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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.”
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.
The negotiations on REDD are heating up. After a week of mindnumbingly slow progress on REDD, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are now opposing the inclusion of references to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the COP14 decision text on REDD. Needless to say, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and NGO representatives are outraged at this development.
An action on Friday parodied measurements of carbon baselines and predictions of future deforestation by rounding up delegates, gazing into a crystal ball and telling them how deforestation rates would increase in the future and how much money they might make from REDD by reducing the rate of destruction.
Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway have released a new briefing sheet on rights-based climate change mitigation and adaptation. The briefing sets out a framework of actions, including strengthening rights and governance, prioritising incentives for indigenous peoples and forest communities, monitoring more than carbon and establishing international and national advisory and audit mechanisms.
We have received the following position statement from the Consortium for the support of Community Based Forest Management, which sets out some key concerns and demands concerning the development of REDD in Indonesia.
GenderCC, a global network of women and gender activists, is demanding that a comprehensive gender assessment is carried out of the potential impacts of different REDD policies on women “before the negotiations on this issue are continued within the framework of the FCCC”. They note that “The REDD discussions are already triggering elite resource appropriation,” as governments, corporations and large international conservation agencies take over large tracks of land to profit from REDD. GenderCC also opposes the potential inclusion of plantations in REDD schemes.
The Accra Caucus on Forests and Climate Change, a group of civil society and Indigenous Peoples organisations, has released the following statement. The statement sets out 10 principles and an approach to financing that Accra Caucus considers to be crucial for the REDD negotiations and subsequent agreements. The statement is available in French here, and in Spanish here.
“For many the term ‘REDD’ has become synonymous with a carbon financing approach where reducing emissions from forests by developign country actors is supported by developed country actors buying carbon credits, potentially to meet their own emissions reduction obligations.” This quotation comes from a World Resources Institute (WRI) briefing sheet titled, “Beyond Carbon Financing: The Role of Sustainable Development Policies and Measures in REDD”. The briefing sheet notes that under the Bali Action Plan, agreed in Bali in December 2007, REDD “is defined more broadly to include a range of actions by both developing and developed countries to address the drivers of deforestation”.
World Rainforest Movement released the following statement earlier this month. The statement challenges some of the assumptions underlying the current negotiations on REDD. It can be downloaded as a pdf file (1 MB) by clicking on the image below. |
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