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On 27 May 2010, Sir Michael Somare, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, gave a speech at the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference. Much of his speech amounted to little more than a request for Norway’s money. But the speech included the outlines of Papua New Guinea’s new plans for REDD – a plan that involves doing away with any safeguards.
During the climate negotiations in Poznan, Brazil pushed for “forests in exhaustion” to be included under the Clean Development Mechanism. Currently, any plantation established on land that was forested after 1 January 1990 is excluded from the CDM. Brazil hopes to overturn this ruling by arguing that severely degraded logged-over forests store little carbon and that the only way of storing more carbon on the land is by planting trees.
On 11 December 2008, the Brazilian government organised a side event in Poznan to explain the National Plan on Climate Change and to present the Amazon Fund. The National Plan on Climate Change was launched on 1 December 2008 by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The timing was interesting. Coinciding with the first day of COP 14 in Poznan, the country with the largest area of forest in the world announced its climate change plans, which include reducing deforestation but excludes the possibility of trading the carbon stored in its forests.
On the final day in Poznan, a dispute took place between Saudi Arabia and Brazil over the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Saudi Arabia wants carbon capture and storage to be included in the CDM. Brazil wants carbon credits for “forests in exhaustion”. Saudi Arabia’s motivation is obvious. It wants to continue extracting and selling oil. But what is Brazil’s motivation? And what, exactly, are “forests in exhaustion”?
Interview with Tom B.K. Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, co-chair and co-founder of the Environmental Justice Climate Change initiative and co-chair of the Honor The Earth campaign in the U.S.
FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme have produced a “Special report on Poznan”, focussing on what happened (and what went wrong) in the negotiations on REDD. The report is reproduced in full below and can be downloaded here.
Interview with Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and Executive Director of Tebtebba.
In its statement on the final day of the COP in Poznan, the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change repeated its demand “for an immediate suspension of all REDD initiatives and carbon market schemes. Cut emissions at source ‐ No REDD.”
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz’s comments on the deletion of all references to rights from the draft SBSTA text during the negotiations in Poznan.
At the 2007 climate conference in Bali, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) organised a Forest Day. In Poznan, on 6 December 2008, CIFOR held Forest Day 2. The more than 900 participants could chose from 38 different side events and four “Cross-Cutting themes” Sub Plenary presentations, all bracketed by an Opening Plenary session and a Closing Plenary session. But this apparent diversity of views was marred by the fact that there were no Indigenous Peoples’ representatives in any of the Plenary or Sub Plenary sessions. During the Closing Plenary session, Yvo de Boer pointed out the importance of consulting Indigenous Peoples and civil society and said that “There is a little group of marginalised Indigenous Peoples wandering around who are not really making an input to the negotiations.” He might have added that they were also not making an input to Forest Day 2.
REDD was one of the main themes covered in the media reporting on the first week in Poznan. While there was much discussion about REDD in side events and outside the formal UN process with a flurry of reports produced on REDD, there was little or no progress in the negotiations themselves.
As REDD-Monitor has pointed out several times, the way forests are defined is crucial to whether REDD helps to preserve or destroy forests. The UN’s failure, in its negotiations on REDD, to differentiate between forests and industrial tree plantations, creates the risk that governments and companies could replace forests with oil palm, eucalyptus or rubber plantations and claim carbon credits under REDD schemes. Clearly, this is deeply unsatisfactory to anyone who cares about people and forests. Yet the UN continues to define plantations as forests. On 11 December 2008, delegates entering the Poznan climate change conference saw a “Plantations are not forests” banner on the edge of a protest in favour of womens’ rights. Protesters chanted “Plantations, down! down! Monocultures, down! down! Women’s rights, up! up!”
On 10 December 2008, the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change attempted to read out the following statement at the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice’s final session in Poznan. The chair closed the meeting before the statement could be read out. A video of this is available here.
Sarwadi Sukiman, an Indonesian farmer, tells the story of what happened to the forests and farmland of his village, Tanjung Lebar, in Sumatra, Indonesia. First the forests were logged to produce timber and paper. When the loggers had destroyed the forest they left and the villagers reclaimed their land. They recently lost their land to a conservation project, the Harapan Rainforest project, run by Yayasan Burung Indonesia, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and BirdLife International. John Lanchbery, head of Climate Change Policy with the RSPB, is in Poznan. At a side event last week he emphasised the importance of involving local people, “otherwise it just won’t work”. REDD-Monitor looks forward to Lanchbery’s response to Sarwadi’s testimony.
The Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) held its final session for COP14 yesterday. Three interventions were prepared: from the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change; the International Youth Delegation; and the Global Forest Coalition. The first two were read out during the SBSTA. “The last words that SBSTA heard for 2008 were ours on REDD,” says Josh Wyndham-Kidd from the International Youth Delegation. “There were a few moments of stunned silence following the statement.” |
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