Yesterday, ABN interviewed the Chair of the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board, Martin Hession. The interview included a very interesting question, which is very relevant to REDD and whether REDD is to be financed by carbon trading.
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A report released earlier this week by the Oakland Institute investigates the role that hedge funds are playing in land grabs in Africa. Hedge funds are investing in large scale industrial agricultural projects in Africa. The result, according to the Oakland Institute is, “food insecurity, the displacement of small farmers, conflict, environmental devastation, water loss, and the further impoverishment and political instability of African nations”.
Forests in exhaustion is one of the more absurd proposals to emerge from the UN negotiations on climate change. The proposal came from Brazil during 2008 and it was discussed during the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol held in Poznan in December 2008. It amounts to nothing more than a subsidy for industrial tree plantations.
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.
With apologies for the delay, here’s a posting for International Women’s Day (8 March 2011). A group of organisations has produced an invitation to sign on to a position statement on Women and REDD.
In December 2010, the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Andrew Steer, wrote that one outcomes of Cancun was that “Forests [are] firmly established as a key for addressing climate change, and to be included in a future carbon trading system.” This comment should end any discussion about whether the World Bank considers REDD to be anything other than a carbon trading mechanism.
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.
The European Trading System suspended spot trading in carbon credits on 19 January 2011, after 475,000 EU carbon dioxide emissions allowances (EUAs) were stolen from the Czech Republic’s carbon registry. The theft was discovered at 8:00 a.m. on 19 January 2011, by which time the thieves had already sold the credits.
Here we go again. The UN climate negotiations started yesterday in Cancun, Mexico. It’s COP 16, for those who are counting. There are lots of side events relating to REDD and forests in Cancun. Here’s a calendar. Thanks to Simone Lovera of Global Forest Coalition for compiling this list.
Yesterday, Asia Pulp and Paper and Carbon Conservation launched a REDD-type project on 15,640 hectares of peat forest on the Kampar peninsular, in Sumatra. “The Kampar Carbon Reserve is a gift from Indonesia to the world,” said Aida Greenbury, sustainability director for APP, in a press release. But the project raises serious questions about the credibility of REDD.
Papua New Guinea was one of the founders of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations that five years ago proposed “a novel economic model for reducing deforestation” at COP-11 in Montreal. But the country has seen a series of REDD related scandals and the problems, it seems, just won’t go away.
Vía Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers. It is a coalition of around 150 organisations, with an estimated 300 million members. Vía Campesina recently put out a statement about COP-16 in Cancún.
On 18 August 2010, Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria, the country’s leading environment group) organised a meeting on REDD in Nigeria, together with the Rainforest Research Development and GREENCODE. The meeting produced a statement, signed by 18 NGOs. “Forests and REDD must be out of carbon markets,” is the first of a list of resolutions included in the statement.
From 11-15 August 2010, the fourth Social Forum of the Americas took place in Asuncion, in Paraguay. The forum started with a march through the city, with about five thousand people taking part. Viá Campesina organised a campground for the rural communities from Paraguay who made up about half of those present. About three hundred workshops took place and at the end the Social Forum produced a Declaration.
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