French leader tells deforestation conference more funding needed to protect world’s woodlands

Sarkozy: more funds needed to fight deforestation

PARIS — Rich nations must contribute more to a climate change fund and help fight deforestation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a conference Thursday on saving the world’s forests — a key defense against global warming.

Ministers from some 64 nations attended the one-day Paris meeting, including Indonesia and other heavily wooded countries in the Amazon and Congo river basins.

Efforts to halt deforestation, one of the culprits in climate change, have been bogged down along with the wider goal of reaching a legally binding global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions while helping poor nations adapt to and cope with climate change.

Thursday’s meeting, to be followed by a May conference in Oslo, was focused on how to implement forest-preserving measures agreed on in principle at the last U.N. climate conference in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Specifically, nations need to work out how to disburse the $30 billion pledged by rich countries over the next three years. In total, world leaders agreed to spend $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations preserve forests, protect coasts, adjust drought-threatened crops, build water supplies and irrigation systems, and adopt low-carbon energy options such as solar and wind power. French officials said they expected 20 percent of that to go to fighting deforestation.

Sarkozy said he wanted the Paris conference to bring more funding pledges for forests while working out how to organize the aid and find mechanisms to guarantee transparency. He said he wanted the private sector join in, too.

Deforestation — through the burning of woodlands or the rotting of felled trees — is thought to account for up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere — as much as that emitted by all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

Due to deforestation from logging, crop-growing and cattle grazing, Indonesia and Brazil have become the world’s third- and fourth-largest carbon emitters, after China and the United States.

Sarkozy said defending the world’s forests demanded more aggressive funding.

“Those who don’t want to do anything are those who don’t want to pay,” he said in an opening address.

He reiterated his appeal for a tax on financial market transactions worldwide that could be earmarked for a global climate fund.

Several African ministers complained that not enough money has been committed to the enormous and long-term task of fighting deforestation, and they said funds already pledged should be quickly released.

Numerous funding programs are in the works and individual countries are moving ahead with their own programs to fight deforestation and educate local populations who live off forests — estimated at more than 1 billion worldwide — to do so in a sustainable way.

“Lots of things are happening everywhere, but there is no visibility, no transparency, there is no pilot,” said France’s environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo. “We need to know who is doing what and how.”

Managing and protecting forests must involve the people who live off them, Gabon Environment Minister Martin Mabala said.

“Forests are a planetary asset and no longer the concern of individual countries,” Mabala said.

Delegates to the Copenhagen conference did agree on a forest program known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, but a parallel program to protect tropical forests by having rich countries pay other nations concerned fell apart.

Thursday’s conference delegates were looking at an aspect of the REDD program, called REDD Plus, based on reducing emissions through good forest governance, protecting biological diversity and respect for the rights of indigenous people.

Six countries, including France and the other European leader on deforestation, Norway, have pledged $3.5 billion to the program through 2012, and Paris meeting hoped to increase that fund.

Calling the Copenhagen conference “frustrating” in failing to reach a final deal, Sarkozy said the Paris delegates needed to advance what was agreed there to “give the world confidence” and “open the way to progress on other points” at the next global U.N. climate summit scheduled for December in Cancun, Mexico.