Principles of justice in proposals and policy approaches to avoided deforestation: Towards a post-Kyoto climate agreement
Introduction
The topic of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) currently occupies a prime position in the international climate regime development agenda. In the last three rounds of UN climate talks – from Nairobi in 2006, through Bali, to Poznan in 2008 – a huge amount of time and effort in UNFCCC technical and plenary meetings was devoted to discussions over REDD (also known as avoided deforestation) (Okereke et al., 2007, Alvarado and Wertz-Kanounnikoff, 2007). However, the sensitive and intractable nature of the issues involved suggests that negotiations will probably drag and remain clumsy until the last days of agreeing a post-2012 climate change arrangement. The diversity of interests and concerns surrounding the issues also imply that whatever agreement is reached would entail important trade-offs and consequences for human lives and the environment.
The topicality and high profile of REDD negotiations derive from at least three key factors. First is the pivotal role of forests as carbon sinks and consequently, their importance in global climate stabilization. Second is the relatively new attention to the significant contribution of deforestation to global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Stern (2007) almost one-fifth of global emissions come from land use change, which is almost entirely attributed to deforestation in tropical regions (cf. IPCC, 2007). Indeed, deforestation and forest degradation deliver a triple blow to climate stability. As well as being the second largest contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Stern, 2007), deforestation destroys ecosystems that are sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere and additionally alters land surface conditions that modulate global climate and weather patterns. In fact, the large range in the risk estimates of exceeding 2 °C (Baer and Mastrandrea, 2006) are in part down to uncertainty about the continuing uptake of global carbon sinks, with the IPCC predicting that terrestrial sinks could become emission sources with a global temperature rise of only 2.2 °C (IPCC, 2007). The third reason for the prominence of REDD negotiations is that the topic implicates several issues of justice and equity across different geographies and scales of governance (from local through national to international levels). REDD discussions throw up among others the (in)justice of land tenure systems in many developing countries, the (un)fairness of control and access rights to natural resources and the morality of global management of sovereign-based natural resources. REDD is further unique because its provisions may not only have immediate and significant consequences for thousands of indigenous communities that depend on forests for their livelihoods, but also because it offers an unprecedented opportunity for synergies between environmental and social benefits. The realisation of this however, will depend on the way questions of justice are dealt with in the negotiation process and resultant policy outcomes.
In this paper we offer the first attempt to a systematic ethical analysis of the REDD negotiations under the UNFCCC. Drawing from existing theories of distributive justice, we seek to determine which interpretations of equity are embodied in the key proposals and policy approaches to REDD in the run up to post-Kyoto climate agreement, and indicate the potential practical consequences of such approaches. Moreover, we argue that the different offerings for REDD represent not simply varying approaches to climate governance but also different ways of viewing the world; different methods of value ranking and different notions about what the good life ought to be. As the world moves towards a post-2012 climate agreement, understanding the ways in which values lead to long-term environmental and human conditions is critical in negotiating an equitable and effective climate regime.
The rest of the paper develops as follows. We begin by providing a brief overview of the evolution of forest debates within the climate change negotiations and the importance of biodiversity and the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples in this. The paper then outlines a distributive justice framework from which to analyse policy for the likely sustainability of outcomes. Eight key REDD proposals are then discussed and analysed in terms of the notions of justice and potential resultant policies inherent within them. In discussion we advance the argument that the dominance of neoliberal ideals characterising policy responses to REDD is likely to result in increases in cumulative GHG emissions as well as global inequality. In conclusion, we draw out some policy implications of the analysis.
Section snippets
Avoided deforestation-progress from Marrakesh to Poznan
The current legal framework of the UNFCCC does not contain any mechanism to reward efforts to reduce deforestation rates in countries which are not Kyoto signatories.2 This was ruled out of inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol
Distributional justice framework
Ideas about distributive justice are as varied as the cultures with which they are bound up (Sachs and Santarius, 2007). Climate justice literature presents several typologies and conceptions of justice that figure in regime development debates and party proposals (Paterson, 1996, Paavola and Adger, 2006, Grasso, 2007, Okereke, 2008, Klinsky and Dowlatabadi, 2009). Indeed, the literature is so diverse that Rowlands (1997, p. 4) claims nearly every analyst has sought to “derive their own
Core REDD proposals and notions of justice
The following assessment, which evaluates some of the key concepts of justice in different REDD proposals and identifies the environmental and social implications which result, is by no means a comprehensive list of REDD proposals. The analysis here only focuses on the key proposals as advanced by the most vocal parties or coalitions. We believe that analysis of these contending proposals is sufficient to highlight the key notions of justice at play in the international arena and point us to
Discussions: distributive justice in REDD proposals
The preceding sections seek to establish the notions of justice that underpin various core REDD proposals by state parties and their collations in the run up to the post-Kyoto global climate agreement. The analysis indicates that nearly all the proposals before the UNFCCC implicate varying and sometimes conflicting notions of justice even though this is hardly explicitly mentioned in proposals. On one level, this serves to substantiate the point that international politics is certainly not
Conclusions: policy implications
Whilst the preoccupation of mainstream UNFCCC REDD policy processes centre around technical and methodological issues, state parties and other autonomous actors in the international arena are already arguing over proposals which indicate various approaches to global forest governance. Furthermore we have shown that the various proposals on offer do not simply reflect differences in ideas about how to manage forests, but that they also reflect differences in value and subscription to varying
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the editors of GEC and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
References (97)
Baseline, leakage and measurement issues: how do forestry and energy projects compare?
