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“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. “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.
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. The report questions the claims made by the project developers about leakage, additionality, permanence and the ability of the project developers to measure accurately the amount of carbon stored in the forest. In the twelve years of the project, estimates of the emissions reduction have fallen almost 90%, from about 55 million to 5.8 million metric tonnes of CO2.
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. These would be “fully fungible with emissions reductions from other sectors”. This is precisely what carbon traders, the timber industry and polluting companies like AEP want: forest carbon offsets. At a side event at the UN Climate negotiations in Bonn earlier this week, TNC’s Greg Fishbein (whose job title, incidentally, is “Managing Director of Forest Carbon”) said, “We recognise that a goal like this needs to be combined with strict Annex I targets to ensure that these emissions reductions are in fact in addition to a contribution to overall emissions reductions and not just replacing emissions reductions that are taking place some place else.” But when TNC talks about “strict Annex I targets”, what do they actually mean?
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 is another nightmare vision of REDD, similar to that recently proposed by the Australian government. Another similarity with Australia is the support received from what is at first glance a surprising source: big international conservation NGOs. REDD-Monitor received the following anonymous contribution about the agreement. We reproduce it in full in the hope of generating further discussion about this liaison between conservation NGOs and polluting industry. 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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