Climate Chronicle - climate justice news from COP 15

With the climate talks in full swing here in Copenhagen, take a look atClimate Chronicle, a newspaper in which we aim to report all the latest news from the conference and the street.

Here's my article from the last issue:

Copenhagen Plan B: “protect the rich”
Oscar Reyes
Dec 9 2009



A leaked text of the political declaration that could conclude the Copenhagen conference reveals back-room dealings that offer little to the Majority World.

So the rumours were true. For the past week, it was an open secret that the Danish government had already drafted a “political declaration” that could form the major outcome of the UN Climate Change Conference now that a full-blown international agreement is off the cards. The draft text has now been leaked, sparking outrage amongst Southern delegates and civil society organisations.

“The Copenhagen Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,” as the draft is titled, would introduce percentage-based emissions targets for all except the Least Developed Countries, fatally undermining the Kyoto Protocol, which draws a line between industrialised Annex 1 states and the Majority World. The text also suggests that financial and technological support measures in non-Annex 1 countries, an underlying principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), should now be made conditional to their ability to meet complex emissions monitoring requirements.

The UNFCCC quickly attempted to limit the damage, putting out a statement from Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer that declared that the draft was a “decision paper put forward by Danish Prime Minister,” while maintaining that it was not a “formal text” of the UN negotiating process.

But the leaked text met with an angry response from many Southern delegates. Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chairperson of the G77 plus China grouping of 132 developing countries, said that the Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen had failed in his role as a neutral host and had instead “chosen to protect the rich countries.” The emergence of the draft text was also met by an impromptu protest from members of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, who marched through the Bella Centre chanting “Two degrees is suicide, One Africa, one degree.”

Democratic deficit
Concern stems not simply from the contents of the draft text, but also the secretive and biased way in which it came about. The COP Presidency, which is held by host country Denmark, is mandated to craft compromises based on painstakingly negotiated drafts. In this case, the Presidency stands accused not only of overstepping the mark, but of hopping, stepping and then jumping over it, pre-empting UN decisions with proposals lifted in part from text discussed at the Major Economies Forum, an initiative closely tied to the G20 grouping and chaired by US President Barack Obama.

As Meena Raman, Honorary Secretary of Friends of the Earth Malaysia, explains, “The leaked draft Copenhagen Agreement violates the democratic principles of the UN and threatens the Copenhagen negotiations. By discussing their text in secret back-room meetings with a few select countries, the Danes are doing the opposite of what the world expects the host country to do. The Danish government must stop colluding with other rich nations. Instead it must take as a starting point the positions of developing countries - which are the least responsible for climate change, but who are most affected by it.”

Raman Mehta from Action Aid India decried a “betrayal of trust” on the part of the Danish government.

More “hot air” on reductions
The draft text is weak and vague in its overall ambitions. In reiterating the goal of holding global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the text sets a global reduction target of 50 per cent by 2050, of which 80 per cent should come from the industrialised world. These figures look distinctly unimpressive when tracked back to existing per capita emissions, however, with one estimate suggesting that they would allow Northern industrialised countries to continue outpolluting the Majority World by a factor of 3:5.

The short-term proposals are ostensibly more ambitious, with a suggestion that global emissions should peak by 2020. But the same passage of the text misleadingly claims that this peak has already been reached in “developed countries collectively.” This is based on the latest UNFCCC figures, which show that Annex 1 countries are now on track to meet their Kyoto Protocol commitments, but a closer look reveals that this is achieved on the basis of “hot air” emissions resulting from economic collapse in the former Soviet bloc in the early 1990s. Emissions elsewhere in the developed world have continued to rise. The projections for 2020 are further massaged by counting a large volume of “emissions savings” from carbon offsets made in the global South as part of Annex 1 emissions figures.

Strings attached
Whereas the Bali Action Plan emphasises that developing country actions will be “supported and enabled” by technology, financing and capacity building, the draft suggests that these measures would be “subject to robust measurement, reporting and verification.” This inversion implies that the support measures could be withheld unless monitoring is externally approved. Instead of placing an obligation on industrialised countries to repay and restitute their climate debt, this makes any support measures conditional to a series of complex technical asssessments.
Just as significant is what the text does not include. There are no numbers on long-term financing, and there is no suggestion that these will be forthcoming in Copenhagen. The only figure offered is a projection of $10 billion per year of “fast start finance”, a scaled-down version of a plan first presented by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in late November. But Lumamba Di-Aping was dismissive: “Ten billion dollars will not buy developing countries’ citizens enough coffins,” he said.

