainable forest management, and what gaps exist between the level of resources out there and the level of resources that they need,” he said.
Bishop said the partnership has been involved in a third area, which is looking at the effectiveness of the multilateral agencies in delivering on REDD-plus. “This takes the form of a study, looking at for example the World Bank, UN REDD, looking at how they are operating and to what extent they have been effective, and perhaps to make recommendations on how to improve the effectiveness at the institutional level,” the technocrat said.
“We believe that the partnership should go another level. It should get into for example, how do we scale up REDD plus actions in the countries themselves? It is one thing to develop a database and do studies and gap analyses and so on. However, it is another thing to actually help countries scale up their REDD initiatives and actions. The other area that is of interest to us is REDD financing, because without financial resources, many of these schemes would just remain as plans on paper,” Bishop told the Chronicle.
He outlined that the body wants to scale up concepts such as results-based payments – like in Guyana’s case with the Norway MOU – for actual results of keeping the rainforest, and its services, intact. He said the body is also examining the different financing options and models for REDD plus.
“This is a new area, and we have explored one method and that is with Norway. There could be other methods, for example, the use of carbon markets. This is a bilateral with Norway, [but] there could be multilateral, where various countries could tap into a fund,” he explained, adding:
“We are operating at a certain level right now but we see the partnership evolving, such as scaling up REDD action in the country, scaling up results-based payments, exploring financing options for REDD.”
Many of the REDD countries, he said, are also countries that might be considered vulnerable and therefore eligible to tap into the new Green Fund, established at various stages at both COP 15 in Copenhagen and at COP 16 in Cancun Mexico, and that it is quite possible for such countries to be able to draw down from this fund after the upcoming COP 17 in Durban, South Africa at the end of this year, where it is hoped that the Green Fund will be finally ready to allow countries to access it.
The Fund came out of a commitment given at Copenhagen for US$30 per annum by 2013 and US$100 billion per annum by 2020. However, there is concern that with the continuing economic crisis, increasing Republican influence in the US and the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan could spur reversals of these commitments.
“The Partnership has its focus on forests  and that is a mitigation tool that militates against climate change. So as a partnership, it will not be dealing with adaptation. But many of these REDD countries are vulnerable countries, like [Guyana] low-lying. As REDD countries we would be tapping into the Adaptation Fund as a second fund. But the partnership by itself does not have the mandate in the area of adaptation,” Bishop said.
The way the negotiations are going now, he said, an adaptation framework has been established out of the Cancun agreement. “And so an Adaptation Board will have to be set up. For the Green Fund that is being established, one aspect of it will be adaptation while another aspect of it will be mitigation under which REDD will fall. So it will have various aspects to the total Green Fund,” he said, adding:
“It would fund various aspects – adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer, the whole gamut. Hopefully, with the Green Fund, a lot of money could be channelled through it [for countries which qualify].”