After the inaugural session, there were several technical sessions which lasted two days and covered issues like climate monitoring, adaptation challenges, climate change negotiations, protection of forests, financing technology and water, food and energy security.
While many detailed issues are being negotiated – forest protection, finance for adaptation, technology transfer, to name just a few – the central question is whether countries will stop digging and adopt the kind of legally binding commitments needed to stave off an all out climate catastrophe.
One tool used in these efforts is the modeling of tree features, such as total tree height, sawn-timber tree height, merchantable tree height, and total or sawn-timber tree volume, which yields an estimate of the forest in finance recoverable goods.
While logging and mining extract value from the forest, conservation finance helps indigenous people keep the value there, and that means it requires their active participation.
But our 2015 report, "Converging at the Crossroads: State of Forest Carbon Finance", found that buyers hadn't yet caught on; there weren't yet enough blue carbon transactions to report on them as a unique category.
This new approach can advance subnational REDD+ baselines and reference emission levels, considered crucial for verifiable emission reductions and forest carbon finance efforts.
Forests "Substantial finance to prevent deforestation; adaptation, technology development and transfer and capacity".
Formal talks during the next two weeks are to focus on forests and finance, but sensitive questions on the legal status of a future agreement and the actual figures that countries are prepared to reduce their emissions by are expected to be put back until ministers arrive next week.
The illegal-drug industry has corrupted institutions, distorted economies, wrecked forests, and financed armed groups such as Colombia's FARC guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.
And though many feel offsetting — whether it is planting forests or financing green initiatives in the developing world — is just a fashionable way for vacationers to feel less guilty about traveling, it still seemed better than doing nothing.
