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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Yesterday Greenpeace launched a spoof website: Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee (C.R.O.C.). C.R.O.C.’s philosophy is simple: “do something good for the environment, then do something bad to it!” The timing is perfect. The US Congressional debate on the Waxman-Markey bill is heating up. And last week, the UN suspended SGS UK, the largest auditor of clean development mechanism projects, calling into question the legitimacy of the US$100 billion carbon trading market. A Public Service Announcement from C.R.O.C. is posted below, with an email from C.R.O.C.’s Carl Cardova.

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The World Bank recently invited comments on the design of its Forest Investment Program. Rainforest Foundation UK and Greenpeace produced the following comments on the FIP design document along with suggestions for concrete changes to the text (available here, pdf file 111 kB).

Having noted the “undue urgency” with which the Bank is carrying out this process, Rainforest Foundation UK and Greenpeace focus on the following: strengthening safeguards; increasing transparency; addressing underlying causes of deforestation; including civil society and Indigenous Peoples in decision making processes, design and implementation of FIP; independent monitoring; and excluding from FIP activities that lead to deforestation and forest degradation.
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“Including forest protection measures in carbon markets would crash the price of carbon by up to 75 percent and derail global efforts to tackle global warming,” says Greenpeace in a new report released on the sidelines of the U.N. climate talks in Bonn. The report, “REDD and the effort to limit global warming to 2°C: Implications for including REDD credits in the international carbon market“, was carried out by a New Zealand-based economic modelling group called KEA3.

The report also found that including REDD credits in carbon markets would reduce investments in clean technologies worldwide, causing a “lock in” effect, leaving high-carbon technologies such as coal-fired power stations in place for many years to come. In addition, the report points out that “significant questions of permanence, leakage, and additionality have been raised about potential REDD credits; as well as the ability of countries to accurately measure, monitor, and report on such emissions.”
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