News

The temptation to attend Forest Day 2 at the Poznan COP was too much, so at short notice we participated in the full 2 weeks of the climate change meeting. Inspiring talks from Nick Stern, the President of Guyana and Yvo de Boer left no doubt about the urgency of the need for action. Several copies of the excellent Little REDD Book from the Global Canopy Programme were brought back to Uganda. Many new contacts were made that will hopefully lead to new support for Uganda's pioneering work in carbon finance. And it was good to see so many of our current partners and associates to catch up on latest developments and to talk about new work. We supported CARE at its Forestry Day side event on Social Justice in REDD, and made a particular point of attending all the sessions on CDM Programmes of Activities.

We had a great time meeting global colleagues at the East & Southern Africa Katoomba Group meeting in Dar-es-salaam and Morogoro during 16-20 September. The theme of Taking Stock & Charting a Way Forward: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Africa created a lot of interest amongst the participants. Our work in local market development and the voluntary carbon market was featured in one of the sessions, and we highlighted the need for many more learning projects to be launched to inform the debate about REDD and other forestry carbon developments.

We attended the Africa Carbon Forum in Dakar, Senegal during the first week of September. We had a number of projects that we discussed with investors, and made many new business contacts. There was much discussion about ways to increase Africa's level of involvement in the international carbon markets, but there is still much to be done to increase awareness and technical skills. We are grateful to UNEP and UNDP for their sponsorship support.

Bureau staff attended the Readiness Forum Workshop on REDD, in Ghana on 19/20 August. There was a series of meetings supporting the same topic during the rest of the week. We met many others who are working on REDD in Africa at this important gathering. The Woods Hole Research Center, the Ghana Forestry Commission and the Ministry of Lands, Forestry & Mines organised and hosted this successful event.

We are pleased to announce that the German organisation CIM (Centre for International Migration and Development) has agreed to support us by recruiting an energy specialist to join our team in Kampala. We hope that the selected person will join us in the first quarter 2009, and will lead to an increase in our clean energy work. We are currently supporting the development of a number of CDM small hydro projects in Uganda, and are negotiating a programme of German support that will cover improved cooking stoves and other topics suitable for development as CDM Programmes of Activities.

We participated in the recent meeting at Edinburgh University at which the opportunities for carbon finance to contribute to the lives of some of the poorest people on the planet were discussed. We met representatives from the Plan Vivo projects in Mexico, Mozambique and Uganda, and from the upcoming projects in Rwanda and Malawi. Check here to see the conference papers.

The Bureau participated in the CarbonExpo in Cologne, Germany from 7-9 May. We had the opportunity to meet a number of new firms interested in working with us in Uganda, and got a further update on efforts to prepare new REDD methodologies. In the preceding week we were in London talking with project partners.

The Bureau presented the latest developments involving RED at the FAO Payments for Environmental Services workshop in Dar es Salaam in February. A strong team from Uganda attended the meeting, including Alice Ruhweza the Kampala-based co-ordinator of the East & Southern Africa Katoomba Group, and Pauline Nantongo the Executive Director of ECOTRUST.

And our chairman organised a study tour to Costa Rica for the Uganda Wildlife Authority to see payments for environmental services, sustainable development activities, and to discuss new developments in carbon finance. The 10 strong team was funded by the European Union, and Conservation International also provided support for the visit.

The Bureau received additional British High Commission funds to produce a special climate change edition of the Tree Talk newspaper with the Straight Talk Foundation. This was distributed to all schools in Uganda, and 30,000 copies were given away in the leading national newspaper, the New Vision in April. Read a copy here