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The “Crunch issue” of additional sinks

The climate summit at The Hague (COP6) ended without any agreement because parties could not agree on an appropriate threshold for additional sinks under Article 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol. This article provides a brief sketch on the pertinent discussions at COP6 and how it came to the deadlock of negotiations on this issue. The issue of additional sinks came to the forefront of political debate as parties arrived at some definitional arrangements under Article 3.3 of the Kyoto Protocol. This article allows Annex I Parties to take account of certain human-induced activities in the land-use, land-use change and forestry sector (LULUCF) that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, namely afforestation, reforestation and reduced deforestation. Article 3.3, however, does not define exactly what “afforestation, reforestation and deforestation” means, and parties could not agree on a common definition for these three terms. As these definitional problems could be partly resolved by the IPCC’s special report of LULUCF (IPCC, 2000), and parties at SBSTA 13 (Lyon) seemed to compromise on the IPCC definitional scenario (according to which only non forest to forest conversion, i.e. land use change, triggers accounting under Article 3.3), it became clear that forest management activities (which increase the carbon uptake of existing stands), if at all, had to be included as additional activities under Article 3.4. Several umbrella group countries, particularly the US, could generate heavy credits by including forest management. Some might well be able to meet their Kyoto commitments without any action whatsoever. At the same time these countries face considerable problems to get the Kyoto Protocol ratified at their domestic constituencies. Consequently, they fought at COP6 for an extensive list of additional sinks, including forest management, to release the economic burden of Kyoto and smoothen the process of ratification. In the first week of COP6, Japan, the US and Canada proposed a concrete scheme for computing forest management carbon credits, which became known as the JUSC 3.4 proposal. This scheme consists of three different crediting intervals (see Fig. 2, adapted from Greenpeace, 2000, p. 9).