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| An excavator clears a ditch on a road owned by a disputed palm oil plantation firm near Sebangau Kuala, Pulang Pisau district in Central Kalimantan on June 19, 2012. Plantation firm Suryamas Cipta Perkasa is accused by NGOs of developing the site without environmental approvals and clearing forest on deep peatlands, in violation of Indonesian laws. (Reuters Photo/David Fogarty) |
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Oslo.
Norway’s environment minister on Friday urged Brazil and Indonesia to avoid
backtracking on policies to protect tropical forests, saying up to $2 billion
in aid promised by Oslo hinged on proof of slower rates of forest clearance.
Norway,
rich from oil and gas, has promised more cash than any other donor nation to
slow rainforest clearance from the Amazon to the Congo. Protecting forests
slows climate change, since plants soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas.
Environment
Minister Baard Vegar Solhjell, whose country is failing to meet goals for cuts
in greenhouse gas emissions, said he was closely following debate in Brazil
that might brake what he called a “huge success story” in slowing
deforestation.
Oslo has
promised up to $1 billion each to Brazil and Indonesia, the two main
beneficiaries of a forest initiative worth 3 billion Norwegian crowns ($514.75
million) a year to help combat global warming.
“It is
important that they [Brazil] follow policies that mean that they continue
reducing deforestation in future,” he told Reuters. “We are paying for actual
results.”
President
Dilma Rousseff in May vetoed elements of a new law passed by Congress that
would relax the forest cover farmers must preserve on their land. “We don’t
know what is going to happen” after the veto, Solhjell said.
Other
policies under Rousseff have slowed, for instance, the new areas of forest set
aside as protected land.
Norway has
transferred slightly less than $100 million to projects in Brazil from a total
of $425 million set aside for the nation in the years 2008-11, he said. The
rest of that total is still to be assigned to projects.
Of the up
to $1 billion promised to Brazil, up to $575 million is yet to be set aside.
However a weakening of forest protection would mean a lower payout, Solhjell
said.
‘Big step
forward’
He also
said Indonesia had made a “big step forward” with a moratorium on forest
clearance in 2011 as part of the deal with Norway, despite wide criticism that
illegal logging continues.
“They
[Indonesia] need to develop from this initial phase into a phase of actual
reductions” of deforestation, he said. “The big money will be connected to
actual results.”
Norway
helps about 40 nations protect forests.
According
to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the world lost a net 5.2 million
hectares of forests a year in 2000-10 — totaling an area the size of Costa Rica
— down from 8.3 million a year in the 1990s.
Slower
deforestation rates in Brazil and Indonesia and forest plantings in China,
India and other countries helped brake losses, it said. Norway says that 17
percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions are caused by deforestation.
Some
environmentalists say Norway is poorly placed to lecture other nations about
their environmental policies when it has not lived up to its own.
Solhjell
said Norway was failing to meet its domestic plans for deep cuts in emissions
as part of efforts to avert warming that a UN panel of experts says will bring
more floods, dust storms, heat waves and rising sea levels.
He said it
was impossible even to say if Norway’s emissions had peaked.
“My friend
who is a historian says it is easier to talk about the past than the future,”
he said.
In 2011,
emissions were 5.6 percent above 1990 levels at 52.7 million tons of carbon
dioxide, the highest year so far was 2007 with 55.5 million. Norway is the
world’s No. 8 oil exporter and number two gas exporter by pipeline.
Norway has
set aside 2 billion crowns to buy carbon emissions rights under the Kyoto
Protocol, the UN deal for slowing global warming, to meet a self-imposed goal
of cutting emissions by 9 percent below 1990 levels in 2008-12, he said.
He said
that Norway was planning extra measures, such as higher carbon taxes on its oil
and gas industry, to meet its target of a cut in emissions to 30 percent below
1990 levels by 2020, deeper than almost any other rich nation.
Reuters
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