Columbia University will host Bolivian leaders on Thursday, 15 December, talking
about environmental and indigenous politics. Complete info below:
Político Medioambiental y Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonia Boliviana
Fernando Vargas Mosua, Sergio Paita Siles
document.write(FullDate(15,12,2011));
Thursday, December 15th, 2011, 2:00 p.m.
Location: Room 802 of the International Affairs Building, Columbia University, 420 West 118th St, New York NY 10027 (map)
On the 15th August 2011 the “Great Indigenous March for the Defense of the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and Dignity of Indigenous People in Amazonia, Chaco and the Eastern Lowlands” left Trinidad, Bolivia. After 65 days and more than 600 kilometers a group of 2,000 indigenous men, women and children arrived to the Bolivian seat of government, La Paz. The clarity, legitimacy and legality of their demands for respect for their territories, and their rights to previous and informed consultation regarding large development projects leveraged massive support from the general population. Additionally, the peaceful movement sensibilized the citizens of La Paz and half a million people received them as heroes. One of the central debates of conservation is the impact of protected areas on local livelihoods. However, indigenous people in Bolivia have promoted a model of co management which recognizes their territorial righst and establishes a constituency for conservation and indigenous rights. This experience shows that protected areas in Bolivia are highly valued by indigenous populations that are generally excluded from the benefits of development projects, in particular large ones.
TIPNIS (Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and Protected Area) is the collective land of 64 indigenous Chimane, Yuracare and Mojeño people. Their movement looks to avoid the destruction of 611,000 hectares as a result of induced development resulting from a road project which would cut in half an area of global biodiversity importance in the montane tropical forests of Bolivia.
Fernando and Sergio will talk about the values of TIPNIS for the indigenous population and the conflict with the road proposal. They will present the development of the march and the alliances which led to it. Finally they will present the results of this mobilization and remaining challenges.
Fernando Vargas Mosua is Mojeño indigenous leader of the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and Protected Area. As a child he was only able to finish primary school but as a 38-year-old he had the opportunity to finish secondary school and then obtained a scholarship to obtain a technical diploma on Indigenous Rights and Hydrocarbons from the prestigious Social Sciences Faculty of Latin America (FLACSO). In the past decade he has supported indigenous rights and conservation from a diversity of positions ranging from technical advisor to the local municipal government, coordinator of socio-environmental mitigation programs linked to gas pipelines, implementing information programs on land titling and hydrocarbon activities in indigenous territories and implementing information programs on developing mechanisms for indigenous people in timber management projects. More recently he has been advisor to the executive direction of the Bolivian Protected Area Service (SERNAP) and since the 1st August 2011 president of the Isiboro Secure indigenous organization.
Sergio Paita Siles, lawyer from Cochabamba Bolivia with a Masters in Environmental Law and over 20 years profesional experience. He is of indigenous Quecha origin and his areas of expertise are planning and implementation of conservation and indigenous development plans including the development of community regulations. He has also worked for a decade in the Bolivian Protected Area Service (SERNAP) leading land-titling projects, reviewing relevant legislation projects, establishing conflict management platforms and developing alliances with social organizations in support of the consolidation of protected areas and indigenous territorial rights.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Seeing REDD in Bolivia
The carbon credit scammers are being help up by the Bolivians again...read below an article from Links, an Australian based think tank:
December 4, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- "Bolivia came out swinging at its first press conference of the climate change conference" on December 1, reported the Durban Mercury's Yusuf Omar on December 2. Head of the Bolivian delegation Rene Orellana criticised the Green Climate Fund "– which is meant to help developing countries adapt to climate change – and opposing the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation scheme (REDD). "The role of the forest is not for carbon stocks”, he said.
REDD is designed to use financial incentives to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from deforestation and forest degradation. The forest produces carbon credits and therefore becomes an emissions offsetting scheme.
"While most countries have been hesitant to overtly state their positions at such an early stage in the negotiations, the Bolivian delegation took a strong stance against the mainstream consensus of the talks thus far", Omar reported. “As people who live in the forest, we are not carbon stocks. We disagree with REDD because we oppose the commoditisation of the forest... It’s a complex and dangerous situation to see forests as carbon stocks. The forest provides a role as food security, a water source and biodiversity for our Indigenous population. REDD reduces the function of the forest to just one, carbon stocks. We have an alternative proposal, not based on market solutions.”
Bolivia has proposed a mitigation and adaptation plan called “sustainable forest life”. Rene Orellana outlined its three main principles: to find different sources of finance for climate change mitigation and adaptation (other than carbon credits); recognition of multiple forest functions such as its environmental, social, economic and cultural functions; and methodologies for integrated forest management.
“We have put the proposal on the table, but no attention is being paid [to it]", Orellana noted.
"In Cancun, Bolivia was the irritating thorn in the side of the US and the EU", the Mercury's reporter observed. "This year, the South American country also passed the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. 'We must have respect for the rights of Mother Earth,' said Orellana. The Law of Mother Earth defines the country’s rich mineral deposits as 'blessings'. The 11 rights for nature include the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right not to have cellular structure modified or genetically altered."
Opposition to REDD
Oppistion to the REDD scheme is widespread among the grassroots climate justice activists who have travelled to Durban to demand real action action -- not false solutions -- to combat climate change. Anti-REDD placards and demands featured strongly in the December 3 day of action march through the streets of Durban.
On December 1, a new report published today by Peruvian Indigenous organisations, AIDESEP, FENAMAD and CARE, and international human rights organisation the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), that reveals the impact that REDD projects and programs are already having on the lives of Indigenous peoples, reported the Global Justice Ecology Project. Entitled The reality of REDD+ in Peru: Between theory and practice –- Indigenous Amazonian Peoples’ analyses and alternatives, the report finds that REDD pilot projects run by some NGOs and companies are already undermining the rights of Indigenous peoples, and are leading to carbon piracy and conflicts over land and resources.
Carbon piracy
The Global Justice Ecology Project reports:
The AIDESEP-FPP report highlights how, without any form of regulation, carbon piracy is already rife in Peru. Project developers are roaming the jungle attempting to convince Indigenous peoples and local communities to enter in to REDD deals with promises of millions of dollars in return for signing away their rights to control their land and forest carbon to third parties. Many deals are being conducted using strict confidentiality clauses and with no independent oversight or legal support for vulnerable communities. Some of these peoples are not yet fully literate in Spanish, but are being asked to sign complex commercial contracts in English that are subject to English law. Many communities have already come to regret some early deals made with carbon traders and NGOs, and are now attempting to extricate themselves. One leader from the community of Bélgica in South East Peru explained:
We were presented with a trust fund in which the community is obliged to hand over the administration of communal territory and be subject to the decisions of the developer for 30 years ... this will not allow us to make decisions about our territory or plan for the future of our children.
Land grabs
Many other communities have no secure land rights, as an estimated 20 million hectares of indigenous peoples' customary territories in the Peruvian Amazon still possess no legal recognition (including those of isolated or "autonomous" indigenous peoples). This is in violation of Peru’s international obligation to recognise and secure indigenous peoples’ traditional possession of their forest lands. At the same time, hundreds of formal requests for ‘conservation concessions’ (with the intention of establishing REDD projects) have been submitted to the government by private individuals and environmental NGOs. Many of these ‘would be concessions’ directly overlie indigenous peoples’ territories still awaiting legal recognition, thereby setting the stage for a state-backed land grab.
Conrad Feather, project officer for FPP and the report’s other lead author said:
REDD is not just a policy instrument being negotiated at the UN; unregulated REDD developments are already turning Peru into a centre of international carbon piracy and the site for a potential land grab of indigenous peoples’ territories on a massive scale. Urgent measures are needed to protect the lands and livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous alternatives to REDD+
Indigenous peoples’ organisations, however, are not only ringing alarm bells, they are also proposing alternatives. They are urging the new Peruvian government to re-think the forest and climate plans developed by their predecessors and use REDD funds to secure indigenous peoples’ forest territories and support community-based solutions to tackle climate change.
