PNG and Japan drive REDD talks to the Brink
In the often infuriating milieu of global forest politics, the Interim REDD+ Partnership is teetering on the brink of despair at talks in Tianjin this week, as the dismal performance of the current co-chairs, Papua New Guinea and Japan, continues to make progress all but impossible.
As readers of this blog will recall, the objective of the Interim REDD+ Partnership process is to speed up the transfer of finance earmarked for fighting emissions from deforestation from the developed world to the developing world. It sounds great in principle and considerable hope was attached to the Partnership when it was established earlier this year. Unfortunately, since Papua New Guinea and Japan took over the chairing of the partnership, trust and progress have radically deteriorated.
NGOs are publicly seething over the performance of the PNG chair this week in particular, but the outrage is not confined to civil society. Privately, senior representatives from a number of governments are declaring that their patience is at an end. Many are simply waiting for France and Brazil to take over the co-chairing at the end of this year – but waiting and delaying will prevent the partnership from gaining crucial momentum.
At least two sets of divisions are in evidence – and PNG is at the core of both. The first involves the ongoing question of whether and how to involve stakeholders from civil society and Indigenous peoples groups in the process. Common sense would dictate the benefit in openness and open doors, in order to build trust and consensus around the Interim REDD+ Partnership. Instead suspicion has been the order of the day as PNG has led efforts to thwart NGO involvement, to the frustration and fury of many other governments as well as civil society actors.
The second involves deeper divides over what needs to be in place before money can start being disbursed. PNG strongly funds flowing more quickly – but the credibility of this position is undermined by a growing national track record of alleged corruption and misconduct associated with REDD.
The International community has never been much good at dealing with deforestation as a global problem. From the failure to negotiate a forests convention at the UNCED Rio Earth Summit in 1992, to the creation of the United Nations Forum on Forests in 2005 as a lightweight hollow institution, years of fruitless talks have yielded little beyond platitudes, entrenched differences and the occasional non-binding statement. Now the Interim REDD+ Partnership is in grave danger of being the latest episode of multilateral futility on forests.
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This blog has previously drawn attention to the UK Guardian newspaper’s Biodiversity 100 campaign, consisting of an effort to persuade national governments to engage in a century of specific acts to save biodiversity within their jurisdictions. The campaign is now live with its first batch of campaigns asks that can be viewed here.
