PNG to show evidence for carbon trade deal

PAPUA New Guinea will have to show that it is able to reduce its carbon emissions to qualify to participate in the carbon trade, an official says.

Roy Banka, project coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) funded by the national forest inventory project, told a workshop for the national forest monitoring action plan in Port Moresby yesterday: “There must be data to showcase to the global community that PNG was able to reduce its carbon emissions.

“Currently, we don’t know our performance in terms of reducing emissions.
“We can only showcase and tell the world that we have reduced our country’s emissions and state in numbers if we know our forest reference level for Redd+ in the country.

“We can say that we have huge forests and so forth, but how can we quantify that?
“So what we are doing now with all the stakeholders like the PNG Forest Authority, Climate Change and Development Authority and other state and international agencies is to try and come up with a forest reference level for Redd+ in PNG.”

Banka said the reference level was basically being able to measure the country’s emission rate in the past years as well as the present and identify a future trend of emissions.

“So that will become our reference and if we were able to reduce through climate-smart policy initiatives, then we can state that in our measurement, reporting and verification to the rest of the world in figures that PNG was able to substantiate its emission reduction.”

Source: The National newspaper.