Isramart : 05 Jun 2009 18:51 CET
A carbon trade lobby has outlined a raft of changes to the Kyoto protocol's flexible mechanisms.
At the end of the first week of UN climate talks in Bonn, the International Emissions Trading Association (Ieta) put forward a long list of reforms it reckons are neccessary to make carbon trading work more effectively."Parties (signatories of the Kyoto protocol) must not simply choose from the proposals on the table: they must design mechanisms that work well - for the climate, the parties and the private sector," Ieta said in a position paper presented today at the Bonn talks.
The UN talks, which end next week, aim to find ways of making the current Kyoto protocol work better, and pave the way to an agreement on a future climate pact.
Ieta said that the talks, which will deal mainly with technical issues related to the architcture of current and future climate deals, should deliver on promises made at the UN climate summit in Poznan last year.
Delegates attending the summit in the Polish city worked to streamline the Kyoto protocol's clean development mechanism (CDM).
The CDM, a UN mechanism in which rich countries earn credits by investing in emissions-reducing projects in developing countries, has struggled to yield the expected amount of credits so far because of delays in auditing and registering projects.
"The parties need to address some remaining challenges with the CDM in current form," Ieta said.
Ieta said progress still needs to be made in getting the UN's executive board, which oversees the CDM, to explain its decisions more clearly, and getting more auditors appointed to monitor, validate and verify projects.
Shopping list
Ieta also wants UN climate talks to make the following changes in any revised form of the CDM post-2012.
- The removal of barriers to get carbon credits from land use projects;
- The inclusion of carbon capture and storage projects;
- A clear economic benefit for the private sector in any sectoral approach in cutting emissions;
- A supervisory body to administer a sectoral mechanism that is outside the authority of the executive board;
- Restrictions on supply for any credits generated by emissions-reductions measures in developing countries known as nationally appropiate mitigation actions (NAMAs);
- Clearer guidelines on how projects show they are surplus to business as usual;
- Increased availabilty of data and consistent baselines;
- That all registered CDM projects be allowed to compete until the end of their remaining crediting periods;
- Increased accessibilty of least developed countries to the CDM, but one that isn't based on the weighting of credits depending on host country.
JI
The carbon trading lobby also wants the UN talks to reform the joint implementation (JI) mechanism, which aims to reward greenhouse gas reduction projects with carbon credits in countries that have targets under the Kyoto protocol.
The JI has been largely ineffective in issuing credits to cleaner energy projects in countries such as Russia, mainly because of red tape in host countries and lack of auditors for projects.
Critics also suspect that many JI projects are surplus to business-as-usual or will demonstrate benefits to environmental sustainabilty.
But Ieta said JI could be reformed and expanded in a way that would enable the flow of credits to flow more smoothly.
In particular, it wants:
- Less bureaucracy at the UN level;
- A greater role for JI credits so they can offer a greener alternative to 'ungreened' government emissions rights;
- Timelines at every stage of the JI process;
- Clearer explanations of decisions on JI and improved transparency of the UN panel that approves such projects;
- Greater transparency in track 1-JI, meaning host countries should provide more information about projects that are approved by governments.
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