United Nations urged to adopt EDF’s proposals to improve carbon accounting in forestry

Leading up to next week’s round of international climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany, a coalition that includes Environmental Defense Fund today presented to the United Nations its proposals to properly account for land management activities that add or remove carbon in the atmosphere.

Using the historical average baseline (HA in graph above) is the most transparent way to account for emissions from the forestry and land use sector. This chart shows how alternatives to the Historical Average can lead to a wide range of unaccounted emissions.

In an unusual – and promising – move, the countries invited the Climate Action Network (CAN), a group of more than 450 organizations worldwide including EDF, to present its preferred accounting rules for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) at a one-day “pre-sessional” meeting before the official negotiations begin Monday.

Today EDF and CAN representatives presented what we’ve been pushing for some time now: accounting rules for creating robust and scientifically-accurate reference “baselines”.   (If you want to get into the weeds, check out the presentation we made and the “Forest Management: Getting the Accounting Right” fact sheet we handed out at the workshop.)

Inviting CAN to present our group’s preferred accounting rules is especially encouraging because it shows countries are interested in hearing the environmental community’s concerns and solutions.

Forestry and land-use policy has become one of the biggest issues this year in international negotiations, and negotiators have been intensely debating how to account properly for activities in forests in developed countries that add or remove carbon in the atmosphere.

The problem is that we don’t know what countries are going to do with their forests in the future.  They might have a long-term commitment to sustainability, or they might not.

But in Copenhagen, most Parties made a long-term commitment through the Copenhagen Accord.  It would be helpful, at this stage, for countries to elaborate how forests are going to help them meet their long-term commitments under the Accord.  Until then, we don’t have much transparency about their commitment to sustainability.

What’s wrong with current LULUCF accounting proposals?

Our analysis shows regarding the impacts on the atmosphere that will be unaccounted by any party if the proposed accounting rules are accepted.  Party Proposed Reference Levels
Allow emissions to go unaccounted and are not an effective mechanism for guaranteeing accounting integrity and ambition.
Do not incentivize activities to reduce forest emissions using mitigation activities identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Create the largest accounting gap, and would allow these emissions to go unaccounted.

The effect is to violate Annex I (developed countries) commitments and allow new emissions without penalty.

We found that this factor and the impact of other proposals submitted by Parties could lead to an unaccounted emissions increase of nearly 580 Mt CO2-e per year – that’s nearly the amount of the United Kingdom’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, Parties have agreed to conserve and enhance sinks and reservoirs, and make deep cuts in global emissions. Any increase in net LULUCF emissions will undermine Annex I Parties’ efforts to meet their economy-wide post-2012 commitments

Using alternatives to a long-term average presents two major issues:
A projected reference level is designed to measure deviation from planned growth, and does not accurately reflect changes in emissions relative to the current state of the atmosphere.
LULUCF rules will undermine economy-wide ambition if they fail to account for increased net emissions from forest management from historic levels.

Using a long-term average offers a number of advantages:

1. It allows better characterization of uncertainty.
2. It smoothes effects of economic cycles or transitions.
3. It evens out effects of interannual variability.
4. It minimizes winners and losers: everyone is treated equally.
5. There’s no opportunity for choosing convenient years to maximize credits.
6. It serves as the best reflection of historical impacts on the atmosphere.

Can we say all this in five sentences?

Yes.

1. Historical average baselines are the best reflection of changes in emissions to the atmosphere.
2. All other alternatives create an accounting ‘gap’.
3. This gap is largest for proposed reference levels.
4. The accounting gap from proposed reference levels would be reduced if historical harvest levels were used instead of projected increases.
5. The best baseline to capture net changes in emissions is a long-term historical average from 1990-2008.

You can read more about our work with and analysis of LULUCF and forestry policy on the EDF Climate Talks blog and EDF’s Forestry and Land Use Policy 101 [PDF].

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