Over the weekend, the two weeks of climate talks in Cancun closed, yielding two radical new initiatives. The first is a multi-billion-dollar Green Fund to help developing countries fight climate change. The second is a new global agreement to halt deforestation, which is responsible for 20 percent of the total CO2 emissions. While there were other elements that resulted from the talks, these two hold the greatest promise for increased measurement and monitoring, which align well with the capabilities of the geospatial community.
The Green Fund of annual aid for climate defense that will reach $100 billion per year in funds by 2020 for aid to developing countries. The new fund will take a year to establish, and as of yet the means for raising the funds has not been stipulated.
The REDD+ agreement (that stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, with the + was added to denote broader ecosystem conservation) provides monetary incentives for slowing and even reversing deforestation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This forest agreement will mainly benefit those countries that protect their rainforests, such as Brazil, Congo and Indonesia. These countries will be paid to protest their forests that sequester carbon.
Similar to the status of the Green Fund, REDD+ will take a year to set up, with a number of significant issues to solve, and just $4.1 billion seed funding with no long-term plan for financing. Among the sticking points to work out are the need to define governance, and monitoring requirement.
Both initiatives hold promise for greater mapping, forest assessment, monitoring software and services, and hopefully an international repository for geospatial data and software to assess the health of forests and compliance with this new framework. While the details of these agreements are sketchy at present, there’s no doubt that there will be a surge of geospatial activities surrounding these and other directives that came from the international talks in Cancun last week.
