Experts: Climate talks to revisit 'double count' issue

Though last year's United Nations climate change conference was tasked with setting rules for implementing the Paris climate agreement, the parties failed to reach consensus on guidelines for market-based climate change mitigation mechanisms, leaving part of the process to be dealt with at this year's conference.

The issue, however, remains a hard nut to crack and will be one of the most challenging problems to resolve in the climate change conference scheduled for Dec 2 to 13 in Madrid, Spain, experts said.

The mechanisms laid out in article six of the agreement allow parties to realize greenhouse gas emissions targets through cooperation. One mechanism establishes a global market for trading polluting carbon emissions, through which richer countries can buy emission credits from other countries' programs.

However, at the conference last year in Katowice, Poland, a rift between two groups of nations led largely by the European Union and Brazil impeded the work of establishing rules for the global market. A major concern for the European Union was Brazil's proposal of counting its emissions that get absorbed by land use, land-use change and forestry in the country as credits that could be sold, which could result in double counting emissions reductions, said Zou Ji, CEO and president of Energy Foundation China.

Germany's state secretary for the environment, Jochen Flasbarth, for example, said in an interview with Bloomberg early this year that his country wants a completely new system with a "clean and uniform" design.

Flasbarth focused on eliminating the possibility of double counting. For example, if a country generates credits by having a carbon-absorbing forest, it shouldn't be able to both take credit for that decrease in its emissions and also sell the credit to another country that then counts it into its own emission reduction.

Zou said the rift between the two groups is rooted in an issue that the academic community has yet to reach consensus on－approaches to calculating and monitoring the amount of emissions absorbed by forest. As to the management of such emission reductions, there is little agreement on what reduction should be counted as credit.

While Brazil and the EU proposals are both to some extent amenable, they both tend to turn to approaches that serve their own interests, Zou said.

"If you want to address the academic disputes in the negotiation, it will be impossible. Scientists have failed to settle the disputes over the past dozens of years, right? Only after reaching a compromise... can the result be accepted by everybody and can the negotiations over article six be completed," he said.

Zhang Jianyu, founder and chief representative of the Environmental Defense Fund's China program, said it is critically important to establish the global carbon market despite the challenges arising from the complicated political and economic relationships of different parties and the huge differences in their positions on how to avoid double counting.

Double counting could potentially result in ambiguity in margins of carbon credit and conflicts that make the operation of the carbon market inefficient, he said.

Roberto Castelo Branco, the Brazilian Environment Ministry's secretary for international relations, said last month, at a news conference for the 29th BASIC Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change in Beijing, that Brazil is open to negotiation and that he expects the carbon credit system could be built by taking developing countries concerns into consideration.

He highlighted the importance of developed countries fulfilling their commitment to offering support to the Third World countries, saying it is only after the commitments are in place that "we can have confidence in this system".

"It's through the eradication of poverty that will be able to address the climate change challenges. Therefore, we want the carbon credit system to be built taking into account the need to preserve the development and growth of developing countries," he said.

Li Gao, director-general of climate change at China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said the rules for article six should be established to avoid double counting while taking into consideration the "specific concerns of each party".

If technical solutions can be reached in this way, that will help promote parties' proactive participation in global climate progress and the growth of that progress, he said.

"We encourage major related parties to conduct deep discussions from the technical points. The work has been going on. I think we are hopeful of reaching a solution."