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Vía Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers. It is a coalition of around 150 organisations, with an estimated 300 million members. Vía Campesina recently put out a statement about COP-16 in Cancún.
On Tuesday, 18 May 2010, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry held a meeting to discuss the country’s activities under the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. Invitations went out the previous Friday. No documents were available before the meeting. The meeting lasted less than four hours. The Ministry of Forestry calls this “Public Consultation”.
The Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP) for the Democratic Republic of Congo is to be considered at the UN-REDD Policy Board meeting 17-19 March and at the FCPF 5th Participants Committee meeting 22-25 March. Global Witness, Greenpeace, FERN, Rainforest Foundation Norway and Rainforest Foundation UK have produced a joint statement about DR Congo’s R-PP.
At a recent conference in Oxford, Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, launched a new report that warns that we could see a global increase in temperatures of 4°C as soon as 2055. Climate change could accelerate so rapidly because of feedback loops which are triggered by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and which in turn will cause new emissions. “Four degrees of warming, averaged over the globe, translates into even greater warming in many regions, along with major changes in rainfall,” Betts said. An increase of 4°C global average temperature would mean a rise of up to 15°C at the North Pole. Sea levels would rise by up to 1.4 metres. Monsoon rains could fail. At the conference, two scientists looked specifically at the implications of 4°C warming for the Amazon rainforests: Yadvinder Malhi, a Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford University; and Wolfgang Cramer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
In its most recent newsletter, Down to Earth outlines the increasing concerns about the way REDD is developing in Indonesia, focussing on the role of the World Bank and the Australian government. The World Bank is pushing ahead with its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility in Indonesia in spite of a “storm of criticism from civil society organisations at home and internationally”. Of particular concern is the fact that the Bank is going ahead without applying its own safeguard policies. DTE also criticises the Australian government’s focus on carbon offsetting in its bilateral REDD-type schemes in Indonesia.
For the past five years, the Forest Peoples Programme and other NGOs have been working to persuade the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) that funding the oil palm sector in Indonesia is problematic. Given the destruction caused by oil palm plantations, you might think this would be easy. Not so. This is the World Bank, after all. In July 2007, Forest Peoples Programme and 18 other NGOs filed a complaint with the IFC’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO) about the IFC’s funding of the palm oil producing and trading company, Wilmar. The recently released CAO report found that “Because commercial pressures dominated IFC’s assessment process, the result was that environmental and social due diligence reviews did not occur as required.”
The World Bank is positioning itself as one of the major funders of REDD. One of the Bank’s funding mechanisms is the Forest Investment Program. So far, the FIP has held three design meetings. Sena Alouka, Executive Director of Jeune Volontaires pour l’Environnement, Togo is one of the civil society representatives at the FIP meetings. He wrote the following account of the FIP so far in the Global Forest Coalition’s newsletter “Forest Cover“, July 2009.
On 8 July 2009, the Rights and Resources Initiative and Chatham House held a meeting on “Forests, Governance and Climate Change” at the Royal Society in London. Among the speakers was Marcus Colchester of the Forest Peoples Programme, who spoke about the importance of recognising rights in the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. His presentation, “Safeguarding Rights in the FCPF” is available here.
The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) has approved the readiness plans (R-Plans) for Panama and Guyana, reports the Bank Information Center. In doing so the FCPF ignored the advice and recommendations of its own Technical Advisory Panel. The approval demonstrates that the guidelines and standards developed under the FCPF are effectively meaningless. From 15th to 18th June 2009, the members of the governing body of the FCPF, the Participants Committee, met in Montreaux in Switzerland. Three R-Plans were on the agenda at this meeting, from Guyana, Panama and Indonesia. Once their R-Plans are approved, countries can tap into grants up to a maximum of US$3.6 million, including a US$200,000 grant which the Bank can provide up front to support the development of the R-Plan.
Indonesian NGOs SawitWatch and AMAN have written to the Minster of Forestry expressing their concerns about Indonesia’s draft R-Plan (Readiness Plan), due to be considered by the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility in June 2009. “We have serious concerns regarding the current draft, the gaps and omissions contained therein, and the time that will be made available to review the revised, final R-Plan,” the NGOs write. The NGOs note that the R-Plan “makes no reference to, nor contains any attempt to comply with, key requirements of the FCPF Charter.” They add that “This is perhaps not entirely surprising as the Guidelines for the Review of R-Plans similarly contains no reference to the Charter, a strange oversight given that the Charter is the overarching legal framework for all activities and operations of the FCPF.” |
 
 
 
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