The first week of negotiations is over and 110 world leaders are about to descend on Copenhagen for the final week. It seems like all eyes are on this city, as we wait in anticipation for a treaty on climate change.
The negotiations are extremely complicated, with more acronyms than you could imagine. I’ve had to get my head around LULUCF, REDD, LCA, KP, UNFCCC, COP15 and more – not to mention all the small details that I’ve had to learn. But unfortunately I have no choice, as the devil is mostly in the detail!
At the moment one of the key sticking points in the negotiations is around loopholes in the agreement. One such loophole is in land-use policy – which includes forestry and agriculture.
Under the last global agreement on climate change – the Kyoto Protocol – Australia was given a legally-binding target for how much greenhouse gas we could release into the atmosphere. Although it looked like we would meet this target, we have actually increased our emissions quite a lot in the last decade. This is because we didn’t properly account for all the emissions that were released from land-use – such as land clearing and logging forests, because we chose not to count these under the Kyoto Protocol.
At the moment the world is deciding how to include land-use emissions in the next agreement.
What we’re worried about is that Australia will fiddle the books. They’re currently pushing to include a clause in the agreement that means we can count emissions where we want (for example, where we sequester carbon through improved agricultural practices) but not count the emissions where we don’t want, such as when we release greenhouse gas into the atmosphere (such as from logging).
It’s a little bit like a business being able to count all of their income, but only some of their expenditure. It will look like we’ve met our emission reduction targets when we actually haven’t, because we will release a lot of emissions from land-use but not count them towards our targets.
This has huge implications, especially for rural and regional Australia.
This will be a big thing to watch this week, and we’ll keep you updated.
In the meantime, you can help us make this front-page news by writing a letter to the editor to the newspaper in your state, using the following points:
Write a letter to the editor and use the following points (just pick one or two points, then write the letter in your own words).
1. At the moment in Copenhagen, world leaders are deciding on what to do about emissions from the land-use and forestry sectors.
2. Countries like Australia need to accurately account for the full amount of emissions from the land-use and forestry sectors.
3. Australia is pushing to include a loophole which allows countries to increase emissions dramatically from the land-use and forestry sectors without this showing up on its carbon accounts.
4. This could mean Australia is allowed to log our native forests and release a whole lot of CO2, but not count it in our final target.
5. The loophole could result in up to one billion tones of CO2 annually being ignored by developed countries – that’s roughly equivalent to Japan’s annual emissions!
