— President hails start of process
JUST BACK from the last meeting of the United Nations High Level Advisory Panel on Climate Financing, President Bharrat Jagdeo says Guyana’s receipt of the first tranche of US$30 million from the agreement with Norway marks the commencement of an exciting pathway to low-carbon development. At a press conference Friday at the Office of the President complex, he said the depositing into a World Bank account of the US$30 million resulted from a long process that “saw us doing a study that was very important in establishing a notional value for forest carbon in our forests and then an extensive process of consultation based on strategies that we developed.”
Mr. Jagdeo said that Guyana saw the creation of a model to fill a gap in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations.
“[It is] a model that would see payments for our forest carbon and particularly, a model that proves that avoided deforestation is an important tool in the fight against climate change,” he said.
The President added: “We have not only created a financial flow through the establishment of GRIF (Guyana REDD Investment Fund) in Guyana, but we have created a model that has changed the concept of REDD-plus that includes conservation as part of a compensatory scheme.” (REDD is the UN-backed programme to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).
Guyana, he said, has demonstrated that there could be appropriate safeguards for environmental, social and fiduciary issues.
“And we have now embarked on a more exciting pathway to show that countries like ours can use this stream of payment to generate alternative prosperity for their people – alternative to the traditional path that developed countries used,” he said, adding:
“…overall, it was groundbreaking, and many Guyanese worked on this. I am very pleased that this puts us right at the cutting edge of world opinion in the field of preserving forests and creating a market for forest carbon.”
He noted that this is the first payment through a formal agreement that has a detailed monitoring, reporting and verification system ever in the entire world between a developing country partner and a developed country partner for forest carbon, where payment is based on measured output.
“This is the first time this has ever happened anywhere in the world,” said the President.
He said it will be very useful “as we seek to expand or to create a market for forest carbon that will eventually create a carbon price of $20 to $25 per tonne from the price that we currently use of $5 per tonne.”
He added that this will see Guyana receiving payments in the order of hundreds of millions per year.
The President said that while the sum of US$30 million may seem small to some people, it is groundbreaking and the second element to this strategy is to use the money well.
“We have already notified the Parliament of our plans and in what areas we intend to use these resources”, he said, adding that one of the most important initiatives the money would fund is the transformation of the economies of the Amerindian villages, accelerating the process of demarcation of Amerindian titled lands and getting power to each home in the Amerindian villages through the use of solar panels.
He said that during the conference of Toshaos this week, they will continue the discourse on how these developments will move forward.
According to the President, there is a lot in the programme for coastal people but these benefits will come through cheaper electricity when the hydro power plant is up and running. He said that on the coast, people will also benefit from the one laptop per family programme.
He said that because of the peculiarities of getting power to the Amerindian communities, it is unlikely that the laptop per family programme will be taken there but indicated that there will instead be internet kiosks established in each community.
This first US$30 million tranche sets out a bigger transformative process in Guyana and “I hope that we don’t lose sight of it,” he said.
The President was also in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the last meeting of the principals of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Advisory Panel on Climate Finance.
The panel was put together to brainstorm ideas on raising US$100 billion per year by 2020 to fight climate change.
“We have just finalised our report so a series of recommendations will go to the Secretary General. The conclusion is that this is technically feasible and this advisory group emerged out of a promise made in the Copenhagen Accord, that there will be a financial flow from the developed world of about US$100 billion per year by 2020, ramping up from the fast start financing of US$10 billion per year for the three years – 2010, 2011, 2012”, the President said.
“I am pleased that we managed to reach some form of consensus, because we had people from China, the USA at the technical level…there are only three Heads of State: myself, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and the Prime Minister of Norway,” he said, adding that the others are mainly technical and financial officials.
The group is to present the report to the Secretary General during the COP 16 summit in Cancun, Mexico in December.