The report concludes that instead of squandering the money on unproven and unstable carbon markets, more modest and selective funding could be targeted to secure the land and territorial rights of indigenous peoples and support sustainable community forest management. These community and rights-based approaches are cost-effective and proven to protect forests. Community-based alternatives will not only reduce emissions from deforestation and keep forests standing but will also lead to poverty reduction, increased livelihood security and biodiversity conservation. In the words of Alberto Pizango Chota, president of AIDESEP, “Only in this way can REDD truly become an opportunity for indigenous peoples instead of a threat.”
The reality of REDD+ in Peru: Between Theory and Practice: Indigenous Amazonian Peoples’ analyses and alternatives is available for free download at: http://www.forestpeoples.org/the-reality-of-redd-plus-in-peru-indigenous-amazonian-peoples-analyses-and-alternatives.
No REDD Papers
A book by the Indigenous Environmental Network, Carbon Trade Watch and others arguing that current proposals to address global warming through projects to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) constitute a "threat to Indigenous Peoples, local communities, forests, our climate and your future". Download at http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/no-redd-papers.
Open letter of concern to the international donor community about the diversion of existing forest conservation and development funding to REDD+
Marlon Santi from Ecuador, former president of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of the Ecuadorian Amazon) speaks at the press conference that released the following document at the UN Climate Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
We the undersigned NGOs and Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations (IPOs) want to express our profound concern about the way funds for forest conservation and restoration, and poverty eradication, are being misdirected toward REDD+ projects and policy processes (ostensibly to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to enhance forest carbon stocks).
Our organizations are working to halt the continued loss of the world’s forests, and to address the impacts this forest loss has on the rights and needs of forest-dependent peoples and on the climate. As such, it is our considered opinion that REDD+ as a mechanism suffers from a large number of inherent risks and problems which cannot be remedied.
Winnie Overbeek from World Rainforest Movement, based in Uruguay, speaks at the press conference. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
1) REDD+-type projects are already having severe negative impacts on the environment and on economically and politically marginalized groups in society, particularly Indigenous Peoples, small farmers, other forest dependent communities, and women.[i] Most of the world’s remaining forests are found in areas that are relatively unattractive for industrial agriculture, cattle ranching or other land uses and are inhabited by Indigenous Peoples, small peasant communities and other groups. Many of these groups have insecure title over their land, yet due to their social, economic and cultural circumstances, the resources found in forests play a major role in sustaining their livelihoods. A sudden increase in the economic value of forest land due to the introduction of performance payments for forest conservation will definitely lead to an increased risk of conflict over land between these communities and more economically and politically influential groups that see an opportunity to profit from these payments. For this reason, increased conflicts over land, elite resource capture, forced displacements, involuntary resettlements and human rights violations are inherent outcomes to REDD+ as a forest conservation approach.
2) Performance-based payments for forest carbon storage address only one presumed driver of forest loss: the lack of proper economic valuation of the role of forest carbon storage in overall carbon sequestration. This approach fails to address other direct and indirect drivers of forest loss. Such drivers include lack of recognition of the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and other customary caretakers of forest areas; overconsumption of and trade in forest products and products that directly or indirectly impact on forests; and perverse incentives such as subsidies for export crops and monoculture tree plantations. Other important drivers that are ignored by REDD+ include mineral, oil, gas or coal exploration and extraction activities, shrimp farming and large-scale infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams, as well as incoherent government policies in general.[ii]
3) Performance-based payments for forest carbon will by definition lead to a situation where one value of forests dominates forest policy decision-making, thus undermining what the Executive Director of the UN Forum on Forests has called a “360 degree” approach to forests, an approach in which all functions and values of forests are taken into account in a balanced manner. This deficiency will not only lead to a marginalization of the social and cultural values of forests in forest policy-making, but also to a marginalization of biodiversity values. Already, there has been a strong tendency in forest carbon offset projects to support growing monoculture plantations of rapidly growing tree species, despite their negative impacts on biodiversity.[iii] This problem is exacerbated by the flawed forest definition that has been used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, which includes monoculture tree plantations as well as “temporarily unstocked areas”, and allows the use of Genetically Engineered (GE) trees.
4) Forest carbon cannot be equated to carbon stored in fossil fuel deposits. There will always be a high risk of non-permanence in forest carbon offset projects, yet it is broadly recognized that no satisfactory solutions for this problem have been developed. .[iv] In fact, this problem cannot be resolved as non-permanence is an inherent feature of forest or tree plantation carbon.
Indigenous Environmental Network's Tom Goldtooth speaks at the conference. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
5) Another inherent problem with REDD+ is that performance-based payments will require a significant investment in monitoring, verification and reporting (MRV) systems that can claim to ensure that the forest carbon benefits of a certain initiative are real and additional. Such MRV systems could take up more than half of the overall budget of REDD+ initiatives. As a group of international market specialists have noted:
“Assuming that forest carbon requires a quantification process similar to the one used today, there is no reason to expect that the market for REDD forest carbon will behave any differently. The expertise, travel requirements and operational scale required to follow IPCC-like standards almost certainly requires a multinational organization, one that is well-capitalized and capable of managing many clients at once. Will these organizations be numerous? Unlikely. Will they be domiciled in developing countries? It seems improbable. These skills and scale will cost money to deploy, and that – far more than avarice or inefficiency – explains why REDD projects are likely to spend so much on MRV… Forest carbon is likely to behave as any commodities market would, which implies that producers will derive only marginal benefits from the market as a whole. Moreover, the unique logistical challenges posed by counting carbon to IPCC-like standards imply a very limited population of providers willing to do this for projects.”[v]
This is an unacceptable waste of money in times when resources are scarce and funding for REDD+ is likely to come from the same sources that could also finance other sorely needed real climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives. Moreover, these costs make it impossible for economically marginalized groups including Indigenous Peoples, forest dependent communities and women, as well as poor countries, to participate in an equitable manner in REDD+ projects.
6) All these problems will be exacerbated if, as is virtually certain, REDD+ is financed through carbon offset markets. This is the funding option supported by many influential countries and other major stakeholders including the World Bank; even those REDD+ initiatives currently being supported through philanthropy and public monies are generally designed to help jump-start forest carbon markets.[vi] In addition to undermining forest conservation, such markets can only make climate change worse, due to irresolvable problems relating to permanence, additionality and leakage, while continuing pollution in the North and creating toxic hotspots in vulnerable community areas already disproportionately impacted by toxic exposures and environmental injustices.
7) REDD+ is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, forests, trees and land. This approach runs counter to the cultural and traditional value systems of many Indigenous Peoples and other forest-dependent communities.[vii]
Simone Lovera, from Global Forest Coalition, presents GFC's point of view. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
There is a severe risk the market-oriented approach inherent to REDD+ will undermine value systems that are an essential element of successful community-driven conservation of forest areas, and Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and conservation practices.
