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The Copenhagen Conference brought progress in protecting the world's forests.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Three issues dominated the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference during the last two weeks: funding, forest preservation, and emission reductions. Despite a lack of resolution on the latter, there has been some success on the first two.

Funding

A climate fund is essential to achieving a new global compact to control climate change. Funds are needed to support nascent industries and to launch clean technologies into the global marketplace. While the pledged amount of $10 billion annually for the next three years is insufficient, at least the principle of a fund has been established. The climate fund envisioned at the conference will include financing for adaptation, mitigation (climate stabilization and clean-technology transfer), and forest preservation. Though much, much more funding is needed—hundreds of billions of dollars a year for several decades, according to leading energy experts, for the clean-energy transformation alone—there is now a platform for ratcheting up the amount (rapidly, we can hope, as nations and organizations maintain pressure). Hillary Clinton’s Dec 17 speech included the U.S. goal of working with other nations to jointly mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate-change needs of developing countries.

The question to follow is, what's the best way to raise these funds from international sources, and not tax already-strained national budgets? The amount, sources, and allocation procedures will be on the docket for the 2010-11 climate discussions.

Forests

A second accomplishment of the Copenhagen conference: The principles for a framework have been put forward for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Threats of further deforestation—including the use of trees for biofuels and in large-scale bioenergy power plants—loom large. We cannot afford any further clear-cutting of forests. Adequate screening of energy solutions is needed so we can avoid those measures that come with unintended consequences that render them unsustainable. Funds are also needed here, and sources other than the projected proceeds from an international cap-and-trade program are needed now.

Accounting measures need to be crafted, but REDD provides a necessary first step toward a larger project: regreening the earth to draw down billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 in the coming decades, an idea proposed by ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and reinforced by George Woodwell of the Woods Hole Research Center.