Land, forests and hot air: for a comprehensive, holistic, rights based approach to land-use
The Global Forest Coalition (GFC) launched a new briefing paper, providing a critical overview of the problem of current carbon accounting rules in the land use and forests sector, under the acronym LULUCF. These are creating loopholes for real emission cuts and will undermine any new climate agreement. The paper highlights that current carbon accounting rules are too flexible, confusing and allow several forms of cheating. In the case of the Kyoto protocol, Annex I parties were allowed to earn large amounts of fraudulent surplus credits. They also benefitted from future forest management activities that were yet to be implemented, allowing polluters to continue emissions.