I received some positive feedback from my earlier post on the subject of carbon trading and why I believe that a future climate regime should avoid including that mechanism of financing any realistic improvements in the climate change crisis from a colleague in the sector. It was an engaging discussion and based on that I would want to offer a few clarifications.
1. In principle, I am not against the substance of "off-setting" schemes as long as they are not financed by carbon trading tools. This is clearly what I mean! The fact that you can pollute (release carbon into the atmosphere) somewhere are take actions in another place to capture the carbon (through improved agriculture technologies that enable the soil, crops or trees to capture more carbon than they usually will) or plant trees to capture the carbon is not that a bad idea. How you finance such a scheme of this off-setting is my problem, in which case I am totally against the idea of financing it through carbon trading i.e polluters trading money in exchange of carbon credits that is owned through any of the tools mentioned above in tropical forest countries. I am totally against it because of the reasons I gave in the earlier post. The second and equally important reason is that such a mechanism does not force radical shift in the way western economies behave to cut emissions. This is "business-as-usual" usual scenario and this does not solve the climate crisis. We are told by the IPCC that we need to cut emissions drastically if we are to avoid the catastrophe that awaits us as a human race. There is need to cut consumerism in the West, reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, shift our energy dependence on coal among others. The off-setting schemes as currently being pushed will only maintain the status-quo. Keep on polluting and plant trees or undertake among others agro, forestry based technologies in tropical countries to capture that carbon.
2. In principle I am also not against, any "off-setting" mechanism that helps farmers in Africa for instance in practicing new technologies that helps to improve their cocoa yields and also capture carbon (for instance through shade-tolerant cocoa agroforestry technologies). It will improve their yields, help to create forest resources and obviously improve their livelihoods.I am an Agroforester by training so I am aware of the benefits of such a scheme. I am totally against, rewarding the farmers through the carbon emissions captured by these agroforestry technologies through carbon trading.
3.I am totally in favour of a fund-based mechanism for rewarding the efforts of communities, farmers and tropical forest governments for capturing excess carbon in the atmosphere. The technicalities of how such a fund should be run to ensure that farmers and governments who invest in such carbon capturing technologies are rewarded should be in the domain of any international climate change mitigation regime discussions.
4. In conclusion, I reiterate that I am not in support of any climate change mitigation effort (in a future global climate change regime) that focuses on using carbon trading as a tool to achieve an off-set scheme. The West must do more to cut emissions, we must also encourage tropical countries and their communities to invest in improved farming technologies, agroforestry, and forest mitigation technologies that ensures sustainability and helps to reduce the global carbon dioxide levels. Such investments should be rewarded through a fund-based mechanism and not carbon trading. I understand what the benefits are of one over the other.
I hope this provides some clarifications. And of course this is an on-going debate at the international level. And this is my take on some of the issues.
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