Forestry and Development E-News: December 2008
Forestry and Development (F&D) is an online resource on sustainable forestry. It supports commercial forestry as a viable source of economic growth which is compatible with sustainability.
PNG closes book on illegal logging claims December 2008: Papua New Guinea's forest industry moved closer to closing the book on claims that it is a major source of illegal timber with the announcement of PNG's first independent legality verification certificate. The SGS Timber Legality Traceability and Verification (TLTV) certificate was awarded to Saban Enterprises Limited, a subsidiary of Rimbunan Hijau in PNG. The project was the result of collaboration between Saban, SGS - one of the world's leading audit agencies - and the ITTO, which jointly funded the development of the new legality standard for Papua New Guinea. This important development contrasted starkly with a serious blunder by Greenpeace in September when it seized a timber vessel in the Gulf of Papua, claiming that it belonged to a particular company and held illegal timber. Those claims were publicly demonstrated to be as false as its claims that most of the logging in PNG is illegal. Greenpeace not only revealed its true colours, but wasted most of the one million euros that a Dutch agency forked out to finance the prank. The intention of Rimbunan Hijau and the PNG Forest Industries Association is progressively to extend application of this legal verification standard to most operations in PNG. The Australian Government has offered funding to support this. Greenpeace has criticised the SGS legality verification standard (and others) on the usual contrived grounds - lack of independence and poor consultation - revealing once again that its aim is not to curb illegal logging, but to exploit that issue with false claims to advance its campaign to restrict or halt commercial forestry in tropical developing economies. SGS publicly released its response to Greenpeace's complaints. The conclusion was as follows: "SGS finds it unfortunate that Greenpeace continues to undermine global timber legality verification efforts when both Greenpeace and SGS share a common interest - ensuring that timber harvested in any country meets the criteria of legality and provides the necessary assurances to consumer markets world over.  A more productive cause for a globally reputable environmental NGO such as Greenpeace would be to work with timber producing country governments to improve their legal framework and bring it closer to Sustainable Forest Management standards." The announcement by Papua New Guinea's forest industry is available at the following link: http://www.illegal-logging.info/item_single.php?item=news&item_id=3043&approach_id
Forestry in the spotlight at Poznan December 2008: Developing countries won some useful ground on forestry at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland. The discussions over REDD - reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries - have now been broadened to include expansion in forest cover as a means of reducing emissions. While the concept is yet to be endorsed by the UNFCCC and remains with a subsidiary body, the development represents a shift in thinking on how to use forests to tackle climate change. Most REDD proposals - particularly those made by Greenpeace, WWF, the World Bank and the EU - have focused almost entirely on deforestation, ignoring the carbon sink function of afforestation and reforestation projects, and the implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) as a means of climate change mitigation. Both the UNFCCC and the IPCC have published data which clearly show that reforestation, afforestation and SFM are equally cost-effective climate change mitigation measures. These proposals reflect an apparent intention of Greenpeace and WWF to push their anti-commercial forestry agenda, whether it is sustainable logging in native forests or plantation forestry, through the climate change negotiations. Deforestation-focused REDD proposals have also ignored the development risks associated with REDD. Data presented by the UNFCCC show that 80 per cent of deforestation is caused by agriculture. Almost half of deforestation is caused by subsistence agriculture. Thus far, no Green proposals on REDD have sufficiently explained how a strategy focusing purely on deforestation will guarantee either economic growth or food security for developing countries. Some leading tropical forest nations, such as Indonesia, India and the Congo Basin countries, stressed that the climate change strategy must include sustainable forestry and expansion of sinks. The World Bank is considering how to meet these demands. Forestry the easiest way to mitigate emissions December 2008: US-based NGO World Growth released a report at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan pointing out how UN research shows that expansion of forestry is the most cost-effective way in which developing countries can mitigate emissions. The report, "Winners All - How Forestry Can Reduce Both Climate Change Emissions and Poverty", is available at www.worldgrowth.org. Click here to download the report.	PNG's REDD proposal published November 2008: Papua New Guinea's analysis to demonstrate that it is ready to participate in World Bank REDD programmes has been published on the World Bank Forestry Carbon Partnership Facility Website. Unfortunately, the report draws heavily on recent research by the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) which suggests that deforestation rates in PNG were higher than extant assessments and that the commercial forestry industry is a significant driver of deforestation in Papua New Guinea. The methodology in the UPNG study has been severely critiqued by Colin Filer, one of the region's leading forest and resource management experts, and flies in the face of existing data on deforestation in PNG published by the FAO. In a recently published report, Greenpeace relies heavily on the UPNG report in an attempt to resuscitate the flagging credibility of its claims that illegal logging is a major problem in PNG. It is now also making the unsupportable claim that commercial forestry is a major threat to the country's carbon stocks. ITTC holds 44^th Session November 2008: The 44th Session of the International Tropical Timber Council (ITTC) was held from 3-8 November in Yokohama, Japan. At the meeting the ITTC announced funding of US $8.6 million toward tropical forests. This includes: - US$3.5 million towards a new programme aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics; and - US$5.1 million for new projects and activities for the conservation and sustainable management, use and trade of tropical forest resources. These funds are in addition to the US$3.1 million announced in June in Accra, Ghana. The pledged total in 2008 is therefore US$11.7 million. The Council also announced a number of new pilot programmes, including: Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade; Community Forest Management and Enterprises; Trade and Market Transparency; Industry Development and Efficiency; and Reducing Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Enhancing Environmental Services in Tropical Forests. For the last programme, the Norwegian Government pledged US$3.5 million. The Council stated that further detail on all newly funded projects will be provided at a later date. Also on Forestry and Development News > About F&D > Contact Us >
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