U.S. agrees to debt-for-nature swap to preserve Peru rainforests.

In a bid to preserve some of Peru’s biologically diverse rainforests, the United States agreed this week to a $25 million debt-for-nature swap with the country, Peru’s second since 2002. Over the next seven years, in exchange for erasing millions of their debt, Peru will fund local non-governmental organizations dedicated to protecting tropical rain forests of the southwestern Amazon Basin and dry forests of the central Andes.

“This agreement will build on the success of previous U.S. government debt swaps with Peru and will further the cause of environmental conservation in a country with one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Other debt-for-nature agreements have already been brokered with Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, and the Philippines.

This week’s swap makes Peru the largest beneficiary of such deals with the U.S., with more than $35 million dedicated to environmental conservation in the country.

The Commission on Sustainable Development Is It A Moribund UN Body Or Will It Be Revived Because It Is Needed After The Re-Engagement Hoopla That Happens Now At Bali?

Our Website was established in order to help create the awareness that there is no other development possible - not in the developing countries and not in the developed countries - that is not SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

We had experience starting from before the Brundtland Commission of 1987, we were engaged at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, and we wrote the “Promptbook on Sustainable Development for The World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002. In short we are strong believers that if the UN CSD were not created in 1994, we would have had to create it now.

Why that? Simply, because as it is crystal clear now that the development of tomorrow cannot go on by rules of the development of yesterday - and this was given, right today, full global recognition in Oslo, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the scientists of the IPCC, and to Al Gore - whatever will come out from the Bali-Poznan-Copenhagen process will be clearly a final global landing on the runway that was built in Rio for Agenda 21. And as we keep saying - this will be a joint Sustainable Development for North and South, East and West. It will be a world were those that have the needed technologies will share them with those that are only trying out for their own National development. This will not be done because of altruism - it will be rather because of self interest that comes from the simple fact that we are all residents of planet earth, and we understand that we have caused the planet to be on a path of destruction that harms the continuation of life as nature or god created.

After UNCED, The UN created a Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development and Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Gali appointed Mr. Nitin Desai, at the Under-Secretary-General level to head the Department. 1994-1998 Joke Waller-Hunter from the Netherlands was the first Director of the Division for Sustainable Development and the head of the Commission on Sustainable Development - so the Commission itself dates back, for all practical purpose, to 1994 - even though it officially was started in 1992. In May 2007 we witnessed the CSD 15 (that is counting back to 1992!).

In 1997, Secretary-General Kofi, in an effort to reduce the number of UN Under-Secretary-Generals, consolidated three economic and social departments and created UN DESA (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and eventually put Mr. Desai as head of DESA where he was until he was replaced in 2003 with Mr. Jose Antonio Ocampo, the former Finance Minister of Colombia; the new Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon, brought in, July 2007, Mr. Sha Zukang, the previous China Ambassador in Geneva. In 1998 Ms. JoAnne DiSano, with a background of having worked for the Canadian Government, and then for 11 years with the Australian Government, became the Director of the new Division of Sustainable Development within DESA. She held this position until September of 2007 and since then the position is VACANT, and it looks as if the UN does not care.

Ms. Joke Waller-Hunter, left her position with the CSD in 1998 in order to become the Executive Secretary of the of Bonn based  UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) where she remained untill her death in 2006. She was replaced there in 2007, by Mr. Yvo de Boer, appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Yvo de Boer is also from the Netherlands, where he was Director for International Affairs of the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment. He was in the Past Vice-Chair of the Commision on SD and Vice-Chair of the COP of the UNFCCC. Both, the CSD and the UNFCCC are outcomes of the 1992 UNCED. Ms. Joke Waller-Hunter’s departure from New York may have had something to do with the 1997 UN reorganization that replaced the Department of SD with a Division of SD within DESA. She may have sensed that her presence at UNFCCC will further SD goals easier then  at the new Division of SD - that its creation caused in effect a demotion in her position.

The present vacancy at the nerve-center of the CSD, at a time the CSD is needed indeed, following the latest push at the UNFCCC, on matters of climate change, that causes our renewed interest in the UN CSD and in the UN Division that was established specifically in order to run the CSD. We are afraid that it will be difficult to see progress on the UN level, in matters of climate change, without a functioning office that deals with sustainable development.

