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Here, as promised on Friday, is my presentation from last month’s meeting in Bangkok about carbon markets in Southeast Asia. My presentation contrasts the way the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative and others still promote carbon trading despite the fact that the carbon markets have been in the doldrums for well over two years.
On 18 August 2010, Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria, the country’s leading environment group) organised a meeting on REDD in Nigeria, together with the Rainforest Research Development and GREENCODE. The meeting produced a statement, signed by 18 NGOs. “Forests and REDD must be out of carbon markets,” is the first of a list of resolutions included in the statement.
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”.
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.”
On Tuesday, 9 December 2008, I visited the Sheraton Hotel for an event titled “Making Forests Competitive: Practical solutions for permanence”. Organised by the legal firm Norton Rose, in association with the UNEP Finance Initiative and Carbon Markets and Investors Association, the event looked at the possibilities for the insurance industry to insure forest carbon. The principle is simple. There are lots of risks associated with storing carbon in forests. If you are buying or selling carbon you want a contract and want it to be insured. While insurance cannot prevent the carbon being released to the atmosphere, it can insure against financial loss, thus making financing forest projects more attractive to investors. The point of insurance is “de-risking investment in forests”, as Phil Cottle from ForestRE put it.
In September 2008, the United Nations launched its UN-REDD programme. According to information released by the UN “Nine countries have already expressed formal interest in receiving assistance through the UN-REDD Programme: Bolivia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tanzania, Viet Nam, and Zambia.” A “Framework Document” dated June 2008 provides more detail about the programme. The analysis presented raises several concerns with UN-REDD, but what is far more worrying is what is excluded from the Framework Document.
The latest issue of “Forest Cover“, the newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition includes several articles about REDD. Miguel Lovera, GFC chairperson suggests chanting “stop the fraud now” might be the best strategy to follow in the run-up to the Climate COP in Copenhagen in 2009: |
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