A growing market
The flip side of this lack of financial commitments is a commitment to scale up carbon markets as part of any agreement. The cap and trade proposals currently passing through the US would allow up to 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon offsets per year to displace the need for domestic emissions reductions, a demand that is over seven times larger than the existing supply of offsets through the UN's Clean Devopment Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation scheme.

Although the language on carbon markets remains vague, talk of “an effective and orderly transition from project based to more comprehensive approaches” signals a framework that would introduce a broad range of new offsets, from “sectoral crediting” through to measures aimed at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).

“With developed countries offering so little by way of public finance, developing countries are being sent a message that support for offsetting mechanisms is their only real choice to access funds” says Payal Parkeh, a climate scientist with International Rivers.

A coalition of the unwilling
What the “Copenhagen Agreement” leak signals, above all, is a lack of ambition on the part of industrialised countries to make emissions reductions at home or meet their financial and other obligations to the South. “Despite the hype, the talk of ´Hopenhagen´, the supposed political will to ´get it done´, this set of negotiations might be no different than anything that has come before” concludes Rhiya Trivedi, a member of the Canadian Youth Delegation to Copenhagen. “It could be just another round of the North-South divide and power struggle.” Business as usual, in other words.

www.carbontradewatch.org

Copenhagen Climate Negotiations - latest EU, G20, African Union positions

The EU this week released its latest negotiating positions for the Copenhagen climate talks - including on the controversial aspects of climate finance. For a clear report, take a look at the EU Observer. To get into the geeky detail, take a look at the Communication 'Stepping up international climate finance: A European blueprint for the Copenhagen deal'"(an EU Communication is a non-binding statement of intent from the EU Commission, the Brussels-based bureaucracy charged with initiating discussions that are subsequently taken up by the EU Parliament and Council of Ministers).

One of the key aspects is that public financial commitments are further squeezed (or retreated from as an idea). Instead, the EU claims that financing for tackling climate change should be built around carbon market revenues and private finance (aka investment opportunities for EU-based corporations).

A second key aspect (as I've mentioned earlier in this blog) is the proposed "sectoral crediting mechanism." Although the EU talks this up as an improvement upon the discredited Clean Development Mechanism, it is suspiciously silent on the fact that the shift from "project based" to "sectoral" crediting means that the last, inadequate lines of environmental impact assessment would be circumvented. This is mainly in the interest of "unblocking" the CDM bottleneck - the complaint from financial institutions that they can't grow this market quickly enough.

Further info can be found in this background "staff working document, this Q+A and press release

While the EU has set out figures in the region of €2-15 billion for climate financing, the African Union is suggesting a figure of $200 billion by 2020.

The US, meanwhile, has yet to come up with a proposal at all.

Finally, a series of position papers for the forthcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh reveal are distinctly worrying (and predictable) in their emphasis on private sector market openings and various means to expand global carbon markets

Divide and rule: the politics of climate negotiations

Want to know how global treaties get stitched up? You could do far worse than read this new briefing by Oilwatch International. It outlines the following tactics to force a treat in the interest of the developed countries at the expense of a just climate deal:

• Controlling the discourse. Shape the narrative and expectations of negotiators and the public about what constitutes success and failure – including misleading the media.

• Ambush and push. Seeking a sudden deal before developing countries have time to assess the implications.
  

• Mischaracterizing policy as science. This is a way to depoliticise the claims of the powerful – for example, by arguing that IPCC reports make recommendations about the north/south balance of action to tackle climate change.

• Obscuring the details. Setting goals and expectations in different statistical terms, making the implications difficult to evaluate and compare

• Building a Trojan Horse. The inclusion of developed country officials or consultants in developing country delegations, who then mischaracterise their positions.

• Carving out special deals. Splitting up developing countries by offering special deals to sub-groups – for example, in relation to market access in trade negotiations, or in relation to aid provisions.

• Establishing new groupings of countries. Breaking the ties between developing country groupings by championing new groupings – normally, by developed countries defining that sub-grouping in relation to “favourable treatment” offered in the form of a special deal

• Setting up the blame game. Characterising larger developing countries as “reluctant” while championing the unambitious efforts of developed country governments.

