We are headed into Week Two of international climate negotiations here in Bangkok. Progress is slow…but there is some progress. I asked Andrew Deutz, The Nature Conservancy’s director of international government relations, to provide some context on what’s going on…and what it means for a climate-change agreement in Copenhagen this December:

Q: What progress has been made in the first week of these discussions?

Deutz: While the week started out with optimistic and hopeful speeches, buoyed by the international momentum coming out of the UN Climate Week in New York, it’s been challenging to bring that high-level momentum into these negotiations to really break through the major political sticking points.

While there has been some progress on certain aspects of the text, for example reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), the pace is not nearly fast enough to get where we need to be by Copenhagen.

There has also been a lot of talk about the “elephants in the room” – such as what overall emissions reductions targets and financing will come from developed countries, how much common responsibility developing countries should share, and whether the Kyoto Protocol will continue independently or be merged with a new agreement. These political issues are also getting more clearly defined and out on the table, which helps the negotiations move forward in other areas.

Q: What needs to happen in the next week in these negotiations?

Deutz: We are going into Week Two with some consolidated texts and hopefully some energy to find the key areas of convergence that will make up an agreement in Copenhagen. But the elephants in the room could rear their heads at any point and prevent further progress. Parties must continue to look for areas of agreement, move towards reduced texts, and provide a vote of confidence that the elephants will start moving by Copenhagen.

At the same time, it’s important is that everything that has been agreed to date is not lost as parties work to shorten the text. We don’t want to through the baby out with the bathwater. Guiding principles and annexes that capture what has been learned should be retained to support a political agreement — and to facilitate implementation once an agreement is reached.

We should come out of Bangkok with a single consolidated negotiating text or a clear mandate to the chairs to put such a text on the table before we get to Barcelona [the next stop for the negotiations]. If negotiators can get a series of elements in place by Copenhagen – around REDD, adaptation, technology transfer and other areas – it will create a foundation for a political deal to be struck in Copenhagen.

Q: Looking outside the negotiations, what needs to happen in the next months to reach an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Getting a solid foundation in place for Copenhagen will push ministers and heads of state to focus on the overall level of ambition of the whole agreement, and keep them from blaming the negotiations for not paving the way for a decision.

In particular, leaders need to deliver on a strong emissions reductions targets and a clear commitment for public financing from developed countries. The G20 did not provide substantial guidance on finance, so leaders must quickly find a forum where they can pull a solution together.

And progress in the United States is crucial. The prevailing opinion here is that momentum is slowing for comprehensive climate legislation in the United States being adopted before Copenhagen. Without that, the U.S. will not be able to bring emissions reductions targets or billions of new dollars to the negotiating and those are the twin keys to unlocking the negotiations.

So much of the first week was characterized by delegates reassessing the perspectives of U.S. leadership and recalibrating their expectations for Copenhagen. The best possible adrenaline shot for these negotiations would be for the U.S. Congress to adopt the climate bill.

Q: What can negotiators here do to facilitate an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Resolving the legal structure and how to merge the two negotiating tracks (one for the Kyoto Protocol and one for Long-term Cooperative Action) is also a crucial step to bring clarity around the level of overall emissions targets:

• Developing countries want to keep the Kyoto Protocol alive because it defines the world into two simple camps — developed and developing countries — with developed countries carrying all the responsibility for emissions reductions.
• Developed countries are keen on the agreement on Long-term Cooperative Action because it opens the door for counting developing countries actions to reduce emissions as part of an overall agreement.

Finding a structure that brings together the commitments from the Kyoto Protocol with efforts undertaken by the U.S., China, India and others would create a global framework that captures efforts from all of the major emitting countries.

(Image: Elephants at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (LWC) in the Laikipia District of Northern Kenya in East Africa. The Conservancy is partnering with LWC to help protect the grasslands and savannas of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Credit: Josh Knights/TNC)

This fabulous close-up of a young green anole was taken by Flickr user Jenna Stirling in her backyard in Texas. Never seen an anole before? Me neither. But now I know it’s a lizard closely related to the iguana, though because it can change its skin color and run up walls, the anole is often mistaken for a chameleon or gecko. Cool, heh?