In numerous places in the world, REDD+ projects and policies are being implemented in violation of the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). In Ecuador, the government continues to develop a REDD+ program despite the fact that the most representative organization of Indigenous Peoples, CONAIE, has explicitly rejected REDD+ policies in the country.[viii] As Kenya’s Mau Forest is made “ready” for a UNEP-funded REDD+ project, members of the Ogiek People continue to suffer evictions, and Ogiek activists are attacked for protesting land grabs.[ix] In Indonesia, the Mantir Adat (traditional authorities) of Kadamangan Mantangai, district of Kapuas in the province of Central Kalimantan, “reject REDD projects because it is a threat to the rights and the livelihoods of the Dayak community in the REDD project area”, and have called for the cancellation of a project that has “violated our rights and threatened the basis of survival for the Dayak community.”[x]
Many companies and organizations which have historically caused pollution and deforestation are promoting REDD+ as a profitable opportunity to “offset” their ongoing pillaging of the planet, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, Dow, Rio Tinto, Shell, Statoil, BP Amoco, American Electric Power- AEP, BHB Billiton and the International Tropical Timber Organization. In Brazil, Chevron-Texaco, infamous for causing significant forest loss in the Ecuadorian Amazon and threatening Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation, which might lead to genocide, backs a REDD+ project in the Atlantic Forest which uses uniformed armed guards called Força Verde who shoot at people and jail them if they go into the forest.[xi] In Bolivia, BP, whose oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the United States, participates in the biggest REDD+-type project in the world, which helps it to greenwash its destruction of biodiversity and communities’ livelihoods.[xii] As noted in the New York Times, “REDD could be a cash cow for forest destroyers.”[xiii]
In Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Peru and elsewhere, ’carbon cowboys‘ are running amok, conning communities into signing away their land rights with fake contracts.[xiv] In the words of one Indigenous leader, REDD+ may be “the biggest land grab of all time” [xv] REDD+ is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, forests, trees and land and corrupts everything that Indigenous Peoples hold sacred, including their traditional knowledge systems. Where REDD+ projects target the territories of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation, as in the Peruvian Amazon or the Paraguayan Chaco, they might even threaten the very survival of these Peoples[xvi].
These risks and problems have been recognized by a large number of UN organizations and other international institutions, as well as by the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change themselves.[xvii] The so-called “safeguards” adopted by a majority of Parties to the UNFCCC show that they are already concerned about the potential negative environmental and social impacts of REDD+. However, these REDD+ “safeguards” will not save forests from being converted into plantations, or Indigenous Peoples’ rights from being violated in REDD+ projects. Nor can they prevent the damage that REDD+ carbon offsets would do to genuine efforts to address climate change. Voluntary, weak and relegated to an annex, they are unsupported by any consensus to make them legally binding, let alone establish a compliance and redress mechanism. In the past, such voluntary safeguards schemes have usually proven to be ineffective, many even serving as greenwash for corporate malpractice.
For that reason, many institutions have emphasized that all land tenure conflicts have to be resolved and that rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women have to be secured, before REDD+ projects and policies are implemented.[xviii] However, this is not a realistic proposition. We strongly support any policy efforts to address land tenure conflicts and human rights violations, especially as far as the rights of Indigenous Peoples are concerned. But land tenure problems and human rights violations in forest areas are far too complicated to be fully resolved in a foreseeable timeframe, and REDD+ will not help. On the contrary, as stated above, the promise of potential performance-based payments would make it more instead of less difficult to resolve these issues, and would tend to weaken instead of strengthen communities’ struggles for their rights.
GFC's Andrei Laletin. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
Considering this long list of broadly acknowledged and inherent risks and negative impacts of REDD+, it is remarkable that an estimated 7,7 billion US dollars has already been committed to it by donor countries.[xix] Still more remarkable is the fact that foundations formerly renowned for supporting human rights and justice work are adding millions of dollars to projects and initiatives that promote REDD+.[xx] Meanwhile, there is a financial stranglehold on the often small and independent civil society and Indigenous Peoples organizations that denounce the growing list of human rights violations and environmental destruction caused by REDD+-type projects.[xxi]
Unintentionally or not, this extreme, unjust funding disparity constitutes a form of de facto financial censorship, and this means that the right to Free, Prior, Informed Consent of the custodians of the majority of the world’s forests, Indigenous Peoples, is being compromised. If there is almost no funding to support detection, documentation and rejection of the negative social and environmental impacts of REDD+ projects, to say nothing of reasoned criticism of its underlying premises, it will be impossible to expose and disseminate all of the crucial information that remote communities need in order to make decisions about REDD+, and any consent they grant will not be thoroughly and fully “informed”. It must be noted that REDD+ and its relationship to the world of carbon markets and offset regimes is a very complex area that many NGOs involved in climate policy do not fully understand. In this respect it should be taken into account that Indigenous Peoples’ fundamental right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent is a pillar of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This right is also recognized in the REDD+ safeguards adopted by the majority of Parties to the Climate Convention, and by UN-REDD and other donors. Funding the painting of a rosy REDD+ picture in which communities get paid to take care of forests and share in the costs-benefits of REDD+ programs without showing the darker realities in the background is at best negligent and at worst implicates funders in a severe violation of one of the most important rights of Indigenous Peoples. This letter is intended both as a wakeup call to funders and an invitation to bridge this funding gap.
In this respect it is also important to ensure that community capacity-building and awareness-raising projects provide fair and unbiased information about the quite desolate state of the climate negotiations, and the unwillingness of large Northern polluters to agree to legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or financial support for needed climate measures. In the eyes of many social movements, REDD+ is a paltry fig leaf in this respect. The 100 billion USD that was mentioned as possible climate finance in Copenhagen has not been concretized yet, and it is increasingly clear that some of the most important donor countries expect the bulk of this funding to come from carbon markets.[xxii] Already, carbon markets have proven to be a highly volatile and inequitable source of funding, and the current lack of political momentum for a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol will only create more market uncertainty. It is important this information is shared with communities and Indigenous Peoples when they are informed about the “opportunities” of REDD+.
Although protecting forests is a critical piece of the climate mitigation puzzle, a market-oriented and corporate-driven system of performance-based payments comes with inherent risks that are both overwhelming and unavoidable. The irony is that at the same time REDD+ is being so aggressively promoted, there are numerous examples of Indigenous Peoples’ territories and areas where forests have been conserved or restored successfully by communities without performance-based payments based on individual land titles and questionable carbon rights. Examples from countries like India, Gambia, Nepal, Brazil and Rwanda have demonstrated that recognizing community governance over forests and Indigenous Peoples’ rights over their territories provides more effective and ethically sound incentives for forest conservation and restoration, while the Ecuadorian proposal to keep fossil fuels in the ground shows the way toward a more realistic approach to mitigating climate change. In addition to such direct approaches to the fossil fuel problem, it is essential to assure the necessary space for the empowerment of communities that have successfully conserved their forests, and to address the direct and underlying drivers of deforestation such as over-consumption and over-production for and by industrialized societies.
In conclusion, we believe that REDD+ is a fundamentally flawed symptom of a deeper problem, not a step forward. It is a distraction that the planet –- our Mother Earth -– does not have time for. We should build on the many existing examples of successful forest conservation and restoration rather than investing billions of dollars in an untested, uncertain and questionable REDD+ scheme that is likely to undermine the environmental and social goals of the climate regime rather than support them.
Addressing climate change and forest loss require measures that contribute to thorough economic, ecological and social transformation. To present all sides of the REDD+ story as part of a larger effort to build the diverse and powerful global alliances that can support the transformation that our planet and peoples need, will require the full support of the charity, gift-giving and philanthropy community.
We’re up for the task.
Are you?
Some of the press conference presenters. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
Notes
[i] No REDD Platform, No REDD, A Reader (2010), http://noredd.makenoise.org.Lohmann, Larry (2008), Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold?, The Corner House, London, UK, www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/chronicle-disaster-foretold.
[ii] Moussa, J. and Verolme, H. (ed.) (1999), Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation, Case Studies, Analysis and Policy Recommendations, Biodiversity Action Network, Washington, USA.Global Forest Coalition (2010), Getting to the Roots, Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Drivers of Forest Restoration, Global Forest Coalition, Amsterdam, Netherlands.Mery, G. et. al. (2011) Forests and Society = Responding to Global Drivers of Change, International Union of Forest Research Institutions, January 2011.
[iii] See for example: Acción Ecológica and World Rainforest Movement (2005) Carbon Sink Plantations in the Ecuadorian Andes, Impacts of the Dutch FACE-Profafor Monoculture tree plantations project on indigenous and peasant communities, World Rainforest Movement, Montevideo, Uruguay.
[iv] http://unfccc.int/methods_and_science/lulucf/items/4122.php.
