REDD-Monitor

Two days ago, Greenpeace set up a Climate Defenders Camp on the Kampar Peninsula in Riau province, Sumatra. The camp will remain there for several weeks to highlight the importance of protecting forests on peat soils. The soils on the Kampar Peninsular store about 2 billion tonnes of carbon. Much of the forest around the peninsular has been destroyed to make way for oil palm plantations and industrial tree plantations for the pulp and paper industry, in part by pulp and paper company APRIL. Now APRIL claims it want to protect the Kampar Peninsular with a REDD project. This week Forest Peoples Programme and Scale Up released a report titled “Indonesia: indigenous peoples and the Kampar Peninsular“. The report finds that APRIL has ignored the views of local people on the Kampar Peninsular.

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The November 2008 report, “Cutting Corners; how the FCPF is failing forests and peoples” is now available in Spanish. The report, produced by FERN and Forest Peoples Programme looks at nine country concept notes presented to the World Bank (so called R-PINs) to get REDD money and finds that none of them has been developed in a proper consultative process, nor do they address issues as rights and governance and the whole process has been in violation of the Bank’s own procedures and guidelines.

The Spanish translation of the report can be downloaded here (pdf file 0.8 MB) and a Spanish description of the report is below. The English version of the report is available here.
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Forest Peoples Programme recently published a briefing, titled “Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and REDD: The Case of the Saramaka People v. Suriname”. The briefing asks the question: To what extent should or must REDD account for and respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights?

FPP’s conclusion is clear: “attention to indigenous peoples’ rights is not only desirable as a means to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of climate change mitigation measures, but, also, that these rights must be viewed as part of the applicable legal framework for conceiving and implementing such measures. Failure to do so undermines the rule of law and will expose REDD proponents and investors to a series of serious risks.”
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FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme have produced a “Special report on Poznan”, focussing on what happened (and what went wrong) in the negotiations on REDD. The report is reproduced in full below and can be downloaded here.
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A new report from Belgium and UK-based NGOs FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme casts a heavy new shadow over the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF). Based on a assessment of nine FCPF ‘Readiness Plan Idea Notes’, the groups conclude that the Bank has been cutting corners, failing to consult properly, and has ignored its own internal safeguard policies. In a joint press release, given in full below, Marcial Arias, from the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change also called for the “suspension” of all REDD activities and carbon market initiatives in indigenous areas until such time as the inhabitants’ rights were recognised.
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