Check out all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org. And don’t forget to enter your best nature images in our 2009 Nature Photo Contest — deadline for entries is September 30th!

BONN, Germany — The Nature Conservancy’s forest carbon team hosted an event here at the Bonn climate talks this week to present an innovative proposal on how to reduce emissions from global deforestation — a crucial part of effectively addressing climate change. I sat down with the team to get their perspectives on the proposal and how it fits into the broader negotiations that are going on.

Chrissy Schwinn: Why did The Nature Conservancy develop this proposal?

Duncan Marsh (the Conservancy’s director of international climate policy): Two years ago, countries decided that a program for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) will be part of the global agreement on climate change being negotiated here.

The design of the REDD program will determine how successful it is in actually reducing emissions and stopping deforestation. There are already a few proposals out there about what this might take. As a leader in this area — and a conservation organization that cares deeply about climate change and the fate of the world’s forests — we wanted to share our expertise with negotiators and help shape a future agreement that will work in the real world, not just on paper.

CS: The Conservancy’s proposal is called “A Global Mechanism for Reducing Emissions from the Forest Sector.” What does that mean?

Greg Fishbein (the Conservancy’s director of forest carbon): We debuted our proposal for an integrated global mechanism for REDD with the goal of halving deforestation by 2020 and making a major contribution to stabilizing the atmosphere. It’s one of the more comprehensive proposals out there — it shows how REDD could be implemented and financed over the next 10 years. It brings the financial, technical, social and environmental considerations together in one place so policymakers can see how it all fits together.

A central component of our proposal is a carbon market, which we feel is necessary to generate the magnitude of investments needed to stop deforestation. Our proposal also includes public funding that would help lay the groundwork in the early stages of REDD implementation.

CS: What reactions have we gotten from negotiators and other organizations?

Sarene Marshall (the Conservancy’s deputy director for climate change): We just started, but so far reactions been very encouraging. While there are people who will be critical of any proposal for carbon markets based on cap-and-trade systems, many support a diversity of funding streams to achieve these goals. There’s clearly a lot of interest in understanding how all the different pieces of REDD could come together, both within an international agreement and in specific countries and communities.

We’ve gotten very positive feedback about how we have pulled from our on-the-ground work and experience in places like Berau, Indonesia and the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project in Bolivia to back up this proposal. We’ve also taken a business approach to this, by including projections on the financial needs and how those needs would be met. And we’ve made sure it all adds up in a way that is consistent. So we are taking real conservation experience, tying it with hard financial analysis, balancing it with political realities, and showing how it can all come together in an international agreement.

CS: Halving deforestation is no small thing. How can we really get there?

Rane Cortez (Conservancy forest carbon policy advisor): REDD can make a significant contribution to reducing global climate change emissions, but we need to be realistic about what’s possible through REDD and when. We designed this proposal with the aim of really making a dent in deforestation. We lay out a phased approach that supports projects such as Noel Kempff to develop the expertise needed to implement REDD. Then we want to move to the state or provincial level like in Berau so governments can get their systems in place. And eventually we see it growing to nation-wide REDD programs in developing countries around the world.

CS: If you stop deforestation in one country, won’t it just move to another one?

Rane Cortez: This is a potential risk, but there are ways to make sure that this doesn’t happen. In order to prevent shifting deforestation to other countries, we need to design a system that promotes broad participation of developing countries. This means we need a way to help protect forests that aren’t currently threatened by deforestation, and stop deforestation in places where it is happening. Our proposal provides incentives for both efforts. Some of the money generated from stopping deforestation within threatened forests is directed to help protect forests that do not currently face threats but could face increasing pressure in the future.

CS: Why is “on-the-ground” work so important in shaping the Conservancy’s perspectives?

Greg Fishbein: It gives us experience that others just don’t have. There are a lot of people here who are looking for constructive solutions and they respect our point of view because it’s grounded in real work on the ground. This helps us know which issues are important to address, and it gives us real tangible reasons why we’ve made certain choices.