• Divide and rule narratives. For example, seeking to juxtapose a “right to survival” narrative of some developing countries with a “right to development” narrative of others – shifting attention from developed country obligations.

• Forum shopping. Larger developed countries and country groupings – such as the European Union – coordinate actions across a number of different forums – eg. in negotiations outside the climate arena, where officials who do not know the issues are encouraged to ratify positions that circumvent negotiating stances in the climate talks.

• Establishing other forums. New forums are also created to circumvent the UNFCCC process – the Major Economies Forum being a notable example. This is also part of agenda-setting and media messaging for the formal negotiations

• Inappropriate chairing and biased texts. Circumventing the proper channels to advance biased negotiating texts, which are ordered to reflect industrialised country interests – for example, by using developed country proposals as the basic structure, while lumping developing country submissions together in a single block.

• Green rooms. “In the context of the WTO, small group settings – or “green rooms – have been used to cut deals between small groups of powerful countries, with participation (often largely symbolic) by “representatives” of other countries. Green rooms have provided a means for isolating “problematic” countries, advancing negotiations with relatively inexperienced ministers, or excluding key negotiators (on the basis of insufficient seniority). ”

• Green men. Another WTO trick, through which Chairs appoint individuals to “facilitate” consensus on specific issues the development of consensus on specific issues.... forcing the agenda to a biased conclusion.

• Moving up the ladder. Ministerial-level meetings and Summits are sometimes used to marginalizes and overturn the positions of developing country negotiators who “know too much” and are therefore seen as obstacles by developed countries to achieving their interests.

• Use of non-governmental organizations. NGOs cane be useful, but can also be used to do the dirty work of gathering intelligence and lobbying of the developed country governments who fund them

Climate Camel

As if the world of UN climate talks weren´t surreal enough, Avaaz brought camels to Bonn. Their presence was meant to highlight how climate change exacerbates the threat of desertification. Given the under-representation of those at the frontline of desertification in these talks, it just looked a bit crass.

2009 International Climate Calendar: Diversions in the Road to Copenhagen

The Pew Center has produced a useful overview of the major events in the negotiations for a global climate treaty between now and Copenhagen. It is worth comparing with this earlier effort:



Although it was not the point of the Pew Center´s exercise, this clearly shows how the formal UN climate talks going sit within a larger structure of inter-governmental meetings driven by the major industrialised countries - with the Major Economies Forum, initiated by George Bush and revived by Barack Obama, taking an increasingly crucial role. This, in turn, overlaps with the G8.

One of the notable facts about the "one bracket and comma at a time" snore-fest that is the Bonn climate negotiations is how the US lead negotiator Todd Stern skipped the session to go to China instead, with senior negotiators from there held back too. This is a fairly transparent divide and rule game, which aims to isolate China from the rest of the G77, the grouping of developing nations - thereby decreasing their influence. It also plays to a domestic audience, where the US government is setting up to blame China for failures in the climate talks, despite the massive historical and present gap between the two countries when it comes to their contribution to climate change.

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists had this to say about the record: "The G8 summit before Kyoto was when President Clinton redoubled US efforts on Kyoto which led ultimately to Al Gore coming to Kyoto to help negotiate a final deal." And we all know how that worked out.

Punch and Judy on the Climate: Bonn negotiations

Oh yes you did! Oh no you didn´t!

The regular Punch and Judy show that is the UN climate talks is currently underway in Bonn. As ever, everyone is talking up the need for emissions reductions made by someone else – with the industrialised nations seeking out every opportunity to avoid their historical responsibility for tackling a problem that they were overwhelmingly responsible for causing in the first place.

This debate is currently being played out in a working group on the Kyoto Protocol, the existing global climate treaty. The aim is to reach new targets for emissions reductions by industrialised countries (called “annex 1” countries in the jargon) but few commitments are on the table. Broadly speaking, there is a split between developing countries, which want the industrialised nations to commit to deep cuts in carbon emissions domestically, and developed countries which want to discuss the issue within a broader framework for “offsets”.

