According to the UK Green Party website the Green Party will try to achieve the following if they gain power at the 2010 general election:
CC270 The Green Party calls for an emergency international agreement to stop swamp draining and burning of peatland. Such a convention needs to include measures to extinguish fires, re-flood and restore drained peatlands and needs to be linked to a revision of the Clean Development Mechanism in Europe and the broader climate change framework. (see also CC240).
CC271 To achieve the necessary emissions reductions (see section C1) a new protocol will have to make ecosystem destruction and degradation a priority focus. Simply reducing the rate of deforestation will not be sufficient. Only a moratorium followed by a ban on industrial logging and land conversion of all old growth forest will allow us to achieve this goal; see section C7 . Such a ban should be binding on all nations, including nations which currently import wood products or agricultural commodities produced at the expense of old growth forests and ecosystems.
CC272 The Green Party considers the use of market-based mechanisms as an alternative to a moratorium to be wholly inadequate. Commodifying nature and including it in emissions trading is unlikely to slow ecosystem degradation and may even accelerate it. Further, market mechanisms are likely to increase social and economic injustice and to dispossess indigenous and local communities who have a vested interest in protecting forests and other ecosystems, and are most capable of doing so.
CC273 Ecological restoration must be an essential part of a climate change agreement, in order to reverse some of the damage done to ecosystems and to strengthen their ability to survive the now unavoidable levels of global warming. Ecosystem restoration must be based on scientific evidence and must be implemented in ways which are socially just and respect the rights and needs of local communities. Priorities for ecological restoration would include the reflooding of peatlands, particularly the peatlands of South-east Asia which have been drained for monoculture plantations, the protection of selectively logged or ‘degraded’ primary forests from land-conversion and further industrial logging, and measures to reduce the fragmentation of essential ecosystems by monoculture plantations. Biodiversity will be a key measure of the success of ecological restoration.
CC274 Sufficient funding for ecosystem protection and ecological restoration must be made available through the North-South transfer of funding which is an essential component of Contraction and Convergence. Funding will be required for enforcement of logging and land conversion bans, for fire protection and forcommunity forestry and social incentives, including education, public awareness raising and fostering the traditional values systems of indigenous peoples and local communities, measures shown to be effective for ensuring forest protection.
CC275 A new climate change agreement must include clear mechanisms to reverse the trend towards low-biodiversity, high-chemical input monocultures, and to support mixed high biodiversity agricultural systems based on permaculture principles which retain soil carbon. This necessitates regulatory and rightsbased mechanisms, supporting the land rights of small farmers and local communities and regulating against those agribusinesses which rely on destructive agricultural methods that result in ecosystem destruction and high greenhouse gas emissions.
I would be interested to hear both positive and negative views on UK Green Party’s Climate Change and Peatlands policies in the comments below?