California pilots REDD with Brazil, Mexico states

California has reached agreement with states in Mexico and Brazil for pilot projects to protect their rainforests in return for carbon credits under the provincial-level, international climate initiative of outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger will use his last Governors' Global Climate Summit meeting as the platform for announcing the deals, which will see REDD carbon credits generated for use as offsets in the Californian emissions trading scheme, set to begin in 2012.

The governors of Acre in Western Brazil and Chiapas in south-eastern Mexico will sign agreements this week at the meeting at the University of California, Davis.

“Our announcement tomorrow will be an agreement between those three governors to actually move projects from these states into the carbon market and to hopefully provide a path for others to follow,” California Secretary for Environmental Protection Linda Adams told Reuters.

The avoided deforestation agreements must still be approved by the Air Resources Board in California, the state agency that oversees the rules of the emissions trading scheme. It released generous draft offsets rules for the state’s emitters late last month.

States and provinces from more than 20 countries are at Davis to thrash out programmes to finance the reduction of emissions from deforestation and more widely across industry and energy generation.

Reuters, News10/KXTV 15/11/10