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“We believe that the current situation demonstrates more than ever the need to pursue other paths beyond REDD+.” This is from this month’s issue of the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, which focusses on REDD. The first article in the Bulletin asks “Can REDD+ be ‘fixed’?”, the answer to which is somewhat given away by the next article: “The ‘sins’ of the REDD+ approach”.
Forests in exhaustion is one of the more absurd proposals to emerge from the UN negotiations on climate change. The proposal came from Brazil during 2008 and it was discussed during the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol held in Poznan in December 2008. It amounts to nothing more than a subsidy for industrial tree plantations.
With apologies for the delay, here’s a posting for International Women’s Day (8 March 2011). A group of organisations has produced an invitation to sign on to a position statement on Women and REDD.
The forests in the Congo Basin, the second largest area of tropical forest in the world, are receiving increasing interest. Enormous amounts of carbon are stored in these forests, meaning that REDD proponents are increasingly looking at these forests to “offset” continued pollution in the rich countries.
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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