[v] The Munden Project (2011) REDD and Forest Carbon, Market Critique and Recommendations, the Munden Project, USA.
[vi] Swedish EU Presidency (2009) The REDD Initiative: EU Funds and Phases prepared for the Interparliamentary Conference, September 2009, the_redd_initiative -EU-Funds and Phases.pdf.
Indigenous Environmental Network, Funds and Phases: Prep Cooks, Midwives and Assembly Plants for Carbon Market REDD/REDD+, IEN.
[vii] Goldtooth, T. (2010), Cashing in on Creation: Gourmet REDD privatizes, packages, patents, sells and corrupts all that is Sacred, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[viii] http://www.movimientos.org/enlacei/show_text.php3?key=19549.
[ix] See International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (2011), Kenya’s ‘Forest People’ in Bitter Fight for their Ancestral Homes, April 15 2011, http://www.iwgia.org/news/search-news?news_id=277.
Minority Rights Group International (2011), Minority Rights Group Condemns Targeted Attacks on Ogiek Activists, March 7, 2011, www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_12373.html.
First Peoples International (2011), In new Kenya, old guard ‘land-grabbers’ attack key leaders -Ogiek land activists survive assaults, http://firstpeoplesblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ogiek-land-activists-survive-assaults.pdf.Interim Coordinating Secretariat, Office of the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government of Kenya, Rehabilitation of the Mau Forest Ecosystem, www.kws.org/export/sites/kws/info/maurestoration/maupublications/Mau_Forest_Complex_Concept_paper.pdf.Los Angeles Times (2010), Kenyan tribe slowly driven off its ancestral lands, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/world/la-fg-kenya-forest4-2010jan04.
Survival International (2010), Kenyan tribe’s houses torched in Mau Forest eviction 8 April 2010, Video at: www.survivalinternational.org/news/5722, http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/ogiek.
REDD Monitor (2009), Ogiek threatened with eviction from Mau Forest, www.redd-monitor.org/2009/11/19/ogiek-threatened-with-eviction-from-mau-forest-kenya/.
[x] REDD-Monitor (2011), Stop the Indonesia- – Australia REDD+ Project In the Customary Area of the Dayak People in Central Kalimantan, www.redd-monitor.org/2011/06/15/stop-the-indonesia-australia-redd-project-indigenous-peoples-opposition-to-the-kalimantan-forests-and-climate-partnership/#more-8887.
[xi] PBS/ Frontline World, Carbon Watch Centre for Investigative Journalism, www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/moneytree/
Mother Jones (2009), GM’s Money Trees, www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/gms-money-trees.
REDD-Monitor (2009), Injustice on the carbon frontier in Guaraqueçaba, Brazil, www.redd-monitor.org/2009/11/06/injustice-on-the-carbon-frontier-in-guaraquecaba-brazil/.
National Museum of the American Indian, Conversations with the Earth, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, http://www.americanindian.si.edu/.
[xii] Cardona, T. et. al. (2010) Extractive Industries and REDD: No REDD A Reader, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[xiii] Durban Group for climate Justice, www.durbanclimatejustice.org/press-releases/durban-statement-on-redd.html.
[xiv] Gridneff, I. (2011), Carbon conmen selling the sky, The Sydney Morning Herald, www.smh.com.au/world/carbon-conmen-selling-the-sky-20090612-c63i.html.
See video, A Breath of Fresh Air (2009), by Jeremy Dawes, http://www.redd-monitor.org/2009/09/11/more-questions-than-answers-on-carbon-trading-in-png/.
[xv] Carbon Trade Watch, http://www.carbontradewatch.org/issues/redd.html.Stevenson, M (2010), Forest plan hangs in balance at climate conference, Associated Press, http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/12/09/forest_plan_hangs_in_balance_at_climate_conference/?page=2.
[xvi] Cabello J. (2010), Enclosure of Forest and Peoples: REDD and the Inter-oceanic Highway in Peru, No REDD, a Reader, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[xvii] See for example Poverty and Environment Partnership -- ODI, IUCN, UNDP, SIDA, IIED, ADB, DFID, the French Ministry of the environment and UNEP WCMC, (2008) Making REDD work for the Poor, http://www.povertyenvironment.net/?q=filestore2/download/1852/Making-REDD-work-for-the-poor-FINAL-DRAFT-0110.pdf.
Karsenty, A (2008) The architecture of proposed REDD schemes after Bali: facing critical choices, in International Forestry Review Vol. 10(3), 2008 (pp. 443 – 457), ONF International, 2008. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), Analysis of 7 outstanding issues for the inclusion of tropical forests in the international climate governance. ONF International, Paris, France, and Peskett, L. And Harkin, Z., 2007. Risk and responsibility in Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Overseas Development Institute, London, UK.
[xviii] Poverty and Environment Partnership, 2008, Global Witness, 2008. Independent Forest Monitoring and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Global Witness: Cotula, L. and J. Mayers, 2009.Tenure in REDD: Start-point or Afterthought?, Natural Resource Issues No. 15, International Institute for Environment and Development: London, UK; Grieg-Gran, M., I. Porras, and S. Wunder, 2005. “How can Market Mechanisms for Forest Environmental Services help the Poor? Preliminary Lessons from Latin America”. World Development, 33(9): 1511-1527.
[xix] REDD+ Partnership (2011), REDD+ Partnership Voluntary REDD+ Database Updated Progress Report, 11 June 2011, page 6, table 1.
[xx] See the Climate and Land Use Alliance, a joint funding initiative of the Ford Foundation, the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and ClimateWorks: “The projected 2011 budget for the initiatives described in this strategy overview is approximately $32.5 million”, http://www.climateandlandusealliance.org.
[xxi] As little as US$500,000 may be going to these organizations for work critical of REDD+.
[xxii] See for example http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/articles/financial_operations/pdf/sec_2011_487_final_en.pdf.
December 4, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- "Bolivia came out swinging at its first press conference of the climate change conference" on December 1, reported the Durban Mercury's Yusuf Omar on December 2. Head of the Bolivian delegation Rene Orellana criticised the Green Climate Fund "– which is meant to help developing countries adapt to climate change – and opposing the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation scheme (REDD). "The role of the forest is not for carbon stocks”, he said.
REDD is designed to use financial incentives to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from deforestation and forest degradation. The forest produces carbon credits and therefore becomes an emissions offsetting scheme.
"While most countries have been hesitant to overtly state their positions at such an early stage in the negotiations, the Bolivian delegation took a strong stance against the mainstream consensus of the talks thus far", Omar reported. “As people who live in the forest, we are not carbon stocks. We disagree with REDD because we oppose the commoditisation of the forest... It’s a complex and dangerous situation to see forests as carbon stocks. The forest provides a role as food security, a water source and biodiversity for our Indigenous population. REDD reduces the function of the forest to just one, carbon stocks. We have an alternative proposal, not based on market solutions.”
Bolivia has proposed a mitigation and adaptation plan called “sustainable forest life”. Rene Orellana outlined its three main principles: to find different sources of finance for climate change mitigation and adaptation (other than carbon credits); recognition of multiple forest functions such as its environmental, social, economic and cultural functions; and methodologies for integrated forest management.
“We have put the proposal on the table, but no attention is being paid [to it]", Orellana noted.
"In Cancun, Bolivia was the irritating thorn in the side of the US and the EU", the Mercury's reporter observed. "This year, the South American country also passed the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. 'We must have respect for the rights of Mother Earth,' said Orellana. The Law of Mother Earth defines the country’s rich mineral deposits as 'blessings'. The 11 rights for nature include the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right not to have cellular structure modified or genetically altered."
Opposition to REDD
Oppistion to the REDD scheme is widespread among the grassroots climate justice activists who have travelled to Durban to demand real action action -- not false solutions -- to combat climate change. Anti-REDD placards and demands featured strongly in the December 3 day of action march through the streets of Durban.
