Monday, June 9, 2008

Daily Summary: 2008 Global Katoomba Meeting, June 9, 2008.


Today and tomorrow environmentalmarkets authors will post summaries, comments, and reactions from the 2008 Global Katoomba Meeting: Developing an Infrastructure Fund for the Planet.

Opening Keynote
John Holdren (Woods Hole, Harvard) - Inconvenient Truth part 2: return of the graphs. Climate change science rundown. Choices for dealing with it: mitigation, adaptation, and my favorite... suffering.

Q & A's
Good metaphor for importance of biodiversity: taking out the rivets on a plane b/c it's free to do so and we don't really know how many we need. Metaphor 2: library.

Re: involvement of indigenous communities... some of the key q's addressed in Bali re: REDD were: can you monitor, how do you compensate, and can you engage indigenous population?

Panel on State of Affairs
Ken Newcombe (Goldman Sachs) - insight to the history of the C market. The 1st C market is an ex of a market catalyzed by an institution, and overtaken by private investment within 1 year. Hope that REDD can start in vol mkt while figuring out baselines. Alluded to an emerging mkt for adaptation - encouraging invest in sust landuse practices like soil C and WL conservation. Ecosystem services are at the nexus between the env, social dev, ag & infra.


Katie McGinty (PA Dept of Env Protection) - Millennium Ecosystem Assessm highlighted WQ as most urgent env problem (over CC). Insight into PA WQT. Environmental imperative for the market - alternative is pouring concrete/grey infrastructure solutions and chemical treatment (aka “call the engineers”). Env skepticism of markets - healthy when a check/balance leading to better design of the mkt, not so good when get "death by discounts" – “slice & dice” of pounds of reduction from edge of field-> stream ratio, stream-> mouth of Ches Bay ratio; reserve ratio; etc. Just say no when trading is proposed when it doesn't belong.

Stuart Anstee (Rio Tinto) – Mining companies own a lot of land that they’re not working on – normally see this as a liability. When impacting biodiversity, consider this a business risk/cost. Switch perspective to opp for mitigation of impacts on their land. Create positive env results from restor/rehabilitation & potentially get income stream. Builds trust with regulators.

Odigha Odigha (NGO Coalition for the Environment) – founder of a Nigerian NGO that works at the local level challenged audience to take the discussion about PES to the community level in developing countries – to where income streams for creation of env benefits is important.

Jonathan Lash (WRI) – stressed importance of “rules of the game”. Stressed viewing markets as a means to getting desired environmental outcomes (questioned the crowd [Who’s here to make markets work?] & no hands went up). The mechanism for creating value in ecosystem services is a regulatory framework. Legitimacy, predictability, transparency important in env markets.

Q & A’s
Re: viability of markets for fisheries—yes, where possible to define & limit access & rights to access can be sold. Politically difficult to limit access.

The Coastal Zone Mngt Act needs to be updated, so why not create a regulatory mechanism to limit access & require offset responsibilities.

Re: market barriers for poor/small landowners b/c of “death by standards & consulting costs”—ex given where markets accessible for areas in extreme poverty – buying C credits [voluntary] from women tree-growers in developing countries. Works in vol market, but compliance markets still buying as commodity, so buying for lowest cost. When commoditize C, you exclude other attributes – issue of quantity vs. quality. Landowners need advanced payments to imple projects. Small parcels are a problem.

Closing Key Note
Kathy Sierra (World Bank) – gave an overview of World Bank involvement in C [& other?] env markets. Anyone have points to add re: this presentation?

Closing Dialogue
Michael Jenkins (Forest Trends) & Cristian Samper (Smithsonian Institution) - Scale, scope, and pace of change are important in development of env markets. Pace—institutions do not move quickly, but must learn to be nimble if want to affect the way markets develop. In developing countries, the institutional capacity to use/enforce standards is weak.

No comments: