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Jürgen Blaser is a reviewer on the World Bank’s FCPF Technical Advisory Panel. Last week, at a presentation during the eighth Participants Committee meeting in Vietnam, he used a quotation from an article on REDD-Monitor and presented it in a slide titled, “Overall Summary: Strengths of the RPP [Readiness Preparation Proposal].” REDD-Monitor would like to take this opportunity to put the record straight.
Next week, Erik Solheim, Norway’s Minister of the Environment & International Development, will be visiting Guyana. A year ago, Solheim congratulated Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo when he was awarded the United Nations’ 2010 Champion of the Earth. Solheim described Jagdeo’s promotion of low carbon development as “an example for others to follow.”
A new report from FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme concludes that the safeguards put in place by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership (FCPF) are inadequate. The report looks at eight Readiness Preparation Proposals (R-PPs) submitted to the FCPF and finds that FCPF safeguards are not clear and do not conform to the World Bank’s own safeguards.
On 1 February 2011, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, awarded two concessions covering a total area of 18,855 hectares for conversion to rubber plantations. No surprises there, then. Hun Sen’s government awards land concessions on an astonishingly regular basis. But these two concessions are perhaps a little more surprising because they are inside a national park.
The Peruvian indigenous peoples’ organisation, Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP), has produced a detailed analysis of Peru’s Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP). The R-PP was submitted to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility in February 2011.
“Forests under Threat,” was the title of a recent article in the Phnom Penh Post. It’s a good article, but the headline could have been this year’s entry for the Basil Fawlty Award for stating the bleeding obvious. Cambodia’s forests, what’s left of them after years of destructive logging (legal and illegal), industrial agrobusiness and mining concessions, are among the most threatened on the planet.
Two new reports look at REDD in Cameroon from slightly different perspectives. The first, by the Forest Peoples Programme, focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights in the REDD processes in the country. The second, by CIFOR, looks at context of REDD, including reference scenarios, mechanisms for funding, monitoring, reporting and verification and political reforms.
In the past few years, the Amazon has faced two “one in a century” droughts. Last year’s drought covered a larger area of the Amazon and was even more severe than the 2005 drought. In both years huge amounts of carbon was released to the atmosphere as trees died. During these severe droughts, the Amazon turned from a carbon sink to a major carbon source.
In December 2010, the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Andrew Steer, wrote that one outcomes of Cancun was that “Forests [are] firmly established as a key for addressing climate change, and to be included in a future carbon trading system.” This comment should end any discussion about whether the World Bank considers REDD to be anything other than a carbon trading mechanism.
Shift2Neutral, a small Australia-based carbon trading company, has signed REDD-type deals in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil. The total area of these projects is several million hectares. Yet almost nothing is known about this company, and the company chairman, Brett Goldsworthy, is reluctant to answer questions.
Norway has agreed to fund the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund to the tune of US$250 million. Obviously, the Norwegian government isn’t just going to hand over the money. Under the agreement between the two countries, an independent organisation will conduct an assessment of whether the “REDD+ enablers” have been met.
A new report, “Beyond Carbon: Rights-based Safeguard Principles in Law“, edited by Bernadus Steni of the Indonesian organisation HuMa, outlines the various safeguards needed “to ensure that REDD schemes do not harm nearby communities or the forest areas they aim to conserve.”
This week, World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s Participants Committee will review Peru’s Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP). The Committee will have to take into account the comments received from the Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Forest (AIDESEP). An unofficial translation of AIDESEP’s letter is posted below, and the letter is available here in Spanish (pdf file 479 KB).
“Forest peoples’ voices are increasingly being heard, and attended to, in debates about the future of the forests,” writes Marcus Colchester, the Director of the Forest Peoples Programme in FPP’s October ENewsletter. He describes how the movement for the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples has made great progress in the past two decades.
Occasionally, REDD-Monitor posts anonymous contributions. So far, in two years of regular posting on this website, there have been four anonymous contributions (out of a total of 340 posts). Two have been about Guyana. The most recent, “REDD rubber hits the road in Guyana: skid-marks a-plenty,” seems to have ruffled quite a few feathers. |
    
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