On December 1, a new report published today by Peruvian Indigenous organisations, AIDESEP, FENAMAD and CARE, and international human rights organisation the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), that reveals the impact that REDD projects and programs are already having on the lives of Indigenous peoples, reported the Global Justice Ecology Project. Entitled The reality of REDD+ in Peru: Between theory and practice –- Indigenous Amazonian Peoples’ analyses and alternatives, the report finds that REDD pilot projects run by some NGOs and companies are already undermining the rights of Indigenous peoples, and are leading to carbon piracy and conflicts over land and resources.
Carbon piracy
The Global Justice Ecology Project reports:
The AIDESEP-FPP report highlights how, without any form of regulation, carbon piracy is already rife in Peru. Project developers are roaming the jungle attempting to convince Indigenous peoples and local communities to enter in to REDD deals with promises of millions of dollars in return for signing away their rights to control their land and forest carbon to third parties. Many deals are being conducted using strict confidentiality clauses and with no independent oversight or legal support for vulnerable communities. Some of these peoples are not yet fully literate in Spanish, but are being asked to sign complex commercial contracts in English that are subject to English law. Many communities have already come to regret some early deals made with carbon traders and NGOs, and are now attempting to extricate themselves. One leader from the community of Bélgica in South East Peru explained:
We were presented with a trust fund in which the community is obliged to hand over the administration of communal territory and be subject to the decisions of the developer for 30 years ... this will not allow us to make decisions about our territory or plan for the future of our children.
Land grabs
Many other communities have no secure land rights, as an estimated 20 million hectares of indigenous peoples' customary territories in the Peruvian Amazon still possess no legal recognition (including those of isolated or "autonomous" indigenous peoples). This is in violation of Peru’s international obligation to recognise and secure indigenous peoples’ traditional possession of their forest lands. At the same time, hundreds of formal requests for ‘conservation concessions’ (with the intention of establishing REDD projects) have been submitted to the government by private individuals and environmental NGOs. Many of these ‘would be concessions’ directly overlie indigenous peoples’ territories still awaiting legal recognition, thereby setting the stage for a state-backed land grab.
Conrad Feather, project officer for FPP and the report’s other lead author said:
REDD is not just a policy instrument being negotiated at the UN; unregulated REDD developments are already turning Peru into a centre of international carbon piracy and the site for a potential land grab of indigenous peoples’ territories on a massive scale. Urgent measures are needed to protect the lands and livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous alternatives to REDD+
Indigenous peoples’ organisations, however, are not only ringing alarm bells, they are also proposing alternatives. They are urging the new Peruvian government to re-think the forest and climate plans developed by their predecessors and use REDD funds to secure indigenous peoples’ forest territories and support community-based solutions to tackle climate change.
The report concludes that instead of squandering the money on unproven and unstable carbon markets, more modest and selective funding could be targeted to secure the land and territorial rights of indigenous peoples and support sustainable community forest management. These community and rights-based approaches are cost-effective and proven to protect forests. Community-based alternatives will not only reduce emissions from deforestation and keep forests standing but will also lead to poverty reduction, increased livelihood security and biodiversity conservation. In the words of Alberto Pizango Chota, president of AIDESEP, “Only in this way can REDD truly become an opportunity for indigenous peoples instead of a threat.”
The reality of REDD+ in Peru: Between Theory and Practice: Indigenous Amazonian Peoples’ analyses and alternatives is available for free download at: http://www.forestpeoples.org/the-reality-of-redd-plus-in-peru-indigenous-amazonian-peoples-analyses-and-alternatives.
No REDD Papers
A book by the Indigenous Environmental Network, Carbon Trade Watch and others arguing that current proposals to address global warming through projects to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) constitute a "threat to Indigenous Peoples, local communities, forests, our climate and your future". Download at http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/no-redd-papers.
Open letter of concern to the international donor community about the diversion of existing forest conservation and development funding to REDD+
Marlon Santi from Ecuador, former president of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of the Ecuadorian Amazon) speaks at the press conference that released the following document at the UN Climate Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
We the undersigned NGOs and Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations (IPOs) want to express our profound concern about the way funds for forest conservation and restoration, and poverty eradication, are being misdirected toward REDD+ projects and policy processes (ostensibly to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to enhance forest carbon stocks).
Our organizations are working to halt the continued loss of the world’s forests, and to address the impacts this forest loss has on the rights and needs of forest-dependent peoples and on the climate. As such, it is our considered opinion that REDD+ as a mechanism suffers from a large number of inherent risks and problems which cannot be remedied.
Winnie Overbeek from World Rainforest Movement, based in Uruguay, speaks at the press conference. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
1) REDD+-type projects are already having severe negative impacts on the environment and on economically and politically marginalized groups in society, particularly Indigenous Peoples, small farmers, other forest dependent communities, and women.[i] Most of the world’s remaining forests are found in areas that are relatively unattractive for industrial agriculture, cattle ranching or other land uses and are inhabited by Indigenous Peoples, small peasant communities and other groups. Many of these groups have insecure title over their land, yet due to their social, economic and cultural circumstances, the resources found in forests play a major role in sustaining their livelihoods. A sudden increase in the economic value of forest land due to the introduction of performance payments for forest conservation will definitely lead to an increased risk of conflict over land between these communities and more economically and politically influential groups that see an opportunity to profit from these payments. For this reason, increased conflicts over land, elite resource capture, forced displacements, involuntary resettlements and human rights violations are inherent outcomes to REDD+ as a forest conservation approach.
2) Performance-based payments for forest carbon storage address only one presumed driver of forest loss: the lack of proper economic valuation of the role of forest carbon storage in overall carbon sequestration. This approach fails to address other direct and indirect drivers of forest loss. Such drivers include lack of recognition of the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and other customary caretakers of forest areas; overconsumption of and trade in forest products and products that directly or indirectly impact on forests; and perverse incentives such as subsidies for export crops and monoculture tree plantations. Other important drivers that are ignored by REDD+ include mineral, oil, gas or coal exploration and extraction activities, shrimp farming and large-scale infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams, as well as incoherent government policies in general.[ii]
3) Performance-based payments for forest carbon will by definition lead to a situation where one value of forests dominates forest policy decision-making, thus undermining what the Executive Director of the UN Forum on Forests has called a “360 degree” approach to forests, an approach in which all functions and values of forests are taken into account in a balanced manner. This deficiency will not only lead to a marginalization of the social and cultural values of forests in forest policy-making, but also to a marginalization of biodiversity values. Already, there has been a strong tendency in forest carbon offset projects to support growing monoculture plantations of rapidly growing tree species, despite their negative impacts on biodiversity.[iii] This problem is exacerbated by the flawed forest definition that has been used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, which includes monoculture tree plantations as well as “temporarily unstocked areas”, and allows the use of Genetically Engineered (GE) trees.
4) Forest carbon cannot be equated to carbon stored in fossil fuel deposits. There will always be a high risk of non-permanence in forest carbon offset projects, yet it is broadly recognized that no satisfactory solutions for this problem have been developed. .[iv] In fact, this problem cannot be resolved as non-permanence is an inherent feature of forest or tree plantation carbon.
Indigenous Environmental Network's Tom Goldtooth speaks at the conference. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
5) Another inherent problem with REDD+ is that performance-based payments will require a significant investment in monitoring, verification and reporting (MRV) systems that can claim to ensure that the forest carbon benefits of a certain initiative are real and additional. Such MRV systems could take up more than half of the overall budget of REDD+ initiatives. As a group of international market specialists have noted:
“Assuming that forest carbon requires a quantification process similar to the one used today, there is no reason to expect that the market for REDD forest carbon will behave any differently. The expertise, travel requirements and operational scale required to follow IPCC-like standards almost certainly requires a multinational organization, one that is well-capitalized and capable of managing many clients at once. Will these organizations be numerous? Unlikely. Will they be domiciled in developing countries? It seems improbable. These skills and scale will cost money to deploy, and that – far more than avarice or inefficiency – explains why REDD projects are likely to spend so much on MRV… Forest carbon is likely to behave as any commodities market would, which implies that producers will derive only marginal benefits from the market as a whole. Moreover, the unique logistical challenges posed by counting carbon to IPCC-like standards imply a very limited population of providers willing to do this for projects.”[v]
This is an unacceptable waste of money in times when resources are scarce and funding for REDD+ is likely to come from the same sources that could also finance other sorely needed real climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives. Moreover, these costs make it impossible for economically marginalized groups including Indigenous Peoples, forest dependent communities and women, as well as poor countries, to participate in an equitable manner in REDD+ projects.
