What the government is doing

Reducing Australia's emissions

Adapting to climate change

Clean energy legislation: the way ahead

Shaping a global solution

• Finance
• Australia's Fast-Start Finance Progress Report November 2011
• Update to Progress Report November 2011
• Global action - facts and fiction
• Countries acting now
• International pledges
• Australia: part of the problem - part of the solution
• Climate Change in China's 12^th Five year plan
• International climate change negotiations
• Durban 2011
• Cancun 2010
• Overview of the negotiation process
• Copenhagen Accord
• Presentations

Programs and rebates

A-Z of Government programs and initiatives

Public consultations

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries

Forest carbon

If the global community is to solve the challenge of climate change, we are going to need to make the most of every opportunity available to us. Among these opportunities, Australia believes that forests rank as an important and unique way to tackle the challenge.

Unfortunately, global forest cover is declining. This means the world's forests are a large source of greenhouse gas emissions when they could be actively absorbing and storing emissions.

Addressing this issue is commonly known as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, or REDD+.

REDD+ is critically important. Deforestation of approximately 13 million hectares per year—around one-quarter the size of France—accounts for approximately 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the bulk of which come from developing countries. This is more than the world's transport emissions put together.

Developed countries like Australia have a crucial role to play in helping developing countries to reduce their forest carbon emissions. However, this is not simply a matter of helping them to stop cutting down trees. The challenge is ensuring that developing countries can meet a number of requirements essential to the effectiveness of any future climate change outcome, such as being able to demonstrate the extent to which forest carbon emissions reductions have actually been achieved.

While public funding is vital to build this capacity, it is simply not feasible to expect that such funding alone can meet the financial scale of the challenge at hand. Estimates suggest that to halve deforestation, an investment in the order of US$5–15 billion per year is necessary. Australia believes that, ultimately, markets are the only mechanism capable of providing the financial incentives necessary to reduce forest carbon emissions at scale.

Forests have a pivotal role in the social, cultural and environmental livelihoods of many countries. Because of these linkages, it is essential that the development of a way forward on REDD+ does not create new problems when trying to solve old ones. For example, Australia would not support a REDD+ mechanism which promoted the replacement of native forests with plantation forests. Native forests are important for biodiversity and local people who may depend on the forest for their food and shelter. Therefore, a REDD+ mechanism must have environmental and social integrity, and avoid these sorts of perverse outcomes.

Australia strongly believes that REDD+ should be designed to maximise the benefits that can flow to local, Indigenous and forest-dependent communities. To reach an equitable outcome, Australia believes these communities need to be involved in the development of REDD+ policies.

More information can be found in our submission on a forest carbon market mechanism (PDF 170 kB) made to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in March 2009.

Designing an effective forest carbon market mechanism

A market-based mechanism provides one of the best prospects for meeting the scale of financial incentives necessary to reduce forest carbon emissions. Therefore we must work hard to ensure that investors have confidence and certainty in practices and approaches to implementing REDD+. At the same time, countries will still need to meet standards which ensure the social and environmental integrity of REDD+.

Any successful market requires investor confidence and certainty. A country, for example, must be certain that when they buy one tonne of Australian goods, one tonne of Australian goods will be delivered. The same theory applies to forest carbon.

The greatest challenge in designing a workable forest carbon market mechanism rests on how to address the problems of permanence, additionality and leakage:

• permanence means forested areas that are preserved through REDD+ remain intact over time
• additionality means that carbon emissions reductions (or removals) would not have occurred without a carbon payment through a REDD+ mechanism
• leakage means reduced deforestation in one region does not result in increased deforestation in another (and therefore no net gain to the atmosphere).

These issues can be addressed by ensuring that forest carbon monitoring systems are in place at a national level and that the international and national rules and transactions are transparent and clear.

Australia's $273 million International Forest Carbon Initiative is a key contribution to global action on REDD+.

REDD+ Partnership

Following the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009, President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Stoltenberg both announced an intention to host meetings on REDD+ in 2010 to build on the strong outcomes from Copenhagen. This became known as the Paris-Oslo Process.

At the first high-level meeting hosted by the Government of France on 11 March 2010, countries, including Australia, agreed on the need to forge a strong international partnership on REDD+. At the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference on 27 May 2010, the REDD+ Partnership, was endorsed by 58 countries, including Australia. The Partnership has now been endorsed by over 70 countries.

The REDD+ Partnership is a voluntary, non-legally binding agreement. It provides an open forum for discussion on key REDD+ issues and aims to support and feed outcomes into the UNFCCC negotiations. The objective is to provide a platform for countries to scale up REDD+ actions and finance, and improve the effectiveness, efficiency, transparency and coordination of REDD+ initiatives in the immediate term.

Building on the USD3.5 billion fast-start financing package for REDD+ announced in Copenhagen by Australia, France, Japan, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States, six countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden) pledged an additional USD500 million in fast-start contributions at the Oslo meeting of the Partnership. This brings the total package up to USD4 billion. The funding available to support taking action on REDD+ has now grown to over USD4 billion.