I’m very pleased where we are with this. It’s important to have a point of view on the solution to the broader problem, in addition to positions on specific issues. It’s when you can bring the policy makers a comprehensive solution that your value becomes really clear. And that’s what the Nature Conservancy is seeking to do here.

View the webcast for the event (click “Charts” to see slides).
Download the proposal or presentation.

(Image: Deforestations patterns showing forest conversion to agriculture between Santa Cruz and Noel Kempff Mercado National Park of Bolivia. Credit: Hermes Justiniano.)

I wrote about the Church Bird of Borneo a few weeks ago, and asked the question how species could be evolutionary winners and conservation disasters at the same time.

The issue is about exotic and invasive species that are ecologically much better adapted to their new environments than indigenous species, which are often fine-tuned with their native, undisturbed habitats. Disturbance of these native habitats makes the locals suffer, while the newcomers thrive.

Whether they are tree sparrows, Burmese pythons, water hyacinths or humans, all these newcomers are very good at coping with new environments, often at the expense of whoever lived there first. But strangely enough, that is exactly how evolution works. The ancestral Darwin’s Finches once landed, completely exhausted, on one of the Galapagos Islands. They thrived, adapted, evolved and probably displaced quite a few of the species that had arrived before them.

Here in Southeast Asia, I see the same. Every few hundred thousand years, a wave of new species has arrived in the lands that now make up Indonesia and Malaysia, often driven by climatic change. They displaced the original species, which either died out or survived on mountain tops, offshore islands or other unusual places, where they are now rare endemics.

In conservation we are trying to change this. We are eradicating or controlling the invaders, and protect the natives. But that introduces a paradox.

Of course, things are happening much faster now that humans have come onto the scene. We are not talking about millennia or even centuries anymore. Our changes happen in a few years. And few species can adapt to that speed.

Still, there seem to be a disconnect between conservation and natural evolution. Come to Borneo in a few thousand years from now, and quite likely the tree sparrows here will have started to develop some useful traits that allows them to exploit new resources.

When does a species stop being a dangerous invasive and become a wonder of nature worth protecting?

(Image: Sketch of four finches by John Gould that were discovered on the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, from the 1845 edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Credit: John Gould via a Creative Commons license.)

Happy MLK Day to those of you in the United States! Here’s the green stuff that’s catching our eye online this morning:

• Wardrobe Check: Inhabitat urges Michelle Obama to dress green for the inauguration.

• Lean Green Fighting Machine: The Pentagon is realizing that renewable energy makes for good defense policy, reports The Wall Street Journal.

• The Clock is Ticking? NASA scientist James Hansen tells Barack Obama he has four years to save the planet from climate change.

• We Hadn’t Thought About That: Sean Casten at Grist asks: Is renewable energy sustainable? (Bradford Plumer at The Vine says he’ll take the problems Casten outlines over dependence on oil.)

• The Future’s So Bright: Could shinier crops reflect more sunlight into space and cool the earth?

• Going Deep: Is your ecology deep or shallow? Andrew Revkin says the passing of philosopher Arne Naess might prompt you to do some soul-searching on the question.

• I’ll Have Mine Rare: Why people think rare species taste better.

• Can It Survive? What’s the future of the tropical rainforest? Mongabay.com reviews a panel discussion by nine scientists last week.

• So Plastic: New Dehli is getting serious about banning plastic bags, reports the Guardian. More than 10 million are used in the city every day. (Hat tip: Treehugger.)

• Another Mystery Solved: How do machines sort recyclables? Oh, centrifuges, magnets, induced currents and a little bit of help from humans, says EcoGeek. (Now, if only the market for recyclables would come back…)

(Image: Michelle Obama (center) at a campaign rally in Arlington, Virginia. Credit: Greg under a Creative Commons license.)

California’s Santa Cruz Island is famous for its miniature foxes and baby bald eagles, but now a new creature is making headlines — the pygmy mammoth.

At least, that’s what researchers think the four-foot-long bone — recently unearthed on the island — once belonged to. (Check out the full story here.)