Climate Policy
(2002)- et al.
Equity implications of marketing ecosystem services in protected areas and rural communities: case studies from Meso-America
Global Environmental Change
(2007) Fostering environmentally sustainable development: four parting suggestions for the World Bank
Ecological Economics
(1994)Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation
Geoforum
(2004)- et al.
Fair adaptation to climate change
Ecological Economics
(2006) Carbon sequestration in Africa: the land tenure problem
Global Environmental Change
(2008)- et al.
Pan-tropical monitoring of deforestation
Environmental Research Letters
(2007) Scales of governance and environmental justice for adaptation and mitigation of climate change
Journal of International development
(2001)- et al.
Why are we seeing REDD? An analysis of the international debate on reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries. IDDRI Analyses No. 2
Natural Resources
(2007)
What is the right scale for REDD? The implications of national, subnational and nested approaches
CIFOR
High Stakes: Designing Emissions Pathways to Reduce the Risk of Dangerous Climate Change
Liberal environmentalism and global environmental governance
Global Environmental Politics
Environmental ethics and public policy
Environmental Ethics
Accumulation by decarbonization and the governance of carbon offsets
Economic Geography
International equity and climate change policy, Climate issue Brief no. 27
Resources for the Future
China's Wood Market. Trade and the Environment
Protected Areas: An Effective Tool to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries?
Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions of Social Justice
Citizenship and the Environment
The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses
World Atlas of Biodiversity
Climate change, burden-sharing criteria, and competing conceptions of responsibility
International Challenges
FERN Response to the Eliasch Review Questionnaire
Global Forests and Finance Flows
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation: opportunities and pitfalls in developing a new legal regime
RECIEL
Ethics and global climate change
Ethics
A normative ethical framework in climate change
Climatic Change
Morals by Agreements
Seeing ‘REDD’? Forests, climate change mitigation and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities
Forest Peoples Partnership
Justice and moral bargaining
Social Philosophy and Policy
Equity and international climate change negotiation: a matter of perspective
Climate Policy
Divided Forests: Towards Fairer Zoning of Forest Lands
Summary for policymakers
The IR/relevance of environmental ethics
Environmental Ethics
Do Trees Grow on Money? The implications of deforestation research for policies to promote REDD
CIFOR
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation: A Key Opportunity for Obtaining Multiple Benefits
Conceptualisations of justice in climate policy
Climate Policy
Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction
Green Carbon: The Role of Natural Forests in Carbon Storage
Carbon trading tension mounts in PNG
ABC News
International equity in climate change policy
Integrated Assessment
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation: Global Mechanisms, Conservation and Livelihoods
Cited by (136)
Assessment of environmental concern for enterprise pollution reduction
2024, Economic Analysis and Policy(In)justice in modelled climate futures: A review of integrated assessment modelling critiques through a justice lens
2022, Energy Research and Social ScienceWhat does equitable distribution mean in community forests?
2022, World DevelopmentAn Ecohealth approach to energy justice: Evidence from Malawi's energy transition from biomass to electrification
2021, Energy Research and Social ScienceCitation Excerpt :Between 2001 and 2018, Malawi lost nearly 164kha of tree cover [117], with the use of biomass recognised as a historic and ongoing driver of deforestation [16,118–120]. Complementing a wide body of work that examines deforestation and its impacts on ecosystems [121–123], our results indicated that deforestation results in ecosystem deterioration, with direct effects of food provision, slope stability and electricity provision at a local and national scale in Malawi. Rather than implementing initiatives which focus on alleviating the individual symptoms which result from biomass use (e.g. cookstoves to reduce indoor air pollution), we argue that an integrated energy justice framework helps identify interconnected issues.
Fair international protocols for the abatement of GHG emissions
2021, Energy Economics
- 1
Tel.: +44 0 7824697376.