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A new video by the Global Forest Coalition and the Global Justice Ecology Project is deeply critical of REDD. Much of the criticism focusses on carbon trading, but through interviews with communities in Chiapas, Mexico, the video illustrates the perverse impacts that REDD can have on the ground.
The agreement that came out of the Conference of Polluters (COP-17) in Durban included no new commitments to reduce emissions. “What we got instead was a clear signal that we might get another clear signal in 2015,” as Jonathan Grant, director of carbon markets and climate policy at PricewaterhouseCoopers told the Financial Times.
The UN climate talks in Durban finished late on Saturday night, almost 36 hours late. Negotiators agreed little more than to start talks next year on a new deal. These talks are supposed to end by 2015 and are to come into effect by 2020.
The fifth Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Taskforce takes place this week in Central Kalimantan. The organisers anticipated that more than 200 people would take part in the three day meetings. The GCF is a carbon trading REDD deal between 15 states and provinces from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and the USA covering more than 20% of the world’s forests.
The Global Justice Ecology Project’s Jeff Conant and Orin Langelle visited the community of Amador Hernandez in Chiapas, Mexico in March 2011. They were there to investigate the relationship between the threatened forced relocation of the community to REDD proposals.
REDD-Monitor is requesting your help to find the best REDD stories contained in the US Embassy Cables that WikiLeaks released last week. WikiLeaks started releasing edited versions of the cables in November 2010, since when the cables have been trickling out. On 31 August 2011, WikiLeaks released 251,287 US Embassy cables. Unredacted.
The Guaraqueçaba project, run by the Nature Conservancy and the Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS) has been featured in the past on REDD-Monitor, after investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reported from the project area.
A new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency confirms that logs from Laos continue to pour over the border into Vietnam feeding a booming furniture industry there, despite a ban on exports of unprocessed timber from Laos. This illegal trade has serious implications for REDD in both countries.
On 16 December 2010, US President Barack Obama announced that “in April, we announced that we were reviewing our position on the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And today I can announce that the United States is lending its support to this declaration.”
The village of Amador Hernández is in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, Chiapas, Mexico. Since last year, the community has been denied medical supplies and the government has suspended emergency transport of seriously ill people from the area. Villagers are concerned that the suspension of medical services is precursor to eviction under a REDD plan that is currently starting up.
Last week, a court in San Francisco ruled against California’s cap and trade programme. Here’s how California Watch reported the decision: “Activists are celebrating a victory in their lawsuit against the state’s Air Resources Board, halting the start of the landmark climate change law, at least momentarily.”
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.
So far, the REDD negotiations in the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) in Cancun seem to have little to do with either cooperation or action. Yesterday, Bolivia’s Ambassador Pablo Solón said that the latest text “is imbalanced, and excludes the proposals of Bolivia and many other developing nations”.
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. |
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