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Yesterday was the last day of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, organised by the Bolivian government in Cochabamba. REDD, CDM, carbon trading and ecological debt were among the hottest issues discussed in Cochabamba. The final declaration on forests rejects REDD.
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.
A group of NGOs have produced a statement on the Paris-Oslo process, criticising the lack of transparency and participation. “A bad REDD system is worse than no system at all for the world’s climate, its forests and its people,” they write in the statement. “Unless underlying problems are addressed, so-called fast-start financing would be a false start for REDD.”
Last week, REDD-Monitor received a reply from Hans Brattskar, the Director of Norway’s Climate and Forest Initiative, to the post “Indigenous Peoples excluded from French-Norwegian partnership on forests“. The reply is posted below in full, as requested. Brattskar seems keen to distance Norway from the Paris meeting.
On 11 March 2010, an international conference took place in Paris, hosted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy: the International Conference on the Major Forest Basins. While 64 nations took part in the conference, Indigenous Peoples were not invited. A press release from the Forest Peoples Programme denounces the lack of transparency and participation in the discussions.
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. |
 
 
 
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