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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.
A new video by the Global Forest Coalition and the Global Justice Ecology Project is deeply critical of REDD. Much of the criticism focusses on carbon trading, but through interviews with communities in Chiapas, Mexico, the video illustrates the perverse impacts that REDD can have on the ground.
Since 2009, villagers on Pulau Padang, an island off the east coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, have been protesting against pulp and paper company APRIL’s proposed 41,205 hectare pulpwood plantation on their island. In November 2011, in a dramatic protest aimed at illustrating how APRIL and the authorities were ignoring them, 28 of them stitched their mouths shut.
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.
In March 2011, a consulting firm called The Munden Project put out a report about forest carbon markets. The report concluded that carbon trading is “unworkable as currently constructed”.
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 UN climate talks in Durban finished late on Saturday night, almost 36 hours late. Negotiators agreed little more than to start talks next year on a new deal. These talks are supposed to end by 2015 and are to come into effect by 2020.
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”.
A recently released booklet, “No REDD Papers, Volume 1” (pdf file 2.5 MB), includes a list of 10 of the worst REDD-type projects affecting indigenous peoples. The booklet was produced by Carbon Trade Watch, Global Justice Ecology Project, Indigenous Environmental Network, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Timberwatch Coalition. |
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