An archeology student from the University of California, Santa Barbara, made the discovery last week. She also found other bones – possibly rib and thigh bones — while excavating a Native American Chumash site.

While this isn’t the first discovery of mammoth remains on Santa Cruz and other Channel Islands, it is one of the few intact tusk bones to be found here. And the location of the find is new, leading researchers to consider that mammoths might have roamed Santa Cruz’s deep valleys and rough terrain more widely than previously thought.

Speaking of roaming… one might wonder, just how did mammoths get to an island off the coast of Ventura and Los Angeles anyway?

Scientists believe Santa Cruz and the other Channel Islands were once all part of a big island called Santarosae. Just five miles of water separated this landmass from the mainland.

And what else but the smell of food — in this case, lush island grasses — would have inspired a mammoth to swim those five miles? When sea levels began to rise centuries later, the Channel Islands were isolated from the mainland and the mammoths stranded.

It’s this isolation that makes Santa Cruz so unique. The island is home to numerous plants and animals — including the tiny fox – that evolved in isolation. That’s why the Conservancy has spent nearly 30 years restoring it from the damages of feral sheep and pigs and invasive species.

While the discovery of a mammoth tusk might not seem like it has much to do with conservation, the Conservancy’s Santa Cruz Island Project Director Lotus Vermeer says it does:

“This discovery underscores the importance of protecting unique landscapes like Santa Cruz Island,” says Vermeer. “Not only to preserve its plants and animals, but to keep alive the amazing cultural history of the island’s Native American Chumash, who lived in an era when mammoths roamed these islands.”

Whether the bones are indeed from a mammoth or not will be decided by mammoth expert Dr. Larry D. Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota. He will begin excavating the site in late January.

Until then, the discovery is a good reminder of what once roamed the planet.

(Image: Mammoth tusk discovered on Santa Cruz Island. Credit: Kristina Gill.)

For starters, it’s a group blog about every important conservation issue you can think of – from migratory birds to coral reefs, from rainforests to climate change to personal green technology. There’s nothing like it in the world.

Close to 20 Nature Conservancy scientists and writers will be talking about these issues right here every day — bloggers based around the world, from Indonesia to Brazil to Australia to Idaho. They’re expressing their own opinions here, and they’ve got a lot of them.

Cool Green Science is also a great place to get the latest conservation news and features — not just from the Conservancy, but from around the Internet in our daily briefing, Cool Green Morning.

And finally, Cool Green Science is about you — giving us feedback through your comments, and energizing what we hope are vigorous debates about the state of conservation and the future of our planet.

Scroll down — there’s a lot of great stuff here! And please let us know what you think.

• Joel Makower is pessimistic that businesses can ever achieve true sustainability–that is, without an economic meltdown to prod them.
• But is corporate carbon neutrality impossible, anyway? That’s what a new report from The Wall Street Journal about Dell Computer’s struggles to reduce its carbon emissions suggests.
• Meanwhile, Whole Foods and Apple lack holistic climate change strategies and emissions targets for their companies, argues Mindy S. Lubber of Ceres, a sustainability non-profit. (But the report praises Dell’s efforts toward sustainability.)
• Insurance companies are now calling for governments to deal with climate change – citing the increasing costs of extreme weather and its consequences. (Hat tip: Green Inc.)
• Speaking of climate change, 2008 was (a) the coldest year of the century, (b) warmer than all but two years in the 20th century, or (c) the 10th warmest year on record. All of those, says Bright Green Blog.
• Did the absence of jet traffic in the days after September 11, 2001 cause the average daily temperature range over the continental United States to increase?
• Richard Black says 2009 will be the Year of the Gorilla – and whales, and satellites, and Charles Darwin. Oh, and there’s that little meeting in Copenhagen in November…
• Real Climate’s 2008 Year in Review is especially entertaining.
• Hank Green at EcoGeek names the 7 greentech stories of 2008 that will change everything–including why T. Boone Pickens is now more important than Al Gore.
• Finally, are we all sick of “green” yet? Lake Superior State University says “green” was the most overused word in 2008 and recommends banning it in 2009. (Hey — we really are green. And we’re not changing our name.)