6) All these problems will be exacerbated if, as is virtually certain, REDD+ is financed through carbon offset markets. This is the funding option supported by many influential countries and other major stakeholders including the World Bank; even those REDD+ initiatives currently being supported through philanthropy and public monies are generally designed to help jump-start forest carbon markets.[vi] In addition to undermining forest conservation, such markets can only make climate change worse, due to irresolvable problems relating to permanence, additionality and leakage, while continuing pollution in the North and creating toxic hotspots in vulnerable community areas already disproportionately impacted by toxic exposures and environmental injustices.
7) REDD+ is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, forests, trees and land. This approach runs counter to the cultural and traditional value systems of many Indigenous Peoples and other forest-dependent communities.[vii]
Simone Lovera, from Global Forest Coalition, presents GFC's point of view. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
There is a severe risk the market-oriented approach inherent to REDD+ will undermine value systems that are an essential element of successful community-driven conservation of forest areas, and Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and conservation practices.
In numerous places in the world, REDD+ projects and policies are being implemented in violation of the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). In Ecuador, the government continues to develop a REDD+ program despite the fact that the most representative organization of Indigenous Peoples, CONAIE, has explicitly rejected REDD+ policies in the country.[viii] As Kenya’s Mau Forest is made “ready” for a UNEP-funded REDD+ project, members of the Ogiek People continue to suffer evictions, and Ogiek activists are attacked for protesting land grabs.[ix] In Indonesia, the Mantir Adat (traditional authorities) of Kadamangan Mantangai, district of Kapuas in the province of Central Kalimantan, “reject REDD projects because it is a threat to the rights and the livelihoods of the Dayak community in the REDD project area”, and have called for the cancellation of a project that has “violated our rights and threatened the basis of survival for the Dayak community.”[x]
Many companies and organizations which have historically caused pollution and deforestation are promoting REDD+ as a profitable opportunity to “offset” their ongoing pillaging of the planet, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, Dow, Rio Tinto, Shell, Statoil, BP Amoco, American Electric Power- AEP, BHB Billiton and the International Tropical Timber Organization. In Brazil, Chevron-Texaco, infamous for causing significant forest loss in the Ecuadorian Amazon and threatening Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation, which might lead to genocide, backs a REDD+ project in the Atlantic Forest which uses uniformed armed guards called Força Verde who shoot at people and jail them if they go into the forest.[xi] In Bolivia, BP, whose oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the United States, participates in the biggest REDD+-type project in the world, which helps it to greenwash its destruction of biodiversity and communities’ livelihoods.[xii] As noted in the New York Times, “REDD could be a cash cow for forest destroyers.”[xiii]
In Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Peru and elsewhere, ’carbon cowboys‘ are running amok, conning communities into signing away their land rights with fake contracts.[xiv] In the words of one Indigenous leader, REDD+ may be “the biggest land grab of all time” [xv] REDD+ is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, forests, trees and land and corrupts everything that Indigenous Peoples hold sacred, including their traditional knowledge systems. Where REDD+ projects target the territories of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation, as in the Peruvian Amazon or the Paraguayan Chaco, they might even threaten the very survival of these Peoples[xvi].
These risks and problems have been recognized by a large number of UN organizations and other international institutions, as well as by the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change themselves.[xvii] The so-called “safeguards” adopted by a majority of Parties to the UNFCCC show that they are already concerned about the potential negative environmental and social impacts of REDD+. However, these REDD+ “safeguards” will not save forests from being converted into plantations, or Indigenous Peoples’ rights from being violated in REDD+ projects. Nor can they prevent the damage that REDD+ carbon offsets would do to genuine efforts to address climate change. Voluntary, weak and relegated to an annex, they are unsupported by any consensus to make them legally binding, let alone establish a compliance and redress mechanism. In the past, such voluntary safeguards schemes have usually proven to be ineffective, many even serving as greenwash for corporate malpractice.
For that reason, many institutions have emphasized that all land tenure conflicts have to be resolved and that rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women have to be secured, before REDD+ projects and policies are implemented.[xviii] However, this is not a realistic proposition. We strongly support any policy efforts to address land tenure conflicts and human rights violations, especially as far as the rights of Indigenous Peoples are concerned. But land tenure problems and human rights violations in forest areas are far too complicated to be fully resolved in a foreseeable timeframe, and REDD+ will not help. On the contrary, as stated above, the promise of potential performance-based payments would make it more instead of less difficult to resolve these issues, and would tend to weaken instead of strengthen communities’ struggles for their rights.
GFC's Andrei Laletin. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
Considering this long list of broadly acknowledged and inherent risks and negative impacts of REDD+, it is remarkable that an estimated 7,7 billion US dollars has already been committed to it by donor countries.[xix] Still more remarkable is the fact that foundations formerly renowned for supporting human rights and justice work are adding millions of dollars to projects and initiatives that promote REDD+.[xx] Meanwhile, there is a financial stranglehold on the often small and independent civil society and Indigenous Peoples organizations that denounce the growing list of human rights violations and environmental destruction caused by REDD+-type projects.[xxi]
Unintentionally or not, this extreme, unjust funding disparity constitutes a form of de facto financial censorship, and this means that the right to Free, Prior, Informed Consent of the custodians of the majority of the world’s forests, Indigenous Peoples, is being compromised. If there is almost no funding to support detection, documentation and rejection of the negative social and environmental impacts of REDD+ projects, to say nothing of reasoned criticism of its underlying premises, it will be impossible to expose and disseminate all of the crucial information that remote communities need in order to make decisions about REDD+, and any consent they grant will not be thoroughly and fully “informed”. It must be noted that REDD+ and its relationship to the world of carbon markets and offset regimes is a very complex area that many NGOs involved in climate policy do not fully understand. In this respect it should be taken into account that Indigenous Peoples’ fundamental right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent is a pillar of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This right is also recognized in the REDD+ safeguards adopted by the majority of Parties to the Climate Convention, and by UN-REDD and other donors. Funding the painting of a rosy REDD+ picture in which communities get paid to take care of forests and share in the costs-benefits of REDD+ programs without showing the darker realities in the background is at best negligent and at worst implicates funders in a severe violation of one of the most important rights of Indigenous Peoples. This letter is intended both as a wakeup call to funders and an invitation to bridge this funding gap.
In this respect it is also important to ensure that community capacity-building and awareness-raising projects provide fair and unbiased information about the quite desolate state of the climate negotiations, and the unwillingness of large Northern polluters to agree to legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or financial support for needed climate measures. In the eyes of many social movements, REDD+ is a paltry fig leaf in this respect. The 100 billion USD that was mentioned as possible climate finance in Copenhagen has not been concretized yet, and it is increasingly clear that some of the most important donor countries expect the bulk of this funding to come from carbon markets.[xxii] Already, carbon markets have proven to be a highly volatile and inequitable source of funding, and the current lack of political momentum for a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol will only create more market uncertainty. It is important this information is shared with communities and Indigenous Peoples when they are informed about the “opportunities” of REDD+.
