COP18 (29/11/12) – John O’Niles, Director of Climate Change Program at WWF talks about the scaling up of the REDD+ scheme to halt deforestation. He describes the scheme as one of the most immediate positive developments that countries can work on to fight climate change.

He says that what the environmental community want to see from Doha is donor communities and developing communities raising their ambition on climate mitigation. He describes this as a dance, where developing nations say they will do more and more activities to reduce deforestation as long as there is more finance coming in from the richer nations.

He said that there has been a lot of work done to measure the emissions reductions actually taking place on the ground. He says there are conservative assumptions that are taken using satellites and tape measuring trees etc, but the donor community wants to do more to make this information better.

He says that donor communities are keen to increase their finance for REDD and the way that this is usually converted is through carbon. He says while there are also discussion on non-carbon benefits such as biodiversity and social safeguards ultimately the convention is a climate convention and the way that these costs will be reduced is to the CO2 or equivalent is saved.