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Reports about REDD tend to focus on the forests. It’s unusual for a report about REDD to start with an analysis of the economic crisis in Europe and the way in which the world is changing. Yesterday, the Rights and Resources Initiative released a new report that does precisely that.
The Asia Indigenous Peoples’ Pact and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs recently produced a manual for indigenous communities about REDD.
In April 2011, the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP) published the Declaration of Iquitos which opposed the proposed forest carbon trading activities of a Hong Kong registered company called Sustainable Carbon Resources Limited.
The Dayak Benuaq Indigenous People of Muara Tae in East Kalimantan are defending their last remaining area of forest against two palm oil companies. “This is the last remaining forests that we have and the only land we have to survive. If my forests are gone, our lives will end,” says Pak Singko, a leader of the Dayak Benuaq of Muara Tae.
Consulting firm McKinsey has played a key role in pushing a version of REDD that underestimates the role of industrial logging and agriculture on forest destruction, while painting local communities as forest destroyers. McKinsey’s advice, if taken seriously, would have had serious implications for local livelihoods and would do little to reduce deforestation.
Last week REDD-Monitor posted a press release from The Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities against REDD+ and for Life demanding a moratorium on REDD. As a commentator pointed out, that was not the only press release from indigenous peoples at the UN climate negotiations in Durban.
A recent report from Northern Thailand provides a fascinating insight into the farming system of a Karen indigenous community. The report was produced by members of a Karen community in Chiang Rai province, in cooperation with the Northern Development Foundation and Oxfam Great Britain.
“The UN climate negotiation is not about saving the climate, it is about privatization of forests, agriculture and the air,” Berenice Sanchez of the Mesoamerica Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network says in a press release earlier this week.
“The Endless Algebra of Climate Markets”, is the title of a recent paper by Larry Lohmann of the UK-based NGO the Corner House. That’s him on the left holding up an “I love emissions trading”, T-shirt that Fortis Bank (now part of BNP Paribas) was handing out at a UN climate conference.
In November 2011, African Wildlife Foundation and The Nature Conservancy gave an area of land covering 6,920 hectares to the Kenyan government to create the proposed Laikipia National Park. What African Wildlife Foundation doesn’t tell us in its press release is that people were violently evicted to make way for this conservation project.
The UNFCCC has been discussing REDD in two fora at its meetings in Durban: the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA).
The Australian-funded Kalimantan Forest and Climate Partnership is in for yet more criticism after Annet Keller, a German journalist, visited the project last month. She found that villagers are sceptical about the benefits of the project and are asking why they should clear up Australia’s environmental pollution.
On 29 November 2011, REDD-Monitor posted a critique of a watershed conservation project in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya in northeast India. The project is run by Community Forestry International in association with local communities and organisations.
A watershed conservation project in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya in northeast India is set to become the country’s first REDD project. The project is discussed at length in an article by Soumitra Ghosh in the most recent issue of Mausam, an Indian climate justice publication.
The Indigenous Peoples Biocultural Climate Change Assesment met last week in Durban before the start of COP-17. The meeting issued a declaration that strongly rejects REDD as “a neo-liberal, market-driven approach that leads to the commodification of life”. |
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