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A month ago, I wrote to the UN-REDD team in Papua New Guinea to ask, among other things, what has happened to the programme’s budget of US$2,596 million. I am still waiting for a reply. Last week, I sent a reminder, along with a new question about the PNG government’s investigation into the Office of Climate Change, the key documents of which, it seems, have disappeared.
While REDD proponents and critics often provide lists of conditions that should be met before REDD can go ahead, they rarely conclude that REDD should not go ahead if these conditions are not met. As Simone Lovera explains in “REDD Realities” many of the conditions are currently not met and cannot be met – particularly if REDD is to be funded through carbon trading. “The problem with REDD is that there are simply too many ‘ifs’ to be true,” Lovera comments.
This week, activists protested outside a Carbon Trading Summit in New York. Executives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy, American Electric Power and other corporations mingled with representatives from government, carbon credit aggregators, hedge funds and carbon traders. “The same Wall Street bankers who gave us the global climate crisis are trying to own the sky,” said Brian Tokar, director of the Institute for Social Ecology. In its press release about the event, Indigenous Environmental Network focussed on REDD, what can go wrong and what already has gone wrong. (Spanish version, below.)
“We cannot decide whether we would accept or not because we have had no information at all,” Jajang Kurniawan a farmer in West Java told film makers LifeMosaic. “The name of the programme is very foreign to us. What is this REDD? What kind of animal is it, we just don’t know.” LifeMosaic is a film-making organisation that aims “to support indigenous peoples in exercising their right to obtain information before large-scale developments occur on their territories, and to decide freely – without coercion – whether they want to accept or refuse these developments.” LifeMosaic has produced four short films bringing indigenous peoples’ voices to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15) in December 2009.
A Declaration produced during a recent meeting in Papua demands that “All forms of activities and initiatives for carbon trade and carbon compensation which do not recognize the rights of adat community in land of Papua should be stopped.” From 19-21 November 2009, more than 200 participants attended the Congress, “Save The People and Forests of Papua”, organised by the Papua NGO Cooperation Forum (Foker LSM Papua). People from seven indigenous territories in Papua, Mamberamo Tami, Saireri, Bomberay, Domberay, La Pago, Mee Pago and Anim Ha, took part, including Indigenous Peoples, Religious Leaders and CSO activists.
The indigenous Ogiek people living in the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya are threatened with eviction to make way for the government’s conservation plans. The government has already started evicting 1,690 non-Ogiek families from the Mau Forest. They have nowhere to go. The Mau Forest Secretariat says that because they have no title deeds they do not qualify for any compensation. Karanja Njoroge, a journalist with The Standard spent a day and a night with the evicted people and described it as “an experience of extreme despair and squalour of people who say they have been kicked out without being allowed to harvest their crops.”
It really hasn’t been a good few weeks for The Nature Conservancy. First Greenpeace slammed TNC’s Noel Kempff project in Bolivia. Now investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reports from Brazil’s Atlantic Coast about TNC’s Guaraqueçaba project. Schapiro’s article in Mother Jones and a series of films on Frontline/World, document the impacts of the project. “You’ll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy’s website as an example of corporate partnerships that make ‘an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity,’” Schapiro writes. “What you won’t see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.” Neither will you see any mention of the impacts on local communities on TNC’s website.
Two days ago, Greenpeace set up a Climate Defenders Camp on the Kampar Peninsula in Riau province, Sumatra. The camp will remain there for several weeks to highlight the importance of protecting forests on peat soils. The soils on the Kampar Peninsular store about 2 billion tonnes of carbon. Much of the forest around the peninsular has been destroyed to make way for oil palm plantations and industrial tree plantations for the pulp and paper industry, in part by pulp and paper company APRIL. Now APRIL claims it want to protect the Kampar Peninsular with a REDD project. This week Forest Peoples Programme and Scale Up released a report titled “Indonesia: indigenous peoples and the Kampar Peninsular“. The report finds that APRIL has ignored the views of local people on the Kampar Peninsular.
Representatives from social and environmental organisations and movements met recently for two days in Belém, Pará state, Brazil to discuss REDD. After the meeting they produced a letter calling on the Government of Brazil to reject REDD as a carbon market-based mechanism. They also call on the government to reject REDD as a way of compensating emissions from Northern countries. Signed by 49 organisations and movements, the letter rejects “the use of market-based mechanisms as tools to reduce carbon emissions based on the firm conviction that the market cannot be expected to take responsibility for life on the planet”. |
 
 
 
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