- Title: DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: Villagers plant trees to combat climate change
- Date: 7th December 2009
- Summary: VARIOUS OF PEOPLE WORKING ON LAND VARIOUS OF FIELD WITH TREES (SOUNDBITE) (English) GENERAL DIRECTOR OF IBI VILLAGE OLIVIER MUSHIETE, SAYING: "Actually we have two clients that signed emission reduction purchase agreement with us, one private company called Orbeo and one public organism which is the bio-carbon fund from the World Bank." VARIOUS OF MUSHIETE AND ELLYSAR
- Embargoed: 22nd December 2009 12:00
- Keywords:
- Topics: Nature / Environment
- Reuters ID: LVAAIW0Z4LKDOH5G9CRDXSGKECFK
- Story Text: Ibi village in the Democratic Republic of Congo may seem very far removed from current negotiations on climate change taking place over the next two weeks in Copenhagen.
However, people here are firm believers in the controversial concept of climate change, having witnessed changing weather patterns in recent years, and they are trying to counteract their effects.
Located a few hours outside the country's capital, Kinshasa, Ibi covers an area larger than Paris or Brussels and used to be home to ancient forests that disappeared around 15,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.
Today, Olivier Mushiete heads a project named Ibi village that aims at encouraging residents to plant trees.
"Inside here we have 20,000 hectares. We have isolated an area of savannah with a lot of planted trees which is 4, 500 hectares and that will be the main source of carbon. So this is the area in total and this is the carbon zone," said Mushiete.
Damaged by decades of bad governance and mismanagement, and a brutal five-year war that officially ended in 2006, Congo is, despite its rich natural resources, among the world's poorest countries.
Under the Ibi project, villagers are planting cassava, the staple food of most Congolese, alongside trees that will retain carbon dioxide gas, believed to be a key contributor to global climate change.
The goal is to create a commercial food supply for Kinshasa's ever-growing population while creating a carbon dioxide (CO2) catchment area to be marketed under the Kyoto Protocol.
The Protocol allows industrial nations to either reduce their CO2 emissions or buy carbon credits, in this case pay for trees to be planted which will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"The Ibi-bateke carbon sink project in fact is an agro-forestry action with three main objectives: the first one in the short term is to produce food, we are in a kasava field and thanks to kasava we produce food for the town of Kinshasa. The second objective is to produce wood fuel and charcoal. The third objective is to stock CO2 in the trees and so that we can be called carbon sink and we can sell carbon credits," said Mushiete, who went on to say that the carbon credit money also pays for healthcare and education for local residents.
According to studies carried out in Ibi, once mature, the tress planted among the kasava here will stock around 200 tonnes of CO2 per hectare.
With two clients already signed up, by 2017 Ibi aims to possess a permanent stock of 1 million tonnes of CO2.
Ellysar Baroudy, a fund manager with the World Banks' BioCarbon Fund explains how the system works.
"The signatories to the Kyoto-protocol have obligations to reduce their emissions and they can use a variety of menus to do that. So they should be taking actions at home to reduce their emissions. But one thing they can do is also off-set some of their emissions through international projects and this is one case where the investors in the bio carbon fund have obligations to reduce emissions and they are using off-sets from projects like the one in DRC in order to do that," she said.
For now, local initiatives like the Ibi project remain rare in the developing world.
Procedures to qualify as a commercial carbon stock are complicated and Ibi had to invest around 100,000 US dollars before it was qualified to sell its carbon credits.
"The way the rules have been set-up for forestry under the clean development mechanism have been rather restrictive, in that there is a temporary crediting mechanism. So there isn't as much a demand for this kind of project because it is not a credit that is easy swappable with the permanent credits. So this a little glitch that again is being discussed in the new negotiations going forward, so this has caused a little bit of a bottleneck for this type of project, so unfortunately there hasn't been the demand that one could expect for this type of project," Baroudy.
The biggest climate meeting in history, with 15,000 participants from 192 nations, opened in Copenhagen on Monday (December 7).
For developing countries there is the expectation that the summit could be a turning point, where industrial countries agree to lessen their carbon emissions and support projects that fight the controversial concept of climate change.
The United Nations wants developed nations to agree deep cuts in greenhouse emissions by 2020 and come up with an immediate 10 billion US dollars a year in new funds to help the poor cope. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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