This conference is forcing me to learn about a thousand new abbreviations, or that’s what it seems like. I have now been in the policy group of the Act Now team for about half a year. Luckily our team has a pretty clear idea of what we are doing and everyone has a specific focus. This weekend I decided that my main area would be LULUCF. Next to this, there are loads more of interesting things to do, attend, produce and keep track of, all of which we also try to do. And of course, try to have some influence on the delegates and outcome of the negotiations!

Welcome to abbreviation land: LULUCF (Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry) is part of the AWG-KP (Ad hoc Working Group on further commitments for Annex 1 parties under the Kyoto Protocol). I went to some of the meeting yesterday of NGO’s (Non Governmental Organizations) to learn about this topic, which was a good choice!

All developed countries that are part of the Kyoto Protocol (Annex 1) have submitted their proposals for reference levels last week, although the EU did not send it in completely. Almost all countries want to use a projected (2050) reference level, instead of using the ‘normal’ historical 1990 levels. But this is tricky! Using the projected emissions is the politically “easy” way out and is beneficial for many of the EU countries (especially Austria, Sweden, France, Germany and the UK) that will benefit, potentially generating carbon credits or avoiding additional emissions. Additionally, the LULUCF emissions or credits are not taken into account in the accounting of the 20% reduction target of the EU , but only in the 30% which the EU will take on if Japan, Australia, the United States and Canada present even ‘ambitious’ targets. Since LULUCF is a carbon sink in most of Europe, including this mechanism reduces about 3% of emissions that can suddenly be accounted for with no additional reduction!

But not only policy-news today! We also did a very cool action together with Friends of the Earth International: a useless magician trying to make a plane disappear by covering them with a black cloth, and using an offsetting spell. Obviously this didn’t work, the same way offsetting doesn’t work! The magician had a pretty Young Friends of the Earth assistant who handed out information to people why offsetting is a false solution to the climate crisis. The action attracted a lot of attention, we did it three times, two times on the NGO spot and then at the entrance of the media center, where constantly a looot of people are walking by.