This week’s round up of the last seven days’ news on REDD, in chronological order with short extracts (click on the title for the full article). For those who can’t wait until Monday for last week’s REDD news, REDD-Monitor’s news page is updated daily: “REDD in the news“.
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On 4 December 2009, Guyana’s President, Bharrat Jagdeo, was interviewed on the BBC programme “Hard Talk“. At one stage, the presenter, Zeinab Badawi, asks Jagdeo about REDD. What Jagdeo doesn’t say in response is more interesting than what he does say. He doesn’t mention the logging companies already logging Guyana’s forests. He doesn’t mention mining. He doesn’t mention road-building. He doesn’t mention the risks of corruption. REDD in the news: a round up of last week’s news on REDD, in chronological order with short extracts (click on the title for the full article). For those who can’t wait until Monday morning for last week’s REDD news, REDD-Monitor’s news page is updated daily: “REDD in the news“.
FERN has produced a special report on the UN negotiations in Copenhagen, as part of the January 2010 issue of Forest Watch. The report concludes that “While references to safeguards and indigenous peoples rights undoubtedly have improved the negotiating text, such changes could be undermined if the underlying assumption remains that funding for REDD will come from offsetting carbon emissions.” A round up of media coverage of REDD over the past seven days. The Rights and Resources Initiative released an important report: “The End of the Hinterland: Forests, Conflict and Climate Change”. The report warns that “the failure to set legal standards and safeguards for a mechanism to transfer funds to forest-rich nations may trigger a sharp rise in speculation and corruption, placing unprecedented pressures on tropical forest lands and the communities that inhabit them.”
The UN-REDD programme in Papua New Guinea has been very quiet about the on-going controversy involving carbon trading and REDD in the country. REDD-Monitor asked UN-REDD some questions in an attempt to find out what the UN-REDD programme has been doing to address the problems. Unfortunately, UN-REDD remains very quiet on the subject.
The Ulu Masen project covers an area of 770,000 hectares in Aceh province in the north of Sumatra. The project aims to generate 3.3 million carbon credits a year to finance conservation and development projects for local communities. To find out more, REDD-Monitor interviewed Joe Heffernan of Flora & Fauna International and David Gaveau of the University of Kent in England.
While REDD proponents and critics often provide lists of conditions that should be met before REDD can go ahead, they rarely conclude that REDD should not go ahead if these conditions are not met. As Simone Lovera explains in “REDD Realities” many of the conditions are currently not met and cannot be met – particularly if REDD is to be funded through carbon trading. “The problem with REDD is that there are simply too many ‘ifs’ to be true,” Lovera comments.
This week, activists protested outside a Carbon Trading Summit in New York. Executives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy, American Electric Power and other corporations mingled with representatives from government, carbon credit aggregators, hedge funds and carbon traders. “The same Wall Street bankers who gave us the global climate crisis are trying to own the sky,” said Brian Tokar, director of the Institute for Social Ecology. In its press release about the event, Indigenous Environmental Network focussed on REDD, what can go wrong and what already has gone wrong. (Spanish version, below.)
“If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom!” This is Professor Stefano Harney, University of London, commenting on a new book: “Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets”. The book, which can be downloaded (or ordered) here, is edited by Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi from the University of Essex, UK. The book includes case studies and critiques from around the world, “showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities.” It suggests alternatives to carbon markets and includes a chapter by me, looking at some of the problems behind trading forest carbon. |
 
 
 
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