Although protecting forests is a critical piece of the climate mitigation puzzle, a market-oriented and corporate-driven system of performance-based payments comes with inherent risks that are both overwhelming and unavoidable. The irony is that at the same time REDD+ is being so aggressively promoted, there are numerous examples of Indigenous Peoples’ territories and areas where forests have been conserved or restored successfully by communities without performance-based payments based on individual land titles and questionable carbon rights. Examples from countries like India, Gambia, Nepal, Brazil and Rwanda have demonstrated that recognizing community governance over forests and Indigenous Peoples’ rights over their territories provides more effective and ethically sound incentives for forest conservation and restoration, while the Ecuadorian proposal to keep fossil fuels in the ground shows the way toward a more realistic approach to mitigating climate change. In addition to such direct approaches to the fossil fuel problem, it is essential to assure the necessary space for the empowerment of communities that have successfully conserved their forests, and to address the direct and underlying drivers of deforestation such as over-consumption and over-production for and by industrialized societies.
In conclusion, we believe that REDD+ is a fundamentally flawed symptom of a deeper problem, not a step forward. It is a distraction that the planet –- our Mother Earth -– does not have time for. We should build on the many existing examples of successful forest conservation and restoration rather than investing billions of dollars in an untested, uncertain and questionable REDD+ scheme that is likely to undermine the environmental and social goals of the climate regime rather than support them.
Addressing climate change and forest loss require measures that contribute to thorough economic, ecological and social transformation. To present all sides of the REDD+ story as part of a larger effort to build the diverse and powerful global alliances that can support the transformation that our planet and peoples need, will require the full support of the charity, gift-giving and philanthropy community.
We’re up for the task.
Are you?
Some of the press conference presenters. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.
Notes
[i] No REDD Platform, No REDD, A Reader (2010), http://noredd.makenoise.org.Lohmann, Larry (2008), Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold?, The Corner House, London, UK, www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/chronicle-disaster-foretold.
[ii] Moussa, J. and Verolme, H. (ed.) (1999), Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation, Case Studies, Analysis and Policy Recommendations, Biodiversity Action Network, Washington, USA.Global Forest Coalition (2010), Getting to the Roots, Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Drivers of Forest Restoration, Global Forest Coalition, Amsterdam, Netherlands.Mery, G. et. al. (2011) Forests and Society = Responding to Global Drivers of Change, International Union of Forest Research Institutions, January 2011.
[iii] See for example: Acción Ecológica and World Rainforest Movement (2005) Carbon Sink Plantations in the Ecuadorian Andes, Impacts of the Dutch FACE-Profafor Monoculture tree plantations project on indigenous and peasant communities, World Rainforest Movement, Montevideo, Uruguay.
[iv] http://unfccc.int/methods_and_science/lulucf/items/4122.php.
[v] The Munden Project (2011) REDD and Forest Carbon, Market Critique and Recommendations, the Munden Project, USA.
[vi] Swedish EU Presidency (2009) The REDD Initiative: EU Funds and Phases prepared for the Interparliamentary Conference, September 2009, the_redd_initiative -EU-Funds and Phases.pdf.
Indigenous Environmental Network, Funds and Phases: Prep Cooks, Midwives and Assembly Plants for Carbon Market REDD/REDD+, IEN.
[vii] Goldtooth, T. (2010), Cashing in on Creation: Gourmet REDD privatizes, packages, patents, sells and corrupts all that is Sacred, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[viii] http://www.movimientos.org/enlacei/show_text.php3?key=19549.
[ix] See International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (2011), Kenya’s ‘Forest People’ in Bitter Fight for their Ancestral Homes, April 15 2011, http://www.iwgia.org/news/search-news?news_id=277.
Minority Rights Group International (2011), Minority Rights Group Condemns Targeted Attacks on Ogiek Activists, March 7, 2011, www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_12373.html.
First Peoples International (2011), In new Kenya, old guard ‘land-grabbers’ attack key leaders -Ogiek land activists survive assaults, http://firstpeoplesblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ogiek-land-activists-survive-assaults.pdf.Interim Coordinating Secretariat, Office of the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government of Kenya, Rehabilitation of the Mau Forest Ecosystem, www.kws.org/export/sites/kws/info/maurestoration/maupublications/Mau_Forest_Complex_Concept_paper.pdf.Los Angeles Times (2010), Kenyan tribe slowly driven off its ancestral lands, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/world/la-fg-kenya-forest4-2010jan04.
Survival International (2010), Kenyan tribe’s houses torched in Mau Forest eviction 8 April 2010, Video at: www.survivalinternational.org/news/5722, http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/ogiek.
REDD Monitor (2009), Ogiek threatened with eviction from Mau Forest, www.redd-monitor.org/2009/11/19/ogiek-threatened-with-eviction-from-mau-forest-kenya/.
[x] REDD-Monitor (2011), Stop the Indonesia- – Australia REDD+ Project In the Customary Area of the Dayak People in Central Kalimantan, www.redd-monitor.org/2011/06/15/stop-the-indonesia-australia-redd-project-indigenous-peoples-opposition-to-the-kalimantan-forests-and-climate-partnership/#more-8887.
[xi] PBS/ Frontline World, Carbon Watch Centre for Investigative Journalism, www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/moneytree/
Mother Jones (2009), GM’s Money Trees, www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/gms-money-trees.
REDD-Monitor (2009), Injustice on the carbon frontier in Guaraqueçaba, Brazil, www.redd-monitor.org/2009/11/06/injustice-on-the-carbon-frontier-in-guaraquecaba-brazil/.
National Museum of the American Indian, Conversations with the Earth, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, http://www.americanindian.si.edu/.
[xii] Cardona, T. et. al. (2010) Extractive Industries and REDD: No REDD A Reader, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[xiii] Durban Group for climate Justice, www.durbanclimatejustice.org/press-releases/durban-statement-on-redd.html.
[xiv] Gridneff, I. (2011), Carbon conmen selling the sky, The Sydney Morning Herald, www.smh.com.au/world/carbon-conmen-selling-the-sky-20090612-c63i.html.
See video, A Breath of Fresh Air (2009), by Jeremy Dawes, http://www.redd-monitor.org/2009/09/11/more-questions-than-answers-on-carbon-trading-in-png/.
[xv] Carbon Trade Watch, http://www.carbontradewatch.org/issues/redd.html.Stevenson, M (2010), Forest plan hangs in balance at climate conference, Associated Press, http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/12/09/forest_plan_hangs_in_balance_at_climate_conference/?page=2.
[xvi] Cabello J. (2010), Enclosure of Forest and Peoples: REDD and the Inter-oceanic Highway in Peru, No REDD, a Reader, http://noredd.makenoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/REDDreaderEN.pdf.
[xvii] See for example Poverty and Environment Partnership -- ODI, IUCN, UNDP, SIDA, IIED, ADB, DFID, the French Ministry of the environment and UNEP WCMC, (2008) Making REDD work for the Poor, http://www.povertyenvironment.net/?q=filestore2/download/1852/Making-REDD-work-for-the-poor-FINAL-DRAFT-0110.pdf.
Karsenty, A (2008) The architecture of proposed REDD schemes after Bali: facing critical choices, in International Forestry Review Vol. 10(3), 2008 (pp. 443 – 457), ONF International, 2008. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), Analysis of 7 outstanding issues for the inclusion of tropical forests in the international climate governance. ONF International, Paris, France, and Peskett, L. And Harkin, Z., 2007. Risk and responsibility in Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Overseas Development Institute, London, UK.
[xviii] Poverty and Environment Partnership, 2008, Global Witness, 2008. Independent Forest Monitoring and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Global Witness: Cotula, L. and J. Mayers, 2009.Tenure in REDD: Start-point or Afterthought?, Natural Resource Issues No. 15, International Institute for Environment and Development: London, UK; Grieg-Gran, M., I. Porras, and S. Wunder, 2005. “How can Market Mechanisms for Forest Environmental Services help the Poor? Preliminary Lessons from Latin America”. World Development, 33(9): 1511-1527.
[xix] REDD+ Partnership (2011), REDD+ Partnership Voluntary REDD+ Database Updated Progress Report, 11 June 2011, page 6, table 1.