These discussions are currently in some trouble – with developed countries leading moves to “kill” the Kyoto Protocol. The US and others hope that this will revert the discussion to one in which the developed/developing world divide will be weakened, forcing the latter to take on further commitments. These are likely to take the form of voluntary “nationally appropriate mitigation plans” (NAMAs) and a variety of “sectoral” approaches. The language comes from the Bali Action Plan, but the developed countries are pushing an interpretation that stresses market-based approaches – for example, allowing NAMAs to generate carbon credits that can be sold back to developed countries as a means for them to avoid meeting their commitments at home.

Another key trend is the move towards more secretive and selective negotiations. As noted in a previous post, there are numerous meetings to shape a global climate agreement that are happening outside the UN framework. These are being accompanied by move towards a WTO-style Green Room process. This means that powerful countries will hand pick negotiators for particular aspects of the treaty, with a view to locking in their favoured outcome. With Ministers and Heads of State, rather than professional climate negotiators, sitting around the table – a bad (and somewhat absurd) deal would be a likely result.

That´s not the way to do it!

Stepping around the UN: how and where is a global climate agreement being made?

All sorts of misplaced hopes are currently being pinned on a global climate agreement, due to be reached at the UN climate conference in December. As things stand, the negotiating texts are fairly dire as regards action to tackle climate change, since they are framed around expanding market mechanisms and displacing action onto Southern countries. A key part of this has to do with how the debate is framed around "least cost" action rather than what is environmentally effective or socially just.

So while the talks currently underway in Bonn set out negotiating texts, working these over in excruciating detail, the framework they adopt is set out elsewhere. What follows here is a quick sketch of some of the key initiatives shaping the global treaty that exist outside of the formal UN process.

Global

* G8. The Group of Eight remains a key body for setting the global climate agenda in a business-friendly manner, even though it may eventually be eclipsed by the G20. A first tier of corporate lobby influence includes the participation of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and World Economic Forum (WEF). The World Bank and various Regional Development Banks also play a vital role. Second tier initiatives include Globe (currently chaired by Steven Byers MP, the former UK Trade and Industry Minister); and the Club of Madrid and UN Foundation (the former is a group of ex-Presidents, the latter a private organisation), which have advanced various principles at the G8 which have then found their way into the formal climate negotiations. The G8´s work to shape a global climate agreement started in earnest during the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, when Tony Blair launched the Gleneagles Dialogue.

* Major economies forum. Started by Bush and revived by Obama, this club of industrialised nations is now holding monthly meetings of representatives from: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Denmark (as chair of COP 15) and the UN also participate. A heads of state meeting of this grouping will convene at the G8 in Italy in July.

* World Business Summit on Climate Change: for a quick report, see here. This was hosted by the WBCSD, Copenhagen Climate Council, 3C, World Economic Forum (WEF), the Climate Group and the UN Global Compact.

* World Economic Forum hosts its own Climate Change Initiative, as well as carrying forward proposals at regional meetings. A "World Economic Forum Business Expert Task Force on Low-Carbon Economic Prosperity" which partners the WEF with the UK government will deliver recommendations in autumn 2009.

* Global business groupings: WBCSD and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) are the key bodies. The WBCSD, in particular, has been instrumental in pushing "sectoral carbon markets", which would expand the use of carbon offsets - as well as undermining attempts to waive intellectual property rules so that low-carbon technologies can be developed more quickly.

* Climate specific business grouping.

Project Catalyst is crucial here. With support from the consultancy McKinsey, its working groups include "a total of about 150 climate negotiators, senior government officials, representatives of multilateral institutions, business executives, and leading experts from over 30 countries." The UK government is heavily represented amongst these.

The Climate Group is also influential, with a task force on the climate agreement led by Tony Blair. As Henrey Derwent, CEO of the International Emissions Trading Association, IETA (and formerly the head of climate policy for DEFRA, in which role he played a crucial role in G8 negotiations in 2005) puts it: “PricewaterhousCoopers and the Climate Group have done a lot of work on scaling up the CDM [Clean Development Mechanism].” Their recommendations can be found here.

3C is an initiative of CEOs of major companies, hosted by Swedish energy giant Vattenfall.

IETA is an associating that promotes a global carbon market, as well as suggesting business-friendly rules for how those markets are governed.

Regional, national and sectoral

* Below this lies a far broader network of sectoral, regional and national lobbying - far too exhaustive to list here.

* USCAP is key in the push for carbon markets in the USA. It lines up alongside more powerful industry bodies that oppose or seek to water down all climate legislation. A good breakdown can be found here.

