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In November 2011, African Wildlife Foundation and The Nature Conservancy gave an area of land covering 6,920 hectares to the Kenyan government to create the proposed Laikipia National Park. What African Wildlife Foundation doesn’t tell us in its press release is that people were violently evicted to make way for this conservation project.
Last week, at a side event in Durban, the Green Belt Movement presented what they have learned so far about forest carbon finance. A paper released at the side event explains the problems with relying on carbon trading to finance forest projects, with important lessons for REDD.
Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, was asked in June 2011 what he thought would make the upcoming UN climate meeting in Durban a success? His response provides a fascinating glimpse into how the world is utterly failing to deal with the coming climate catastrophe.
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?
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 indigenous Ogiek people living in the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya are threatened with eviction to make way for the government’s conservation plans. The government has already started evicting 1,690 non-Ogiek families from the Mau Forest. They have nowhere to go. The Mau Forest Secretariat says that because they have no title deeds they do not qualify for any compensation. Karanja Njoroge, a journalist with The Standard spent a day and a night with the evicted people and described it as “an experience of extreme despair and squalour of people who say they have been kicked out without being allowed to harvest their crops.”
The latest issue of “Forest Cover“, the newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition includes several articles about REDD. Miguel Lovera, GFC chairperson suggests chanting “stop the fraud now” might be the best strategy to follow in the run-up to the Climate COP in Copenhagen in 2009: |
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