Thursday, 6 December, 5 p.m. — One of the most innovative initiatives to spur clean development in poorer countries that emerges from the Kyoto Protocol is the Clean Development Mechanism, which allows greenhouse gas emitters a low-cost way to meet a portion of their obligations under the Protocol. The mechanism helps finance certified green projects in developing countries that, for instance, convert waste to energy, replace inefficient boilers or build windmill.

There are 850 projects underway and another 2,000 in the pipeline. All told, the mechanism helped reduce about 2.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. The problem, however, is that the development projects have not been spread evenly because investment tends to follow markets and profits. This has left Africa with only 23 projects, a situation, not surprisingly, that the Africans have found unacceptable.

Last year, a number of UN agencies teamed up to try to change that. "It's time that the benefits of this important Kyoto Protocol mechanism were expanded in Africa," Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official. Slow going at first, the agencies say the pace of new projects has picked up and expect the pace to quicken.

Thursday, 6 December, 1 p.m. — Much effort has been made in Bali to ease fears of a brave new low carbon world. We can keep our economies humming even as we implement steps to reduce emissions, we can still have our lumber from the rainforests and still save the rainforests, and we can still have jobs in a greener economy.

Far from crippling economies, the UN Environment Programme says that the antidotes to climate change can produce millions of new jobs. In fact, their new research shows that these "green-collar" jobs are already being created. In the US, for example, the environmental industry created more than 5.3 million jobs in 2005, 10 times the number of new pharmaceutical jobs. Chinese solar heating manufacturers employed more than 150,000 people in 2005 and that number is expected to grow. And there will be more Germans working in environmental technologies by 2020 than in the automotive industry.

Thursday, 6 December, 12 p.m. — A perfect storm is brewing in the Amazon. A combination of climate change and economic pressures could leave only 55 per cent of the rainforest intact by 2030, says WWF's Daniel Nepstad. The forces of cattle ranching, soy farming and biofuel production, he says, combined with a drying of the Amazon caused by climate change are putting more pressure on the rainforest than at any other time during his 23 years of studying the region.

"It will be very hard to keep the temperature of the world from rising more than 2°C unless we conserve the forest, and it will be very hard to conserve the forest if the temperature rises."

Thursday, 6 December, 10 a.m. — Some causes of climate change get all the attention, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. But then there is the problem of peat, which is not on the agenda in Bali, but here in Indonesia, where peatlands account for 20 per cent of the land, and in more than a 130 other countries, peatlands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — about 11 per cent of the global figure.

Left alone peatlands are not a problem, and in fact, serve as a natural repository of carbon. But due to the pressures from land development and climate change, the peatlands are drying out and burning.

Some NGOs here are pushing for global peat protection and for inclusion in any new climate change agreement, but Emil Salim, head of the Indonesian delegation in Bali says no. "We feel that peatlands is our job to settle." He says while the NGOs are pushing for a moratorium on development in peatlands, what the country needs is "sustainable peatland management."