* The EU climate and energy package, passed in December 2008, was lobbied hard by numerous industry sectors. Avril Doyle MEP, the centre-right Irish MP who was rapporteur on carbon trading for the EU Parliament, suggests that German coal power and chemicals producers were loudest lobby voices.

* There are also a plethora of inter-governmental and inter-regional meetings to shape the agenda - including EU-US, US-China and EU-China bilateral meetings. US and EU carbon markets are not dependent on a global agreement, while the EU is pushing plans to link these together across the OECD (industrialised nations) by 2015.

* Most industry sectors are preparing their own plans on the climate agreement too. The head of the International Air Transport Association (a private industry body), for example, effectively pre-announced the International Civic Aviation Organisation (UN body) plan on climate at the World Business Summit - suggesting that the latter is captured by corporate interests.

Specific companies

A lot of the usual suspects are involved, but amongst the most active - either on their own or, more typically, through broader associations, are: BP, Shell and Vattenfall. PricewaterhouseCoopers and McKinsey are also very active as advisers.

Carrots for Copenhagen

Zapatista coffee, vegan pay-as-you-like food and a 56-page brochure of workshops... welcome to Buko 32 - a congress of international solidarity movements - being held in Lüneburg, Germany.

The event also marked the start of "The Road to Copenhagen" tour, which will see Carbon Trade Watch traverse Europe in advance of the December climate summit to expose the failings of carbon trading, and highlight alternatives that advance climate justice - or klimagerechtigkeit, as it is called here. I´ll be blogging that on this site.

I was at Buko to give a presentation on Carbon trading from Kyoto to Copenhagen, which can be found here.

The most memorable moment, though, involved Morgan Ody, formerly of Via Campesina and now "happily unemployed but still following the peasant way", inciting the audience to start community gardens and bring the resulting vegetables to protests at Copenhagen in December.

An army of German autonomists brandishing home grown carrots? Bring it on ...

UN Climate Negotiations: analysis of latest positions

The US has played its hand, finally, if rather tentatively in the negotiations leading to a new UN climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen this December. You can find them, with a range of other submissions, on the UNFCCC website. In fact, the US position remains thin on detail - other than to reiterate Obama´s previous statement that the US will reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. To put this in some context, the Clinton administration had agreed to a 7% reduction on 1990 levels by 2012 - before renaging on its promise. The cost extracted for this "generous" concession to binding targets at the time was a system of carbon offsetting, put on the table by Al Gore (the chief negotiator at Kyoto) that still plagues the talks today.

The EU and sectoral carbon markets
There is some admission that these offsets are not working. The European Commission, in particular, now claims that it wants to see "substantial reform" of the Clean Development Mechanism, the controversial system that allows credits from a serious of dubious corporate projects in the global South to be treated as equivalent to "reductions" in industrialised countries.

The EU acknowledges the failings of this system, but its actual proposals for reform currently take the worst aspects of the scheme and exacerbate them. In particular, it advances a proposal for sectoral carbon markets, which is presented as a move away from controversial offset projects. Yet these proposals for ´sectoral crediting´ are being made within the framework of the Clean Development Mechanism, and have the potential to massively increase its scope. At the same time, they would lower the already inadequate checks on environmental sustainability and social justice, bypassing the current requirement to assess each project individually. This has been the dream of dodgy offset developers the world over.

The EU is proposing that CDM offset credits can be generated by any practice that alters ´business-as-usual trends´ in particular sectors - but this is not the same as a reduction. In most sectors, for example, the trend since 1990 (the usual baseline) has involved enormous increases, while the recent growth trends are slower. Depending on the baseline that is chosen, a baseline target could allow for continued increases over and above those that are currently being witnessed.

Another problem is that the existing data is often extremely poor - which means that assessments of business-as-usual are in the hands of the companies active in those sectors themselves. There is a clear incentive here for companies to talk up current emissions levels, in order to then maximise the number of carbon credits they would receive as a result. The over-allocation in the first phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is a clear precedent for just such a practice.

The EU is proposing a separate "sectoral trading" scheme alongside this sectoral crediting - which is as confusing a mess as that sounds. One of the major failings of carbon trading has been this mix-and-match approach, where a finite "cap" is set with one hand, only for that to be lifted with the other hand by "offsets" that increase undermine it.

Since these credits can be sold on an international market, there is a very serious change they would further undermine the integrity of the EU ETS as well.