Now to be honest, our interest is not just because of curiosity - but rather because of the worry that we understand very well the reasons for the slow demise of the CSD - the factors that got it to start on what may be a path to extinction.

At CSD 9 it was decided that the CSD will discuss specific topics in cycles of two years. So the first cycle was Water for CSD11-CSD12, the second cycle Energy for CSD14-CSD15, the third cycle Land Use for CSD16-CSD17.

So 2006-2007 was the Energy cycle, and as in UN fashion it was supposed to be the turn to have a chair from Asia, it was the Asians that suggested Qatar to chair the energy subject. Now Qatar is a producer of gas rather then oil.

Some said that though sustainable development must help put forward development methods that are less dependent on oil and coal, this for reasons of global warming and climate change, nevertheless, recognizing the role of natural gas as a cleaner fuel and a potential intermediary fuel from an oil and coal economy to an economy that is starting to be based on renewable sources of energy, Qatar could have been acceptable also as a political peace-maker between the interests of conventional industry and the incoming new industry based on renewbles. But to the consternation of those optimists, we could see that behind the representative of Qatar, at the CSD sessions, there was always sitting a representative from Saudi Arabia, and in the end there was no resulting negotiated text for what is probably one of the most important topics of Sustainable Development - Energy.

Above was nothing yet when compared with what happened in the last day of CSD 15. As always, there are elections for the next CSD membership - the membership is held at 53 countries elected according to a regional key - and then there is the election of the “bureau” and the new chair. The turn according to UN habit was that next chair will be from Africa, and as said, the topic for CSD16 in 2008, and for CSD17 in 2009, will be Land Use. The Africans decided to put forward Zimbabwe as their choice and campaigned with the G77 that this is their wish. The UK did not want any part of this, and specially since the land policies of the Mugabe Government have run Zimbabwe agriculture from being a large agricultural exporter to becoming a starving nation, with an economy that was totally destroyed, a monetary situation that shows astronomic inflation rate, and human rights problems that clearly make it ineligible for a UN leadership position, it is this obstinacy that reduced the CSD to plain irrelevancy. We were there that night of Friday May 11, 2007, in room 4 in the UN basement, and watched in disbelief how the distinguished, low-key German Ambassador, head in New York of the EU presidency, with the German Minister of the Environment next to him, simply told the CSD Chair from Qatar that the EU cannot work with this sort of CSD.

If by any way I exaggerate now, 7 months later, please forgive my memory, but see what I, Pincas Jawetz, Inner City Press journalist Matthew Rusell Lee, and the EUobserver from Brussels, wrote about this - the references on the www.SustainabiliTank.info web are:

- EUobserver on the 5/11 Crash of CSD15 (May 14th, 2007)

- A First Analysis: From The Ashes of the CSD, Will We See A Rising Phoenix? A Brundtland II, To be Called - “OUR COMMON GROUND” ? (May 13th, 2007)

- The UN General Assembly Resolution of September 30, 1974 against South Africa was not Premised On Apartheid’s Threat To Security, But On Its Serious Violation Of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. WHY DOES
SOUTH AFRICA OF 2007 BACK MUGABE’s ZIMBABWE SAYING HE DOES NOT THREATEN INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY? (May 13th, 2007)

- 9/11 and 3/11 Have Become Symbols of what Oil Money Can Cause To Those Who Insist On Buying The Oil, Will 5/11 Become The Symbol of Awakening at the UN? This Because Of May 11, 2007 Late Evening Happenings At
The So Called UN Commission On Sustainable Development? (May 12th, 2007)

- At the UN, Zimbabwe Elected 26-21 to Sustainable Development Chair for CSD16, As EU and Others Reject Final Text of The Chairman from Qatar of CSD15. (May 12th, 2007)

I took then the 5/11 date and in ways of exaggeration tried to compare this with 9/11 in New York and 3/11 in Madrid. Was it really an exaggeration? Could we say that the backing Zimbabwe got from States with unresolved problems from colonial days, and oil states that think, completely wrong, that they have anything to gain from derailing the concept of sustainable development, sustainable energy, global warming, climate change…, from efforts to improve the life of billions of people?

