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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.
Next week, Erik Solheim, Norway’s Minister of the Environment & International Development, will be visiting Guyana. A year ago, Solheim congratulated Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo when he was awarded the United Nations’ 2010 Champion of the Earth. Solheim described Jagdeo’s promotion of low carbon development as “an example for others to follow.”
In the past 13 months, the government of Papua New Guinea has issued Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs) covering an area of 2.6 million hectares of land. The area of land so far handed over as SABLs totals 5.6 million hectares. Earlier this month the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination wrote to PNG’s UN Ambassador, Robert Aisi, expressing its concern about the SABLs.
A new report published by The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) looks at free, prior and informed consent in REDD+. The report is, according to the Introduction, “targeted at people concerned with the design and implementation of REDD+ projects or programs.”
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.
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.
“Forests under Threat,” was the title of a recent article in the Phnom Penh Post. It’s a good article, but the headline could have been this year’s entry for the Basil Fawlty Award for stating the bleeding obvious. Cambodia’s forests, what’s left of them after years of destructive logging (legal and illegal), industrial agrobusiness and mining concessions, are among the most threatened on the planet.
The access road to the Amaila Falls hydropower dam in Guyana’s forest is already under construction. The project is one of those listed in President Bharrat Jagdeo’s Low Carbon Development Strategy. Potential financiers of the hydropower project include the China Development Bank, the China Railway First Group, the InterAmerican Development Bank and the Norwegian Government.
In October 2010, the Forest Peoples Programme helped to organise a four day workshop of The Forests Dialogue about Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in Indonesia. More than 80 participants took part, including indigenous peoples, local community representatives, NGOs, international financial institutions, government agencies and the private sector.
Two new reports look at REDD in Cameroon from slightly different perspectives. The first, by the Forest Peoples Programme, focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights in the REDD processes in the country. The second, by CIFOR, looks at context of REDD, including reference scenarios, mechanisms for funding, monitoring, reporting and verification and political reforms.
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.
“The world is looking for a great example somewhere,” Jan Hartke, a consultant to the Clinton Foundation wrote in June 2009. “Wonderfully enough,” he continued, “President Jagdeo’s leadership has quite honestly inspired people around the world, and you really need leadership on something like this if we are able to get progress in Copenhagen. He will be able to show how other countries can follow the emergent Guyana model.”
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.
In a post just before Christmas, I mentioned that Kevin Conrad “was busy in Cancun on Papua New Guinea’s behalf watering down safeguards in the REDD text.” A comment explained exactly how Conrad weakened the safeguards. What is perhaps even more interesting is the way Conrad dealt with a request from a Papua New Guinea NGO not to weaken the safeguards. |
    
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