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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.
On 28 March 2011, Australian TV station Today Tonight Adelaide broadcast a programme about Shift2Neutral and the company’s chairman Brett Goldsworthy. Paul Makin, a journalist with Today Tonight Adelaide interviewed Brett Goldsworthy in his office in a shopping centre in Westleigh, a suburb of Sydney. “Brett Goldsworthy is a one-man band of sorts,” says Makin in the programme.
Shift2Neutral, a small Australia-based carbon trading company, has signed REDD-type deals in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil. The total area of these projects is several million hectares. Yet almost nothing is known about this company, and the company chairman, Brett Goldsworthy, is reluctant to answer questions.
Seventy five indigenous women from 28 countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Pacific and North America travelled to Manila this week for a two-day workshop to discuss the impacts of climate change and mitigation measures such as REDD-plus on their rights and roles as indigenous women.
“We say No! to all market-based mechanisms and false solutions to climate change and demand that indigenous peoples’ rights be respected worldwide in addressing the climate crisis,” stated the declaration that came out of a recent meeting of indigenous peoples representatives.
Brett Goldsworthy, chairman of Shift2Neutral has responded to REDD-Monitor’s email asking some questions about his company’s REDD-type projects in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. He states that his company “deals in facts”, but provides no new information. He states that his company manages its project “in an ethical and open way” but apparently only “to those people involved in the project”.
In response to last week’s post about an Australian carbon trading company, Shift2Neutral, REDD-Monitor received a statement from CoDe REDD in the Philippines (posted below). The Climate Change Commission wrote to Shift2Neutral recommending that the company’s “carbon credit activities be held in abeyance,” until the commission has “promulgated the guidelines and the rules addressing this issue”.
Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (JOAS), the Indigenous Peoples Network of Malaysia, put out a press release on 10 August 2010 about a carbon trading deal with indigenous peoples in Sarawak. On 6 August 2010, Reuters reported that an Australian carbon trading company called Shift2Neutral had “signed a deal with nine Malaysian tribal leaders to certify carbon offsets from a project aimed at preserving more than 100,000 hectares of tropical forest”. |
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