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This week, a Canadian mining company called East Asia Minerals Corporation, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to buy 50% of Carbon Conservation Pty Ltd. East Asia Minerals’ aim is simple: “Through the acquisition of a 50% equity interest in CC, the Company will develop a ‘green’ mining project which will use carbon and biodiversity offsets and the latest in environmentally friendly mining practices.”
In this short video, “Lives of the Forest,” indigenous activists from the Asia Pacific region speak out against REDD. “We find that the way [the international community] took decisions for passing through this REDD mechanism is in complete exclusion of the indigenous peoples,” says Jiten Yumnam of the Meitei people in Manipur, India.
The Forest Peoples Programme’s April 2011 ENewsletter starts with this sentence: “Closing the gap between international human rights law and realities on the ground is the most important challenge facing forest peoples.” This raises a question for REDD proponents: Is REDD helping to close the gap, or further widening it?
Earlier this month, Greenpeace released a report slamming McKinsey’s work on REDD – in particular the McKinsey cost curve. On 14 April 2011, David Ritter, a Biodiversity Campaigner at Greenpeace UK, gave a presentation about McKinsey’s role in promoting deforestation (pdf file 85.4 KB) at the Civil Society Policy Forum of the Spring Meeting of the World Bank in Washington DC. The Bank’s reaction was fascinating.
Just in case you’re still wondering, yes, we are still waiting for the Indonesian forest moratorium to start. It was due to start at the beginning of January 2011, but it needs President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to sign a decree to make the moratorium legally binding. The moratorium is part of the US$1 billion REDD deal between Indonesia and Norway.
Yesterday, Greenpeace released a report titled, “Bad Influence: How McKinsey-inspired plans lead to rainforest destruction.” The report highlights how advice from McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s top consulting firms, will result in an increase in the destructive logging it is, in theory at least, supposed to prevent.
A new report from FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme concludes that the safeguards put in place by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership (FCPF) are inadequate. The report looks at eight Readiness Preparation Proposals (R-PPs) submitted to the FCPF and finds that FCPF safeguards are not clear and do not conform to the World Bank’s own safeguards.
Rainforest Action Network has sent a briefing note to more than 100 companies that consume pulp, paper and palm oil, requesting that they support a robust moratorium on forest concessions in Indonesia. The companies include Staples, General Mills, Levis, and Bank of America.
REDD in Indonesia: We are still waiting for the forest moratorium that should have started on 1 January 2011. Greenpeace notes that the latest draft of the decree (needed to make the moratorium legally binding) “will fail to protect vital rainforests.” Meanwhile, Norway is investing in companies involved in forest destruction in the REDD pilot province, Central Kalimantan.
In October 2010, the Forest Peoples Programme helped to organise a four day workshop of The Forests Dialogue about Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in Indonesia. More than 80 participants took part, including indigenous peoples, local community representatives, NGOs, international financial institutions, government agencies and the private sector.
Australia has committed A$30 million to the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) in Indonesia. Recently, questions from Senator Christine Milne (of the Green Party) in the Australian Parliament were (sort of) answered by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Trade.
The theory behind REDD sounds so simple. We just have to make forests worth more standing than logged. The big REDD idea is to increase the value of forests by putting a price on the carbon stored in the forest. The recent surge in food prices sheds some light on some of the many problems lurking behind this apparently simple idea.
Interview with Elfian Effendi, Executive Director of Greenomics Indonesia, January 2011, Jakarta, by email.
Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia’s Minister of Forestry, recently issued almost three million hectares of new plantation concessions to 44 firms. There’s nothing surprising about that. Indonesia has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, largely due to oil palm and fast-growing pulpwood plantations. What is perhaps surprising is the timing. |
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