Papua New Guinea taking lead in reducing carbon emissions

Resident Coordinator for the United Nations Roy Trivedy

By FIDELIS SUKINA

Papua New Guinea is leading in measures to control climate change and bringing economic benefit to local communities.

This was revealed in a 2 day workshop held early this month for the National Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) Lessons learned workshop in Port Moresby Papua New Guinea.

Resident Coordinator for the United Nations Roy Trivedy said it was a landmark important workshop, because  Papua New Guinea had become the first country under the UN-REED+  program to establish a benefits sharing for local communities and stake holders in terms of them protecting their forests.

He added that with global carbon markets carbon trade benefits will flow down to the communities and that was a first globally.

“Assuming Global carbon markets work and your benefits start to flow and how to distribute those benefits between different communities and stake holders this has been pioneered by Papua New Guinea with the REDD+ program and other countries are watching and if we can make it in Papua New Guinea it can work in other places in the world”.

“This is a game changer for global financing for development if we can make it happen here in PNG and if we can scale it up it will start to change the global financing for development in many other countries as well”. Trivedy said

He also added on by saying that we have pioneered other ways to help the REED+ program setting the pace in the global community.

“we have the satellite land monitoring system and Forestry monitoring system this has not been done in other countries, but Papua New Guinea is doing them, Papua New Guinea is one of the leading countries in the world that is trialing these  systems to see if they work”. Trivedy said

The two-day workshop was amid to take stock of the status of REDD+ readiness in PNG and reflect on the activities undertaken by all stakeholders working on REDD+ in the country.

 Lessons learned will be identified and fed into next steps that the country will take towards REDD+ implementation.

To support the effective national implementation of REDD+ for PNG, it is important to learn lessons from the past four years of REDD+ readiness activities. This includes assessing the activities and achievements to date, including capacity building, tools developed and support delivered to existing policies and measures.