LCDS on track

Nov 15, 2009 Editorial

The President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), outlined in early June, attracted quite a number of naysayers. Not this newspaper. The week before the announcement, in our editorial Climate Change: Beyond Rhetoric, we noted: “We have long criticised the administration for not establishing a strategic vision for our development and remaining mired in the passive Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper foisted by the IFI’s.
“This week the Office of the President announced that on June 8 the President will unfold a strategy at the International Convention Centre to base the economy on low carbon development.
“We are pleased that the state is prepared to take the agenda of our climate change adaptation through development at the micro-level. It needed to be more active than the macroeconomic incentive-based market-oriented economic change strategy allowed up to now. It needs to create state-society and state-individual synergies for its low-carbon development strategies. We hope that the business community will step up to bat.”
Most of the doubts by opponents centered on the premise that the LCDS would be funded: it was felt by many that in the midst of a global downturn, with the developed economies that were supposed to provide the bulk of the funds still floundering, the money was just not going to be there.
On November 1, however, in our editorial “LCDS Financing” we pointed out: “As we draw closer to the December Copenhagen meeting on Climate Change that will attempt to craft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, we are receiving increasingly optimistic information that the premises of the LCDS on funding are fundamentally sound.
“The administration has already received assistance from the UN to assist in addressing the four concerns (raised in the last year on REDD) and whether the new treaty is consummated in December on in the following year as is being now seen as more realistic the LCDS funding appears quite secure.” With the announcement less than two weeks later that Norway will put US$30 million into Guyana’s REDD+ governance development (RGDP) fund next year, as part of a five-year commitment of US$250 million, the Government has apparently been vindicated.
There are, of course, the fine prints – the “conditionalities” – of the RGDP that will have to be adhered to before the monies are disbursed to fund the LCDS. Most of these conditionalities centre on transparency and accountability for both complying with the programme of reduced deforestation and for the utilisation of the funds. These stipulations should go a long way in silencing the critics that expressed concerns that the funds would be diverted to cronies.
For our part, while we remain convinced that the funding will be forthcoming – not because the contributors like us so much, or are really gung ho about forest conversation, but because it serves their own interest to forego reducing their own emissions – we still have concerns about its levels and flows and the consequent implications for our economy’s sustained and sustainable development as outlined in the LCDS. We understand that a revised version that incorporates all the proposals from the extensive countrywide consultations will be available in a couple of weeks and we will reserve our comments on the substantive contents of the LCDS until then.
But in the meantime, take, for example, the Lethem-Linden Highway that is supposed to be paved and be extended to a deep-water harbour in Berbice. This highway is critical to our development because our strategic linkages with the giant economy of Brazil hinge absolutely on its completion. But up to now every highway struck through a rainforest has been followed by deforestation – extreme deforestation.
Once access to remote areas is opened up then loggers, miners and plantation companies etc. follow.
With Brazil moving aggressively to reduce deforestation, the commercial interests in search of timber, gold, soya and beef are moving elsewhere. We are going to be a prime destination. So what do we do then, when the contributors to our RDGP fund balk by either reneging on pledges or hold up funding until the interminable reviews are conducted?
As we have cautioned, while we believe the LCDS is on track, let it be multitracked.

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LCDS on track

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