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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 Guaraqueçaba project, run by the Nature Conservancy and the Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS) has been featured in the past on REDD-Monitor, after investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reported from the project area.
In June 2011, FERN, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation UK produced a report which counters some of the misconceptions about the suitability of carbon markets to finance forest protection.
In November 2009, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reported from Brazil’s Atlantic Coast about a project set up by the Nature Conservancy in a region called Guaraqueçaba. For his new film, “The Carbon Hunters“, Schapiro also visited another REDD-type conservation project in Brazil, the Juma Reserve project, set up with US$2 million by the Marriott hotel chain.
A six-part series in the latest issue of Christian Science Monitor investigates carbon offsets. The researchers look at several offset projects and conclude that “Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and – in many cases – not worth their price.”
Two weeks ago, journalist Johann Hari wrote a searing article in The Nation, raising important questions about conservation NGOs that accept funding from polluting corporations. Hari argues that the funding appears to have influenced the actions the NGOs take to address climate change. “Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant,” Hari writes.
“Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests – and runaway global warming?” Good question. It comes from a new article by journalist Johann Hari in The Nation. In the article, “The Wrong Kind of Green“, Hari slams the corruption of US NGOs that receive corporate funding.
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.
Greenpeace recently released a report which illustrates clearly why REDD offset projects will neither address climate change nor stop deforestation. The report, “Carbon Scam: Noel Kempff Climate Action Project and the Push for Sub-national Forest Offsets“, looks in detail at the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project in Bolivia.
We know what The Nature Conservancy thinks about forest offsets. It loves them. It loves them so much that it has got into bed with the biggest coal-burner in the US, American Electric Power. Meanwhile, TNC has developed a “global mechanism proposal”, which includes a goal of 3 billion tons of “emissions reductions from REDD” by 2020.
Last week, an organisation called Avoided Deforestation Partners launched what they blandly describe as “an agreement on policies aimed at protecting the world’s tropical forests”. Under this agreement, “companies would be eligible to receive credit for reducing climate pollution by financing conservation of tropical forests”. It is a loophole allowing industry to write a cheque and continue to pollute.
This afternoon, the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) held a side event at the climate conference in Poznan titled “How REDD policy options interact with forest measuring and monitoring”. Not surpringly, since Wood Hole is, as the name suggests, a research centre, the presentations tended to be extremely technical. Nonetheless there were brief glimpses about what this technology might mean for REDD and more importantly for the climate, for people and for forests. The outlook is not good.
The appointment of The Nature Conservancy to the governing board of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) highlights the growing distance on climate policy between a small number of mostly US-based conservationist organisations and the mainstream of environmental, indigenous and progressive green groups worldwide, and will also serve to undermine recent claims by the World Bank that the FCPF is not only being used to kick-start forest carbon markets. |
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