Further, the UN recognizes three groups of States with greater needs - these are the Least Developed States (LDCs), the Small Island Independent States (SIDS), and the Landlocked States. These are the States within the UN system that are most in need of help via sustainable development. Why did the UN take them out from being under the Under-Secretary-General who heads DESA, and put them under a separate Under-Secretary-General? Does this not cause waste and decreased efficiency? Would they not be served better within a well functioning unified economic organization that takes, for instance, in account the interests of Island States when it comes to the subject of the effects of global warming/climate change?

Now, I was not going to allow myself to lose my hope for a functioning CSD. The articles I refer to above are actually articles of hope - that is I hope that from the ashes the CSD will rise, as a Phoenix, under the leadership of Brundtland II.

Does this look likely? I submit it is imperative, and by the end of this week, whatever wind will be blowing from Bali, people will see that it does not go without sustainable development. So why do the Africans not get together and try to rein in Mr. Mugabe? Again, just this week, the EU invited all Heads of State of Africa to Lisbon for discussions on trade that were needed in order to help restart the Doha trade round. The Europeans were ready to put aside the dispute with Mugabe, and he was also invited - then why did he have to show physically his raised fist? Is this the end of an EU-Africa relation? Clearly not. It was just a new beginning showing that rational people can try to restart negotiations even in the presence of a street-bully. And that brings me back to the UN DC-2 building - that is where one finds the CSD Secretariat.

CSD 16 will happen one way or another in May 5-16, 2008. The full list of topics is: “The Review Session of The Third Implementation Cycle that Will Focus on Agriculture, Rural Development, Land, Desertification, and Africa.”

The CSD expects Germany to fund the bringing to New York of youth representatives from the developing countries. A main topic will be “Drought and Desertification and Africa” - this means effects of climate change that helped cause warfare in Africa. Will the world allow Africa to commit suicide through obstinacy, or is the world obliged to look into the mirror and say we cannot continue on this path? Mr. Baroso bit his lip and made an effort. We assume the EU will continue to try to find a way to keep the Commission in business, if at least the UN Secretariat helps reestablish a CSD Secretariat - and at the minimum there must be a functioning Director of the CSD Secretariat. That is the closing of the three month old vacancy that was created with the departure of Ms. JoAnne DiSano.

I understand that part of the nominating and election process involves the Commission itself. The present 53 members are:

African States: 12 besides Zimbabwe. They are - Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo/Kinshasa, Djibouti, Gambia, Guinea, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, Tanzania, Zambia.

Asian States: 11 - Bahrain, China, North Korea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kuwait, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Thailand.

Eastern Europe: 6 - Belarus, Croatia, Czech Rep., Poland, Russia, Serbia.

Latin America and Caribbean: 10 - Antigua and Barbuda (the incoming head of G-77), Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Haiti, Peru.

Western European and Others: 13 - Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Monaco, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK, US.

By looking through this list I clearly see that Poland, the host of next year’s follow up meeting to Bali, motors of the UNFCCC track like Germany, UK, Japan, Australia, India, even China, Antigua, Korea,Tunisia, Congo/Kinshasa, Tanzania, Croatia will want to see a functioning CSD. What is needed is a low key peace maker with vision who comes from inside the UN system, and who has a history of having seen the difficulties when working with developing countries that seem to have memories from colonial days that they apply to new situations that really are of a totally different nature. Finding such a person would help, we hope, revive the CSD, so it could continue its functions and prepare for much larger importance when the UNFCCC track finally starts sputtering.

Many Strong Voices joined forces on climate change 27-30 May 2007 at the Belize City Meeting.

Driven by the need to protect the cultures and economies of
countries and regions most affected by climate change, representatives of
Arctic communities and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) from the
Caribbean, and Pacific have formed an alliance called Many Strong Voices to
press for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The participants, who came from 16 countries and regions, including - Alaska,
the Caribbean, Fiji, the Canadian Arctic and the Overseas Countries and
Territories Association of the European Union, including Greenland and
French Polynesia - met in Belize City to prepare a five-year action plan.

The strategy includes plans to push for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

It also includes an assessment of the SIDS to adapt to climate change and a
plan to inform and warn the world of the dramatic effects of climate change
in their regions.

“Together, we have identified common problems as a consequence of climate
change, and our communities are suffering,” said Taito Nakalevu, Climate
Change Officer with the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, based in
Samoa. “We insist that those countries that are causing the problems have a
responsibility to those whose lives are being affected.”

