Pacific voices@COP15 Joe Pokana, PNG Government on REDD

Geoffrey Smith, Fiji TV, Climate Pasifika

Copenhagen, 15 December - Papua New Guinea has explained its strong stand on REDD in the Alliance of small islands states (AOSIS) saying the complexities over shifting from fund based to market based financing has to be within the context of indigenous rights.

Joe Pokana of the PNG Government delegation says that for a country such as theirs with majority of land still under indigenous ownership, it will be something they intend to include as part of ongoing negotiations.  

 

 

Transcript:

Joe Pokana - PNG Delegate

The other thing that we are looking at is finance, we are pushing for three phase finance that will move from readiness to market based thats what we are doing. There's a lot of resistance to that option that one moves from market based to fund based, so we are moving from a readiness fund to a market based.

A lot of parties during our discussions and negotiations they want us to only stop at fund based and maybe in the next commitment phase than we go to market based.

Its those areas that we are really pushing for even though we are supporting other issues that the Coalition of Rainforest parties are involved in, we support human rights and indigenous rights because for Papua New Guinea 97 percent of our land is owned by local people so we cant do a policy thats outside of what our national circumstances are, we have to make sure that we capture in our negotiations as well.

So those are the key areas that we are pushing and working on it for the last 4 years so that REDD became an issue in Montreal in 2005.