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Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, was asked in June 2011 what he thought would make the upcoming UN climate meeting in Durban a success? His response provides a fascinating glimpse into how the world is utterly failing to deal with the coming climate catastrophe.
The “ultimate goal is to jump-start a forest carbon market”, the World Bank announced in 2007, at the launch of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facitily. A “jump-start” is a way of starting a car with a flat battery. After four years of trying, perhaps it’s time to accept the fact that there’s no point jump-starting the forest carbon car when the wheels have fallen off.
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.
An anonymous article in the September 2011 UN-REDD newsletter paints a rosy picture of REDD-readiness in the Republic of Congo. An anonymous response, sent to REDD-Monitor yesterday, argues that the UN-REDD article ignores the on-going destruction of the Republic of Congo’s forests.
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, recently announced that he would allow the destruction of 7,100 hectares of the Mabira Forest to make way for sugarcane plantations. If REDD is to mean anything in Uganda, it has to provide some sort of mechanism for preventing this sort of destruction. So far, there is no sign that this is the case.
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.
A letter to the Participants Committee Members of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), signed by 32 NGOs from 11 countries, raises concern about a potential “significant weakening of safeguards” under the FCPF process. FCPF is considering allowing regional development banks and UNEP, UNDP and FAO to implement FCPF readiness grants – without applying World Bank safeguards.
The Forest Peoples Programme’s April 2011 ENewsletter starts with this sentence: “Closing the gap between international human rights law and realities on the ground is the most important challenge facing forest peoples.” This raises a question for REDD proponents: Is REDD helping to close the gap, or further widening it?
Earlier this month, Greenpeace released a report slamming McKinsey’s work on REDD – in particular the McKinsey cost curve. On 14 April 2011, David Ritter, a Biodiversity Campaigner at Greenpeace UK, gave a presentation about McKinsey’s role in promoting deforestation (pdf file 85.4 KB) at the Civil Society Policy Forum of the Spring Meeting of the World Bank in Washington DC. The Bank’s reaction was fascinating.
From 28 February to 2 March 2011, Green Concern for Development and Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria) organised a forum on Climate Change, REDD and Forest Dependent Community Rights in Cross River State, Nigeria. The forum allowed for a debate on different viewpoints on REDD – and allowed communities to respond to government officials.
Benoît Bosquet, Coordinator of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) at the World Bank, has responded to REDD-Monitor’s questions for Jürgen Blaser, a reviewer on the World Bank’s FCPF Technical Advisory Panel. Blaser had quoted REDD-Monitor in a presentation at the recent Participants Committee meeting in Vietnam, giving the impression that REDD-Monitor supported the REDD readiness process in Cambodia.
Jürgen Blaser is a reviewer on the World Bank’s FCPF Technical Advisory Panel. Last week, at a presentation during the eighth Participants Committee meeting in Vietnam, he used a quotation from an article on REDD-Monitor and presented it in a slide titled, “Overall Summary: Strengths of the RPP [Readiness Preparation Proposal].” REDD-Monitor would like to take this opportunity to put the record straight.
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.
On 1 February 2011, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, awarded two concessions covering a total area of 18,855 hectares for conversion to rubber plantations. No surprises there, then. Hun Sen’s government awards land concessions on an astonishingly regular basis. But these two concessions are perhaps a little more surprising because they are inside a national park.
The Peruvian indigenous peoples’ organisation, Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP), has produced a detailed analysis of Peru’s Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP). The R-PP was submitted to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility in February 2011. |
    
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