– from the CE Daily website; 19 April 2010 2:11pm

Unless or until Australia has an emissions trading scheme, the government should specify a percentage of its emissions reduction target that will be met through investments in projects to stop tropical forest deforestation, says a carbon policy expert.

Charlotte Streck is founding partner and director of Climate Focus and an expert in the international push to reduce emissions from deforestation, known in UN climate talks parlance as REDD+.

Streck told CE Daily such a commitment by Australia to buy a set portion of REDD+ credits – and by other nations that don’t have trading schemes – would give markets “some confidence that there are buyers out there”.

In the absence of domestic emission trading regimes that accept REDD+ credits, “government procurement of [these] carbon credits is very important”, she said.

Australia has always been “very supportive and very active” in REDD+ negotiations, which is “not surprising” given that the forest-rich nations of PNG and Indonesia are its two biggest aid recipients, she said.

ASEAN ministers last Friday issued a declaration on climate change which highlights the benefits of REDD+ and Indonesia’s forestry minister late last month gave the opening speech at a workshop in Jakarta designed to advance its involvement in REDD+.

But while REDD+ has much to offer developing nations in Asia, it is “not an easy path”, Streck cautioned.

It requires a whole-of-government recognition of the need for “a change in the land use paradigm” and, unlike traditional aid funding, payments are “performance-based”, she said.

International push for ‘fast-start’ financing

Although Copenhagen did not deliver a signed-off decision on REDD+, the meeting did reach agreement on almost every aspect of how it would operate and it was mentioned in the Copenhagen Accord, Streck noted.

“It was just not adopted because of the overall failure of Copenhagen.”

Norway and France are now leading efforts to start “fast-track financing” of REDD+ projects, she said.

After a meeting in Paris about a month ago, officials discussed REDD+ again at this week’s UN climate talks in Bonn and a further meeting will be held in Oslo at the end of May.

The task of trying to get funds flowing this year, ahead of governments making specific allocations to fund REDD+, is likely to involve “a lot of relabelling and reallocating of existing [aid] funding to REDD which is, of course, not ideal”, she acknowledged.