Last year, thousands of people protested at the European Climate Exchange in London against carbon trading. The protest was part of the Camp for Climate Action that has also targeted coal mining, coal-fired power plants and the expansion of Heathrow airport. In a statement, Camp for Climate Action explained what they were doing in London: “We were there to expose carbon trading as a financial fraud which has nothing to do with climate change.”
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With apologies for stating the bleeding obvious: If REDD is going to work, it has to reduce deforestation. It also has to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights. So why is Brazil, which claims to be serious about stopping deforestation, planning to build the world’s third largest hydropower dam? The Belo Monte dam is planned to be built on the Xingu River and would result in the eviction of tens of thousands of Indigenous Peoples.
This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is holding the 13th World Forestry Congress, in Buenos Aires. With the slogan “Forests in Development”, the Congress will discuss seven themes, with titles such as “forests and biodiversity”, “producing for development”, “caring for our forests” and “people and forests in harmony”. It all sounds harmless, perhaps even progressive. It is not. As World Rainforest Movement points out, within these themes are topics that ring alarm bells such as “planted forests”, genetic modification, industrial biofuels and forests and climate change. The WFC promotes the frauds that plantations are forests and that offsets address climate change.
This month’s issue of the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin includes the following article about the problems of carbon offset tree plantations. The article gives the example of a offset plantation burning and releasing the carbon six years later. At a time when emissions need to be reduced dramatically (and not just stablised) this is a risk the world cannot afford to take. Offsets from carbon stored in existing, standing forests are even worse. Not only does the offset allow the polluter to avoid meaningful action to reduce its emissions, if the forest burns down then the net emissions are double what they would have been if there had been no trading: the emissions from the burning forest plus those from the polluting company. World Rainforest Movement released the following statement earlier this month. The statement challenges some of the assumptions underlying the current negotiations on REDD. It can be downloaded as a pdf file (1 MB) by clicking on the image below. |
 
 
 
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