11 Dec 2009
The Copenhagen climate change conference must make progress on land use and land change issues by this weekend, says the chief executive of the New Zealand Forest Owners' Association.
“If not then I think time will have run out,” David Rhodes told Carbon News from Copenhagen today.
Changing the Kyoto rules to allow land owners to clear forest from one area and replant it in another without penalty is one of the key objectives of the New Zealand delegation. Rhodes says that there is increasing convergence among developed counties on a number of key forestry issues.“Australia and New Zealand are well aligned. There is still, however, strong resistance by developing countries to conceding any flexibility on LULUCF (Land Use, Land Change and Forestry) issues in the belief that this will lessen the commitment to emissions reductions.
“Hopefully there can be agreement to developing a comprehensive text even if it contains a lot of brackets (non-agreed text) by this weekend.”
But even if substantial progress is made, he says, there is still the problem of whether or not there is a substantial international agreement with adequate commitments or not. Without this the section that deals with forestry will likely be left stranded.”
Source: Carbon News
