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Keuringsdienst van Waarde is a Dutch TV consumer programme. In a recent two episode series, they looked into offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions caused by viewers of their programme for one year. Their plan was to offset the emissions by buying up a plot of Brazilian rainforest. The results are fascinating, in turns shocking and funny.
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.
The headline is the title of a new report by the Italian NGO Campagna per la riforma della Banca Mondiale (CRBM) questions the role of the World Bank in financing responses to climate change. It’s a funny question to ask, particularly given the current state of the global economy (which, just in case you’ve not noticed, hasn’t recovered from a massive meltdown in 2008 – a result of massive deception in the financial markets).
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.
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.”
In the Road Runner cartoons, the coyote chases the road runner off the cliff and keeps going until he looks down. Once he realises what’s happened, he falls. Proponents of trading the carbon stored in forests are currently running coyote fashion as fast as they can towards the edge of the cliff. A new report from the Munden Project suggests they should stop and take a look where they are heading.
A new report from FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme concludes that the safeguards put in place by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership (FCPF) are inadequate. The report looks at eight Readiness Preparation Proposals (R-PPs) submitted to the FCPF and finds that FCPF safeguards are not clear and do not conform to the World Bank’s own safeguards.
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.
Australia has committed A$30 million to the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) in Indonesia. Recently, questions from Senator Christine Milne (of the Green Party) in the Australian Parliament were (sort of) answered by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Trade.
In the past few years, the Amazon has faced two “one in a century” droughts. Last year’s drought covered a larger area of the Amazon and was even more severe than the 2005 drought. In both years huge amounts of carbon was released to the atmosphere as trees died. During these severe droughts, the Amazon turned from a carbon sink to a major carbon source.
Last week, Financial Times journalist Fiona Harvey lamented that “Without a sturdy fundraising mechanism, REDD is worthless.” Her solution is to revive carbon trading, “with a mighty effort of political will.” Her timing could hardly have been worse, coinciding as it does with the closure of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to spot trading in carbon credits after yet another fraud.
In October 2009, Oxford University launched trillionthtonne.org – a website that tracks how fast we are approaching total global emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon. The website illustrates how global carbon emissions are increasing, not decreasing. When the website was launched it predicted that the trillionth tonne would be emitted in March 2045. That date is now June 2044.
The forests in the Congo Basin, the second largest area of tropical forest in the world, are receiving increasing interest. Enormous amounts of carbon are stored in these forests, meaning that REDD proponents are increasingly looking at these forests to “offset” continued pollution in the rich countries.
In Cancun, after two weeks of tense UN climate meetings, negotiators came up with a firm agreement. They decided unequivocally to meet again next year in Durban. There are, of course, over 100 pages of mind-numbingly dull text in the Cancun Agreements, including an agreement on REDD. But many key decisions are postponed until COP-17 in Durban (or later). |
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![AIDESEP condemns and rejects carbon cowboy [CENSORED] and demands his expulsion from Peru](http://www.redd-monitor.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Screenshot-100811-082747-150x150.png "AIDESEP condemns and rejects carbon cowboy [CENSORED] and demands his expulsion from Peru")
