Parties to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change will be meeting in December in Poland. At the meeting, parties must finalise the “rulebook” – the operating manual required when the agreement takes force in 2020.
A technical meeting was held in Bonn, Germany, during May 2018 to try to reach agreement on the “rulebook”.
Director of ARCS International Forests and Climate Program, Virginia Young attended the meeting. Virginia gave a presentation, along with Dr Mary Booth, Director, Partnership for Policy Integrity, and Peg Putt, CEO Markets for Change. Their theme was ecosystem integrity and biodiversity protection.
Peg Putt focused on the problems with accounting for emissions under Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) which was established under the Kyoto Protocol.
LULUCF is defined by the UN Climate Change Secretariat as a “greenhouse gas inventory sector that covers emissions and removals of greenhouse gases resulting from direct human-induced land use such as settlements and commercial uses, land-use change and forestry activities.”
Peg identified a range of loopholes in LULUCF accounting. One loophole relates to biomass and biofuel accounting which is accounted as carbon neutral when burnt in the energy sector on the assumption that emissions would be accounted for in the land sector. However, these emissions are frequently not accounted for at all.
Peg argued that emissions from burning wood need to be accounted where they are burned.
The link below will take you to the full presentation.