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Global Witness recently produced a short film on industrial logging in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film raises an interesting conundrum. “The World Bank and other international donor agencies claim to support the protection of forests and the people that live in them. Yet many donors continue to support industrial logging.”
A new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency confirms that logs from Laos continue to pour over the border into Vietnam feeding a booming furniture industry there, despite a ban on exports of unprocessed timber from Laos. This illegal trade has serious implications for REDD in both countries.
That’s what a group of scientists asked in an open letter earlier this week. Except that being scientists, they called it “An Open Letter about Scientific Credibility and the Conservation of Tropical Forests.” The letter accuses Alan Oxley and his organisations of “significant distortions, misrepresentations, or misinterpretations of fact.”
On 23 August 2010, Norway’s Finance Ministry announced that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) had blacklisted the Malaysian logging giant Samling from its portfolio. The decision was made after a review by the Norwegian Council of Ethics of Samling and two Israeli companies.
In April 2010, the UN Environment Programme named six people “Champions of the Earth” – the UN’s highest award for environmental leadership. Among those recognised this year was Guyana’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo, who won the award for “Biodiversity Conservation & Ecosystem Management”.
REDD is one of the key issues under discussion at the UN Climate negotiations in Bangkok. NGOs have put out a series of new reports hoping to influence the way the discussions go. A new briefing from Global Witness, reveals why the forestry term, ‘sustainable forest management’ could spell disaster for the future of the world’s forests. The Ecosystems Climate Alliance has produced a Forest Pledge, calling for countries “to support the protection of intact natural forests as a core mechanism of the treaty”. And the Indigenous Environmental Network released a report strongly rejecting REDD.
At the start of last week’s UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary, described the negotiating text as “200 pages of incomprehensible nonsense”. By the end of the week, de Boer wasn’t much more optimistic. “We seem to be afloat on a sea of brackets,” he was reported as saying in the New York Times.
On 26 June 2009, the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and Energy and Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, visited London Zoo to launch “The Road to Copenhagen“, a report outlining the UK’s vision of the climate deal to be agreed in Copenhagen in December 2009. The report claims to be setting “ambitious” goals: “The UK believes that the over-riding goal of the Copenhagen agreement is to limit climate change to an increase in global average temperature of 2°C. This means the deal needs to establish a credible trajectory for reducing global emissions by at least 50% on 1990 levels by 2050.” But as George Monbiot points out in The Guardian, “a global cut of 50% offers only a faint-to-non-existent chance of meeting their ultimate objective: preventing more than two degrees of warming.” The 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that to have a high chance of limiting climate change to 2°C requires global cuts of 85% by 2050.
“We practice Sustainable Forest Management,” states Malaysian logging company Rimbunan Hijau on its website. We know that Rimbunan Hijau’s claims to sustainability are nonsense, of course. As if to make the point, the company illustrates its claim with a photograph of a monoculture tree plantation (right). In a 2006 report, Greenpeace describes Rimbunan Hijau’s operations as “Thirty years of forest plunder” and notes that “Rimbunan Hijau is responsible for many large scale destructive logging operations”. But the fact that even Rimbunan Hijau can claim to be carrying out sustainable forest management illustrates that the term is little more than a fig leaf for industrial logging – business as usual. Yet at the UN climate negotiations, the term “sustainable forest management” is increasingly being used in the REDD negotiations. |
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