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Last month, I took part in a meeting in Bangkok about carbon markets in Southeast Asia. Much of the discussion during the meeting involved the complexities and details of the Clean Development Mechansim, but the two points in the headline came across clearly.
How can a company use the fact that it is one of largest forest destroyers in Indonesia to benefit from REDD? Easy. The very fact that the company is so destructive means that any forest in the company’s concessions is automatically threatened. So any patch of forest left standing must, by definition, be avoided deforestation.
“Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market over all,” Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, told the New York Times in July 2007.
Last month, 29 NGOs and indigenous peoples organisations from 14 countries wrote to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility expressing their concern that the World Bank is rushing through its REDD readiness process.
In September 2011, the 64th Annual UN DPI/NGO Conference took place in Bonn, Germany. About 1,500 people from 70 countries turned up. On the third day of the meeting, a remarkable thing happened. Not a single participant at the conference put up their hand to disagree with a declaration which promotes REDD as a carbon trading mechanism.
A new manual by six Europe-based NGOs calls for an end to forest offsets. The report argues that there are two motivations for forest offsets: “reducing the pressure to do something about fossil fuel emissions and the short term profit motive”.
Two pieces of depressing news from the Amazon. First, the price of gold has increased, leading to increased mining and increased deforestation. Second, Brazil is planning to invest US$120 billion in large-scale infrastructure projects in the Amazon region.
A new report by Global Witness reveals two conflicting views of REDD. First, forests are near the top of the global political agenda and REDD is an “unprecedented opportunity” to address deforestation. Second, “The potential for criminality is vast and has not been taken into account by the people who set it up,” as Interpol’s Peter Younger pointed out in 2009.
In a recent draft report, the World Bank writes that “The value of transactions in the primary CDM market declined sharply in 2009 and further in 2010 … amid chronic uncertainties about future mitigation targets and market mechanisms after 2012.”
On 21 September 2011, the World Day against Monoculture Tree Plantations the No REDD Platform released “an open letter to the international donor community to halt the diversion of forest conservation funding to dubious schemes to ‘Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks’ (REDD+).”
In a recent article in The Monthly, Guy Pearse questions why so many environmental organisations are cheering the Australian government’s draft Clean Energy Future (CEF) carbon-pricing package. This is an important article, which should encourage some serious debate.
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.
The Odzala-Kokoua National Park, in the northwest of the Republic of Congo, was declared a National Park in 1935 when the country was a colony of France. In 2001, the part was increased in size to 1,354,600 hectares. It is currently managed by the African Parks Network, which describes itself as, “The business approach to management of protected areas”.
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.
“We believe that the current situation demonstrates more than ever the need to pursue other paths beyond REDD+.” This is from this month’s issue of the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, which focusses on REDD. The first article in the Bulletin asks “Can REDD+ be ‘fixed’?”, the answer to which is somewhat given away by the next article: “The ‘sins’ of the REDD+ approach”. |
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