The participants from the Arctic and the SIDS regions pointed to similar
climate change effects, including the relocation of communities as well as
changes in marine resources on which communities depend.

“In the Arctic, we know that melting ice and sea level rise are going to
affect everyone on the planet especially people in Small Island Developing
States. This is why we have chosen to work together – amplifying our voices
in global negotiations,” said Alaska-based Patricia Cochran, Chair of the
Inuit Circumpolar Council.

Stressing the connection between the Arctic and the SIDS regions, Dr. Ken
Leslie, Director of the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change
Centre (CCCCC) noted that Belize has been experiencing many effects of
climate change. “We have many small, low-lying, inhabited islands along our
coast and the second largest barrier reef in the world that are vulnerable
to sea level rise and, most significantly, hurricanes which are increasing
in intensity due to the warming of the sea.”

The Many Strong Voices meeting was hosted by the CCCCC and was coordinated
by UNEP/GRID-Arendal, based in Norway, and the Center for International
Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO).

Meeting in Belize will develop adaptation strategies for Arctic and Small
Island Developing States.

When it comes to the earth’s changing climate, the people of the Arctic and
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have a message for the world – the
time for action is now.

This message is supported by the recently released report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which highlights the
vulnerability of the polar regions and small island states to climate
change.

These two regions, separated by geography, climate and culture, are united
by the fact that they are already feeling the dramatic effects of climate
change. Both regions are looking for ways to adapt, but on their own, they
may not be able to succeed. Strategic policy-relevant and community-driven
initiatives need to be addressed through collaboration.

“We need to focus our research efforts on local communities because
adaptation to climate change is a global concern with local manifestations,”
says Grete Hovelsrud, project leader for the Many Strong Voices Programme
and Research Director at CICERO.

From 27 to 30 May 2007, 40 stakeholders from the Caribbean, Alaska, Fiji,
Greenland, French Polynesia, and other locations in the Arctic and Small
Island Developing States (SIDS) will gather at a workshop in Belize. They
are part of the Many Strong Voices Programme, coordinated by the
UNEP/GRID-Arendal, based in Norway, the Center for International Climate and
Environment Research – Oslo (CICERO), the Caricom Climate Change Centre and
the Organization of American States’ Department of Sustainable Development.

The Many Strong Voices Programme was launched in late 2005 at a global
climate change meeting in Montréal, Canada. Its task is to bring together a
consortium of researchers, policy-makers, and organizations to advance
mutual learning and exchange of knowledge, research, and expertise on
climate change adaptation within and between the Arctic and the SIDS.

“When the programme was launched we were calling it ‘Many Small Voices’,
thinking about small nations and regions with small populations joining
forces,” explains Joan Eamer, Polar Programme Manager for UNEP/GRID-Arendal.
“It is a measure of the depth of concern and strength of purpose of the
participants from both regions that the name very soon became ‘Many Strong
Voices’.”

Coastal communities in the Arctic and Small Island Developing States are
experiencing the effects of climate change first-hand. Because of their
close ties to land and sea environments, economies and cultures in both
regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Although the natural and human environments in the two regions differ
markedly, the effects of rising temperatures, changing precipitation, shifts
in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and projected
changes in sea level threaten the ecology, economies and social and cultural
fabric of both regions.

The four-day workshop will focus not only on strategies to adapt to climate
change but also on ways to deliver a strong message to the world. The people
in the SIDS and Arctic are responsible for less than 1 per cent of the
world’s greenhouse gas emissions. According to the IPCC report, however,
they are feeling a disproportionate level of impact.

These regions are bellwethers for climate change and the effects they are
feeling now will soon be felt by the rest of the planet. Representatives of
the Arctic and SIDS countries have been arguing that the rest of the world
needs to pay attention to their situation.

Belize is an ideal location for the workshop, which is hosted by the Caricom
Climate Change Centre, because it too is experiencing the effects of climate
change. These include coastal erosion, sea level rise and increased
temperatures that have led to the widespread devastation of forests in the
region due to insect infestations.

At the workshop in Belize, participants will develop a five-year programme
and agree on concrete and collaborative steps to address the issues of
capacity building, targeted research, communications and outreach
activities, and partnership and fundraising goals.

Funding for the workshop is provided by the Government of Norway and the US
National Science Foundation.