If you picked up the Sydney Morning Herald or the Melbourne Age earlier this week, you would’ve seen the front-page story about Australia trying to cook the books at Copenhagen. Kevin Rudd was grilled about it on ABC Radio – and it was about time.
Heard of LULUCF? Most people haven’t. But it’s a HUGE deal at Copenhagen, and is part of the fine print that could mean Australia’s final agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Here’s what is going on
The Australian negotiators are trying to change the rules relating to how emissions from land use are counted. In the language of the global climate talks, it is about LULUCF – an acronym that refers to Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry.
It’s important that we develop incentives for land managers to improve carbon sequestration in the landscape, however we need to be careful about how we establish the accounting rules so that they are robust and not open to rorts.
Australia wants to be allowed to count the carbon that gets sucked up by the soil and vegetation, while not including the emissions produced from this sector. And they produce alot. For example, in 2002-03, bushfires resulted in around 190MT of emissions – equivalent to 27 average-sized coal-fired power stations for a year.
Including the emissions from bushfires into our accounts would make it difficult to control whether or not we meet our targets. At the same time, it doesn’t make sense for Australia to claim credit for carbon stored in a forest (or in soils) if we don’t have a corresponding debit when that carbon is released into the atmosphere through bushfire or drought. It’s like only counting deposits into your bank account and ignoring all of the withdrawals – in other words, cheating.
Here’s why it’s a problem
Australia pulled off a similar scam in the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997 – infamously known as “The Australia Clause”. It meant that Australia’s actual greenhouse pollution (from burning coal, oil and so on) could continue unchecked while we could still look much better than we actually were.
Australia’s Kyoto target was to limit greenhouse emissions to 108% of 1990 levels by 2012. Looking at the actual data, we see that, in 2007, Australia’s emissions were 82% above 1990. If you exclude land use altogether and look only at industrial emissions, they were 30% above 1990 levels. Not exactly a good record.
However, Australia’s official accounts under the Kyoto Protocol (replete with the Australia Clause – Article 3.7(2)) shows that our emissions in 2008 were only 7% above 1990 levels. This massive improvement in our carbon accounts hasn’t come as a result of good government policy, but from creative accounting.
The Australian Government are still backing the Australia clause, saying that it isn’t cooking the books. And this is backed by some in the media who rightly point out that Australia have complied with the Kyoto rules – it’s just that they managed to set the rules up to be crooked.
The risk from this trickery is that we end up offsetting emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (where the carbon has been very safely sequested underground for millennia), with far more temporary sequestration of carbon in vegetation. And then if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere (for example, through bushfires or drought) we just ignore it.
We are only going to solve climate change if we actually reduce the amount of C02 in the atmosphere. To do this, we need a combination of improved land management so that we stop deforestation and improve the sequestration of carbon in the landscape, and we need to stop releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere by making a transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean, renewable energy.
Accounting tricks won’t fix the problem.
