Climate change aid bitter-sweet for Guyana says president
Caribbean Net News – August 01, 2008
Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo says he is pleased that Guyana is among 14 countries selected for financial aid for combating tropical deforestation and climate change from an initial US$82 million partnership. Guyana will receive the funding from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), which is aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation by compensating developing countries for greenhouse gas emission reductions. However, the Guyanese leader expresses dissatisfaction with the mechanism through which these payments will be effected. "I'm arguing that it should change. It's a clean development mechanism and I'm arguing that this should be changed to a market-based mechanism especially to trade carbon and carbon dioxide from forest, that is, sequestered through tropical rain forests," he said.
Jagdeo argued that the forests store much carbon and, as such, the carbon in these forests needs to be given credits and the credits traded in the markets similar to the system that obtains in Europe. "Europe now, through an emissions trading scheme has been trading credits to the value of $33 billion. We feel that we can generate a significant amount of money for developing countries like ours if we were to have a market-based mechanism trading these credits," the president said. He argued that the forests produce the same type of service to the rest of the world and he did not understand why they should be treated any differently. The Guyana government has been continuing to put measures in place to ensure sustainable forestry management over the years and this has resulted in the country's rainforest still being fully intact. Jagdeo has been advocating for the country to be compensated for this, since developed countries have been contributing mostly to pollution through carbon emissions, while developing countries have faced the brunt of global warming and climate change.
Jagdeo has been in the forefront of the Caribbean for a year now, touting that countries like Guyana with large standing forests be compensated since they are playing a crucial role in mitigating the deadly effects of global warming. During a press conference with Conservation International (CI) in New York earlier this year, the president made Guyana’s forest available to be used as a model for studies. Guyana has also donated one million acres of its standing forest to Iwokrama International to be used as protected areas.
Guyana, along with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar; Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama and Nepal, Lao PDR, and Vietnam, will all receive funding from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) in an innovative approach to finance efforts to combat climate change. In a statement released by the World Bank, the FCPF is aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation by compensating developing countries for greenhouse gas emission reductions. The partnership, approved by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors on September 25, 2007, became functionally operational on June 25, 2008. The 14 tropical and sub-tropical countries are the first developing nations to receive grant support as they build their capacity for Reducing Emission from Deforestation Forest Degradation (REDD).