[xx] See the Climate and Land Use Alliance, a joint funding initiative of the Ford Foundation, the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and ClimateWorks: “The projected 2011 budget for the initiatives described in this strategy overview is approximately $32.5 million”, http://www.climateandlandusealliance.org.
[xxi] As little as US$500,000 may be going to these organizations for work critical of REDD+.
[xxii] See for example http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/articles/financial_operations/pdf/sec_2011_487_final_en.pdf.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Bolivian events for summer 2011 in the US
Bolivian Independence Day is just around the corner, there will be a parade on 6 August in the Tri-State Area in Jersey City, with La Fraternidad Negritos del Sagrado Corazon. It will be held at Hamilton Park, with the parade proceeding to City Hall at 280 Grove Street.
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Orange, California LAS VEGAS CARNAVAL INTERNACIONAL
PRESENTAN A SURKUY
Jueves, 14 de Julio, 2011- Las Vegas, Nevada Llajtamasis y Morenada Santiago
presentan a Surkuy
Viernes, 15 de Julio, 2011- Orange, California CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS EN NEW JERSEY
MISS BOLIVIA -TRI ESTATAL 2011
Viernes, 15 de Julio, 2011- Garfield, New Jersey COMITE CIVICO CULTURAL BOLIVIANO
VERBENA PACEÑA
Sábado, 16 de Julio, 2011- Corona, New York ASOCIACION BOLIVIANA EN UTAH
SURKUY EN CONCIERTO
Sábado, 16 de Julio, 2011- Salt Lake City, Utah ANIVERSARIO CIUDAD DE LA PAZ
TORNEO DE FUTBOL
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- North Miami, Florida SANTA CRUZ VIVE EN SF/BAY AREA GROUP
SURKUY EN CONCIERTO
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- San Francisco, California ARUMA BOLIVIA
FESTIVAL LATINOAMERICANO DE FOLKLORE
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Jersey City, New Jersey CAPORALES SAN SIMON USA
TORNEO DE BEACH VOLLEY
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Fairfax Station, Virginia CONSULADO GENERAL DE BOLIVIA
"ESCRIBEME POSTALES A COPACABANA"
Martes, 19 de Julio, 2011- Hollywood, California MORENADA CENTRAL VA- USA
GRAN KERMESSE BAILABLE
Sabado, 23 de Julio, 2011- Alexandria, Virginia FRATERNIDAD BOLIVIANA CAPORALES FLORIDA
SILPACHONEADA
Domingo, 24 de Julio, 2011- Miami, Florida BB PRODUCCIONES
LOS KJARKAS EN CONCIERTO
Viernes, 29 de Julio, 2011- Sandy, Utah MEGA CONCIERTO DE LOS KJARKAS
GRUPOS DE DANZAS FOLKLORICAS
Sábado, 30 de Julio, 2011- City of Industry, California EVENTO MUNDIAL TINKUS
Tinkus 100% Boliviano!
Viernes, 5 de Agosto, 2011- Mission Hills, California PRODUCCIONES BOLIVIA
CELEBRANDO LA INDEPENDENCIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Anaheim, CaliforniaSEGUNDO TORNEO DE FUTBOL
COPA BOLIVIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS DEL SUR DE LA FLORIDA
CENA DE GALA- ANIVERSARIO DE LA INDEPENDENCIA DE BOLIVIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida INTEGRACION CULTURAL BOLIVIANA
CELEBRANDO EL DIA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- FLORIDA CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS EN NEW JERSEY
8vo. DESFILE BOLIVIANO DE LA COSTA ESTE
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- New Jersey CENTRO CULTURAL BOLIVIANO
WAYNA PACHA
Domingo, 7 de Agosto, 2011- Santa Ana, California KALAMARKA EN GIRA U.S.A.
MES DE AGOSTO 2011
Sábado, 13 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida FRATERNIDAD DIABLADA BOLIVIA
GRAN KERMESSE
Domingo, 21 de Agosto, 2011- Orange, California CLUB CULTURAL Y DEPORTIVO BOLIVIA
GRAN PICNIC FAMILIAR
Domingo, 28 de Agosto, 2011- Chatsworth, California PREMIOS ARUMA
RESULTADOS 2011
ESCUCHA LA PREMIACION
Other events in the US include:
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Orange, California LAS VEGAS CARNAVAL INTERNACIONAL
PRESENTAN A SURKUY
Jueves, 14 de Julio, 2011- Las Vegas, Nevada Llajtamasis y Morenada Santiago
presentan a Surkuy
Viernes, 15 de Julio, 2011- Orange, California CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS EN NEW JERSEY
MISS BOLIVIA -TRI ESTATAL 2011
Viernes, 15 de Julio, 2011- Garfield, New Jersey COMITE CIVICO CULTURAL BOLIVIANO
VERBENA PACEÑA
Sábado, 16 de Julio, 2011- Corona, New York ASOCIACION BOLIVIANA EN UTAH
SURKUY EN CONCIERTO
Sábado, 16 de Julio, 2011- Salt Lake City, Utah ANIVERSARIO CIUDAD DE LA PAZ
TORNEO DE FUTBOL
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- North Miami, Florida SANTA CRUZ VIVE EN SF/BAY AREA GROUP
SURKUY EN CONCIERTO
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- San Francisco, California ARUMA BOLIVIA
FESTIVAL LATINOAMERICANO DE FOLKLORE
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Jersey City, New Jersey CAPORALES SAN SIMON USA
TORNEO DE BEACH VOLLEY
Domingo, 17 de Julio, 2011- Fairfax Station, Virginia CONSULADO GENERAL DE BOLIVIA
"ESCRIBEME POSTALES A COPACABANA"
Martes, 19 de Julio, 2011- Hollywood, California MORENADA CENTRAL VA- USA
GRAN KERMESSE BAILABLE
Sabado, 23 de Julio, 2011- Alexandria, Virginia FRATERNIDAD BOLIVIANA CAPORALES FLORIDA
SILPACHONEADA
Domingo, 24 de Julio, 2011- Miami, Florida BB PRODUCCIONES
LOS KJARKAS EN CONCIERTO
Viernes, 29 de Julio, 2011- Sandy, Utah MEGA CONCIERTO DE LOS KJARKAS
GRUPOS DE DANZAS FOLKLORICAS
Sábado, 30 de Julio, 2011- City of Industry, California EVENTO MUNDIAL TINKUS
Tinkus 100% Boliviano!
Viernes, 5 de Agosto, 2011- Mission Hills, California PRODUCCIONES BOLIVIA
CELEBRANDO LA INDEPENDENCIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Anaheim, CaliforniaSEGUNDO TORNEO DE FUTBOL
COPA BOLIVIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS DEL SUR DE LA FLORIDA
CENA DE GALA- ANIVERSARIO DE LA INDEPENDENCIA DE BOLIVIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida INTEGRACION CULTURAL BOLIVIANA
CELEBRANDO EL DIA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- FLORIDA CENTRO DE RESIDENTES BOLIVIANOS EN NEW JERSEY
8vo. DESFILE BOLIVIANO DE LA COSTA ESTE
Sábado, 6 de Agosto, 2011- New Jersey CENTRO CULTURAL BOLIVIANO
WAYNA PACHA
Domingo, 7 de Agosto, 2011- Santa Ana, California KALAMARKA EN GIRA U.S.A.
MES DE AGOSTO 2011
Sábado, 13 de Agosto, 2011- Miami, Florida FRATERNIDAD DIABLADA BOLIVIA
GRAN KERMESSE
Domingo, 21 de Agosto, 2011- Orange, California CLUB CULTURAL Y DEPORTIVO BOLIVIA
GRAN PICNIC FAMILIAR
Domingo, 28 de Agosto, 2011- Chatsworth, California PREMIOS ARUMA
RESULTADOS 2011
ESCUCHA LA PREMIACION
Sunday, July 3, 2011
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