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The US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks provide a fascinating glimpse into US climate policy relating to Brazil. The country is important to the US for two reasons: Brazil controls 70% of the Amazon rainforest and “plays a pivotal role” in the UN climate negotiations.
Of all the topics under discussion at Cancún, perhaps the oddest is a proposal from Brazil to include something called “forests in exhaustion” in the clean development mechanism. In short, it is a subsidy to the plantations industry either to re-establish plantations or to clear forests and establish new plantations.
The Governator is back. “Action is needed now, and action is what we’re taking with R20,” said Arnold Schwarzenegger at a meeting this week at the University of California, Davis. But there may be less to it than meets the eye. China did not sign on. The Guardian reports that a Dutch official, who did sign on, said he thought it was just another empty promise.
In May 2010, Avoided Deforestation Partners put out a report titled “Farms here, forests there“. The report argues that deforestation to create agricultural land in the tropics has resulted in a “dramatic expansion” in food commodities that compete with food produced in the USA. Predictably enough, agribusiness interests in Brazil have used the report to push for more deforestation – to keep Brazilian agriculture competitive.
UPDATE – 17 August 2011: On 15 August 2011, Albert George of the Amazon Reforestation Project wrote to REDD-Monitor stating that “we have severed all ties with Shift2Neutral”. read more »
There’s an interesting discussion taking place between the World Rainforest Movement and Fundação Amazonas Sustentável about the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil. The discussion so far is posted in full below, in reverse chronological order.
“Amazongate” is an attempt, largely by climate deniers, to prove that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) got it wrong on the impacts of global warming on the Amazon, when it wrote that up to 40% of the Amazon forests could be replaced by savanna ecosystems, with even slight reductions in rainfall.
With apologies for stating the bleeding obvious: If REDD is going to work, it has to reduce deforestation. It also has to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights. So why is Brazil, which claims to be serious about stopping deforestation, planning to build the world’s third largest hydropower dam? The Belo Monte dam is planned to be built on the Xingu River and would result in the eviction of tens of thousands of Indigenous Peoples.
In November 2009, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reported from Brazil’s Atlantic Coast about a project set up by the Nature Conservancy in a region called Guaraqueçaba. For his new film, “The Carbon Hunters“, Schapiro also visited another REDD-type conservation project in Brazil, the Juma Reserve project, set up with US$2 million by the Marriott hotel chain.
In the lead up to Copenhagen, letters, articles and reports about REDD are coming out thick and fast. Before looking at them, here’s some bad news. In 2005, a drought meant that in that year the Amazon rainforest did not sequester its usual 2 billion metric tons of CO2. It also released 3 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere from dying trees. The total 5 billion additional tons of CO2 is greater than the combined emissions of Europe and Japan. This year there is another drought in the Amazon. The photograph on the right was taken last weekend by Paulo Whitaker. It shows a fisherman paddling through dead fish that died because of lower water levels on the on the Manaquiri River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
The first thing that you need to know about “forests in exhaustion” is that they are not forests. According to the Clean Development Mechanism, the photograph on the left is a forest. All of it. The eucalyptus monoculture plantation in the background is a “forest” because it is bigger than 500 square metres and more than 10 per cent of it is covered with trees taller than two metres, thus meeting CDM’s definition of a “forest”. But the muddy wasteland in the foreground? Well, in UN-speak, that’s a “forest in exhaustion”. While it’s clearly not a forest, it certainly looks exhausted. Bloody knackered, more like.
At a recent conference in Oxford, Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, launched a new report that warns that we could see a global increase in temperatures of 4°C as soon as 2055. Climate change could accelerate so rapidly because of feedback loops which are triggered by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and which in turn will cause new emissions.
Thomas Friedman’s most recent column for the New York Times comes from Tapajós National Forest, Brazil. His trip was organised by Conservation International and the Brazilian government (Friedman doesn’t say who paid). Conservation International could not have chosen a better journalist to back up their pro-carbon market ideology.
It really hasn’t been a good few weeks for The Nature Conservancy. First Greenpeace slammed TNC’s Noel Kempff project in Bolivia. Now investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reports from Brazil’s Atlantic Coast about TNC’s Guaraqueçaba project. Schapiro’s article in Mother Jones and a series of films on Frontline/World, document the impacts of the project.
Representatives from social and environmental organisations and movements met recently for two days in Belém, Pará state, Brazil to discuss REDD. After the meeting they produced a letter calling on the Government of Brazil to reject REDD as a carbon market-based mechanism. They also call on the government to reject REDD as a way of compensating emissions from Northern countries. Signed by 49 organisations and movements, the letter rejects “the use of market-based mechanisms as tools to reduce carbon emissions based on the firm conviction that the market cannot be expected to take responsibility for life on the planet”. |
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