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Vía Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers. It is a coalition of around 150 organisations, with an estimated 300 million members. Vía Campesina recently put out a statement about COP-16 in Cancún.
On 18 August 2010, Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria, the country’s leading environment group) organised a meeting on REDD in Nigeria, together with the Rainforest Research Development and GREENCODE. The meeting produced a statement, signed by 18 NGOs. “Forests and REDD must be out of carbon markets,” is the first of a list of resolutions included in the statement.
Affiliates from the Durban Group for Climate Justice are requesting signatures on a new statement rejecting REDD schemes, ahead of the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia, 19-22 April 2010. The statement, “No REDD! No REDD Plus!” is below in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
The Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP) for the Democratic Republic of Congo is to be considered at the UN-REDD Policy Board meeting 17-19 March and at the FCPF 5th Participants Committee meeting 22-25 March. Global Witness, Greenpeace, FERN, Rainforest Foundation Norway and Rainforest Foundation UK have produced a joint statement about DR Congo’s R-PP.
In 2004, a group of people’s movements and independent organisations met in Durban in South Africa. The meeting produced the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which strongly opposes carbon trade: “We denounce the further delays in ending fossil fuel extraction that are being caused by corporate, government and United Nations’ attempts to construct a ‘carbon market’, including a market trading in ‘carbon sinks’.” During the Copenhagen meeting, the Durban Group produced a new statement opposing REDD: “No REDD! No REDD Plus!”. (Also available in Spanish, below.)
In the lead up to Copenhagen, letters, articles and reports about REDD are coming out thick and fast. Before looking at them, here’s some bad news. In 2005, a drought meant that in that year the Amazon rainforest did not sequester its usual 2 billion metric tons of CO2. It also released 3 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere from dying trees. The total 5 billion additional tons of CO2 is greater than the combined emissions of Europe and Japan. This year there is another drought in the Amazon. The photograph on the right was taken last weekend by Paulo Whitaker. It shows a fisherman paddling through dead fish that died because of lower water levels on the on the Manaquiri River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
“Honest Engagement“, a December 2008 briefing by London-based NGO Global Witness, points out the central importance of transparency and participation in REDD schemes. The briefing notes that “Almost all previous attempts to reform the forest sector have failed when these basic principles have been ignored in decision-making.” The briefing gives examples of both bad (Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and PNG) and good (Peru) practices, and explains what lessons can be learned from both the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the EU-Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade process. The briefing also sets out some “minimum requirements” for both transparency and participation. KpSHK (Consortium for the support of Community Based Forest Management) has produced the following statement emphasising the importance of respecting local communities’ rights to land use and tenure in developing REDD in Indonesia. The International Youth Delegation is a consortium of over 500 young people from over 50 countries. “We are the largest ever youth presence for a conference of this kind,” they say. “We are here in Poznan to provide the youth voice in the negotiations and to remind governments that they are bargaining with our future.” Here’s their position on REDD. |
 
 
 
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