As REDD-Monitor has pointed out several times, the way forests are defined is crucial to whether REDD helps to preserve or destroy forests. The UN’s failure, in its negotiations on REDD, to differentiate between forests and industrial tree plantations, creates the risk that governments and companies could replace forests with oil palm, eucalyptus or rubber plantations and claim carbon credits under REDD schemes. Clearly, this is deeply unsatisfactory to anyone who cares about people and forests. Yet the UN continues to define plantations as forests.
On 11 December 2008, delegates entering the Poznan climate change conference saw a “Plantations are not forests” banner on the edge of a protest in favour of womens’ rights. Protesters chanted “Plantations, down! down! Monocultures, down! down! Women’s rights, up! up!”
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