More new carbon market proposals
There are a serious of other proposals on the table too. These include a whole paper from Korea advocating a National Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMA) "crediting mechanism," ie. carbon market credits in relation to emissions benchmarks, which would be set in non-binding national action plans. Norway has a proposal on NAMA carbon credits that ostensibly looks quite similar.

The South Africa delegation, which appears to have swallowed an acronym dictionary, suggests that "NAMAs may comprise individual mitigation actions, sets of actions or programmes. Developing countries may choose from a variety of forms of action, including SD PAMS, REDD, programmatic CDM, no lose sectoral crediting baselines and others"

These are mostly market-mechanisms, although Sustainable Development Policies And Measures (SD PAMS) and REDD can be market-based or regulatory.

By contrast to all the above, Brazil seems to suggest that NAMAs should not generate offset credits.

Watering down EU ambition
Another new and re-iterated aspect of the EU´s proposals relates to its emissions reduction target of 20 per cent to be achieved irrespective of the agreement - although most of this could, if the EU wanted, be met with reductions from abroad - and 30 per cent in the context of an international agreement.

In a joint submission with Australia, Belarus, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Ukraine, it is reported that the EU defines the 30 per cent as "including Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry." These emissions are notoriously difficult to verify, for which reason they are currently excluded from the EU´s Emissions Trading Scheme. They also don´t count towards the 20 per cent target.

Including LULUCF "reductions" would help the EU to meet its "more ambitous" target without making that task more ambitious, as a result of which they are included. To give a sense of scale of the difference that might make, the current figures on LULUCF from the European Environment Agency are as follows (countries can choose whether or not to count these towards their current Kyoto Protocol reduction target): "Overall, activities under Articles 3.3 and 3.4, thirteen EU‐15 Member States are projected to remove 57.5 Mt CO2 per year of the commitment period. This is equivalent to 17% of the EU‐15 reduction commitment of 341 Mt CO2 per year of the commitment period, or 1.3 of the 8% reduction target."

That needs decoding. Articles 3.3 and 3.4 relate to aforestation and reforestation (tree planting). 341 Mt is how much CO2 per year the EU is commited to reduce. This means that LULUCF changes accounts for a net decrease of around 1.3 per cent of the EU´s overall emissions, but this is almost one-fifth of the action needed to make a reduction.

In other news: binding reductions for China?
The emergence of a US negotiating position of sorts has been reported with a flurry of excitement about how it has, in turn, pushed China closer to a position from whichit could strike a deal. In fact, the Guardian report names an unofficial source, who floats a potential commitment to "intensity targets." These are not emissions reductions, but relate to the proportion of emissions per unit of GDP. If the economy grows, emissions will be carried along with it.

REDD plus
On deforestation, various countries make proposals for REDD plus. According to the Bali Action Plan of December 2007, which kicked off the current negotiation round, this means: “Policy approaches and positive incentives on issues relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries”.

REDD-Monitor explains some of the drawbacks here

The best of these positions is from Bolivia which argues for this to be directly funded rather than tied to the carbon market. It says:

"1. A fund based mechanism allows for equitable distribution of funds.
2. It will not allow for off-set mechanisms.
3. Is more likely to ensure environmental integrity.
4. Is able to protect the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities as there is no transfer of rights of carbon ownership to the market.
5. Ensures sovereignty and national as well as local control over REDD-plus activities. Where the REDD plus activities must be framed under the national laws and policies and to not affect the national interests.
6. Forest conservation can be funded, including adaptation activities related to forests."

Climate finance
Some of the key debates concern financing. China, amongst other things, restates that:

"The developed country Parties shall fulfill their financial commitments under the Convention in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner; any funds pledged outside the UNFCCC shall not be regarded as the fulfillment of commitments by developed country Parties for the implementation of Article 4.3 of the Convention and the Bali Action Plan."

The implication of this is that it still does not accept that controversial World Bank Climate Investment Funds would be counted as financial commitments from developed nations. These funds have the backing of (and funding from) the EU and US, amongs others.

EU Commissioner Stavros Dimas recently let slip that climate financing for development"will have to be both brand new funds and existing development monies." He then stressed that "mostly it should be new," but the fear lingers on that a lot of this money will be a repackaging of previous commitments, topped up by revenues from carbon markets.