Citola Blog
A Marriage Made In... Oslo
Here’s a secret we bet you never knew. We’re really relationship counsellors here at Citola.
A recurring theme of our blog output is the importance of a happy and stable marriage – the marriage, specifically, between ecological best practice and good commercial sense.
Good intentions and policy-making are important and, indeed, laudable. But without making hard-headed financial sense, most plans to improve the environment will take a long time to get off the ground (if they ever do). That pantomime of pious aspiration, otherwise known as the COP 15 climate conference in Copenhagen at the end of last year, is a case in point.
The COP 15 conference failed to come to anything like a satisfactory conclusion, other than achieving a vague consensus that there was definitely an environmental problem that someone should do something about. A non-binding agreement was reached that richer countries should create a fund of $30 billion by the end of 2012, with the intention of helping lesser-developed countries make ends meet without depleting their natural resources.
The key epithet here is “non-binding”. Without compulsion, many countries tend to fail to act. They need motivating – and if the motivation is commercial success, that’s fine with us.
So let’s hear it for the prime minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, who’s been hosting the Oslo Climate and Forest conference this week – and been talking some good sense there, too.
Talking of the $30 billion plan to preserve forestry and generate new forests, Stoltenberg gave it to us, plain and simple: “There is no way to mobilise that much money without mobilising the private sector…. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation can provide the largest, fastest and cheapest cuts in carbon emissions."
Stoltenberg forest-related programmes could account for "a third of the cuts in carbon emissions needed by 2020”.
The Oslo conference is being attended by delegates representing 52 countries. It’s agreed a way to funnel monies into REDD schemes, with milestones to be achieved along the way. In essence, this means that the capital will keep flowing, provided that the targets are achieved for acreages and volumes of carbon credits, generated by the forestry carbon sinks.
Yes, the agreement is “non-binding”, but the attitudes demonstrated are encouraging. Stoltenberg is encouraging the conference to reach out to the private sector, not to shun it. Some commentators, such as World Bank chief, Robert Zoellick, are even suggesting that there may one day be a comprehensive agreement of the kind that COP 15 so singularly failed to achieve.
The next talks are in Bonn in June. We’re encouraged by the progress from Oslo, but we’re not holding our breath on Bonn producing the outcome we all want. Still, the partnership between policy wonks and the real world of companies generating the carbon sinks we all need constitutes progress – we’re looking forward to a long and happy relationship.
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