Carbon financial mechanisms for agriculture and rural development: challenges and opportunities along the Bali roadmap. An editorial essay.

Three-fourths of the world’s 1.2 billion poor live and work in rural areas; they directly depend on land, water and genetic resources, and the vagaries of climate, for their livelihoods. Their vulnerability and food security situation is expected to worsen under climate change. For instance, it has been suggested that increased climate variability and more frequent extreme events such as droughts and floods could significantly increase risk of production failures in poor regions as early as the coming decades, i.e., by 2020–2030. Particularly at risk are sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. The final declaration of the 2008 High Level Conference On World Food Security1 stated: It is essential to address the fundamental question of how to increase the resilience of present food production systems to challenges posed by climate change.” To this end, the projected costs of adaptation and mitigation measures necessary to safeguard food security and improve livelihoods for the rural poor under climate change are significant, about $100 billion annually in 2030. They exceed several-fold the current and projected private and public investment and financial flows in rural development over the coming decades. Where will the money come from? We suggest that there are large opportunities linked to regulatory and voluntary financial carbon mechanisms for climate change that could be used by developing countries to reduce vulnerability of their rural poor in coming decades, by exploiting the well-recognized synergies that exist in the land sector between adaptation and mitigation potential. In fact, land-based activities in agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem services—including reduced deforestation and degradation, agro-forestry for food and/or energy, landscape restoration, recovery of biogas and waste, and in general a wide set of strategies for soil and water resource management and conservation—while essential components of sound adap- tation planning, are the key to make carbon markets accessible for the rural poor, resulting in enhanced food security and sustainable cultural, social and economic development. The Nairobi Framework and the Bali Roadmap of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change recognize the need for enhanced financial mecha- nisms and reduced bottlenecks to better help the rural poor adapt to climate change, reduce their environmental and economic vulnerability, increase resilience of their production systems, while at the same time contributing to climate mitigation. After reviewing existing and evolving carbon market mechanisms, we propose that post- 2012 regulatory markets should increasingly focus on scaling up offset activities from site to regional level, as well as consider promoting “premium” carbon financing for projects that produce joint mitigation and adaptation benefits.

TUBIELLO Francesco;  RAHMAN Atiqur;  MANN Wendy;  SCHMIDHUBER Josef;  KOLEVA Marieta;  MUELLER Alexander; 

2012-12-19

SPRINGER

JRC52199

0165-0009,   

http://www.springerlink.com/content/100247/?k=carbon,    financial&sortorder=asc&v=expanded&o=10,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC52199,   

10.1007/s10584-009-9611-5,