Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Ministers from nearly 60 nations have pledged to support a global effort to end deforestation by the year 2020. The agreement took place alongside the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity held May 19-30th. James Leape, head of WWF International who organized the pledge, described the event as wildly successful, saying that "we expected 20 countries, but we got more than 50." Halting deforestation "is critically important for a mountainous country like Nepal," said Krishna Pandel, head of Nepal's delegation. "When we lose forest, we not only lose biodiversity, but bring environmental disasters - especially mudslides - onto the poorest of the poor."

Bangladesh will plant 100 million trees over the next three months to create a "natural fence" against floods and storms. "It's the country's biggest-ever planting programme," said Raja Debashish Roy, deputy environment minister. "We've undertaken it to protect our natural calamity-prone country from frequent cyclones and floods that has been exacerbated by climate change," he continued. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has warned that, in Myanmar, mangroves and other natural barriers must be restored as a matter of urgency to bolster flood defences. "We believe that restoring healthy ecosystems, particularly mangroves, should be on top of the reconstruction priority list," reported Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN director general.

New Carbon Finance predicts that the price of carbon will continue to rise over the next four years. The firm has upgraded its expectations for carbon credits traded through the European Union's emissions trading scheme and reckons that prices could reach 38 euros a tonne by the year 2012. The rising price of carbon within the European scheme is currently being driven by higher gas prices and a bottleneck in issuing certified emission reduction credits through the Clean Development Mechanism.

Deutsche Bank has raised its 2008 price forecast to 40 euros because of higher than expected carbon emissions last year, rising oil prices and the forthcoming inclusion of aviation carbon emissions in the European emissions trading scheme. Jonathan Malsbury at New Carbon Finance commented that "in terms of their profit and loss, firms in the scheme are pretty immune [to the price rise] as the bulk of the credits are allocated for free. But a higher price does increase the incentive for them to cut emissions as it would allow them to sell excess credits."

New York City will feel like Las Vegas today if global warming is allowed to continue, according to a new report on the impact of climate change on the United States commissioned by the Natural Resources Defence Council in New York. The report concludes that doing nothing on global warming will lead to annual costs of more than 3.6 percent of GDP, US$3.8 trillion (in today’s dollars), by the end of this century. "Some important impacts are priceless, so the real situation is worse than the numbers can convey," said the report's lead author, Frank Ackerman of Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts. "But the numbers, for those impacts we can put prices on, are bad enough. Climate change is on a collision course with the United States economy, long before the end of the century, unless we act now."

A new report from the United States Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) warns that the ecological effects of climate change could be felt earlier than expected and that land managers may find it more difficult to respond as monitoring systems are not in place. "The fact is, we're seeing lots of effects and impacts right now," commented Anthony Janetos, a lead author from the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Maryland. "These effects appear to be happening faster than expected, and the magnitude is bigger than expected. That's a surprise," he added. Previously, the CCSP, which was created by the Bush administration, has come under pressure to downplay climate effects.