Jul 20, 2016
By Juan Carlos Rodriguez
Law360, New York (July 19, 2016, 9:53 PM ET) California air regulators said last week that the Golden State’s carbon trading program won’t allow companies to buy credits generated from the preservation of Mexican and Brazilian rain forests to offset their emissions, but experts say that idea may end up being part of carbon trading schemes in the future.
Last week, the California Air Resources Board air regulators unveiled a preliminary draft of proposed revisions to the state’s cap and trade program — in which CARB auctions off emissions allowances to refiners, utilities and other greenhouse gas polluters as the emissions cap gradually declines — that would extend the carbon emissions reduction scheme from 2020 to 2030 and envisions steeper annual emissions cuts. A plan to allow the sale of carbon credits earned by foreign governments was not included in the draft, highlighting the difficulties of getting the unorthodox concept off the ground.
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, or REDD, programs would work by allowing sub-national entities like Acre state in Brazil or Chiapas state in Mexico to generate carbon offsets by instituting programs that are subject to verification to save their tropical rain forests. The offsets could then be introduced into a cap and trade arrangement like the one in California.
Opponents of the idea include environmental justice and international human rights groups, as well as some environmental groups, that have argued that REDD programs can harm forest communities.
“The communities themselves don’t necessarily always distinguish between a REDD project or one that comes to cut the timber. At the end of the day, people can lose access,” said Gary Hughes, Friends of the Earth’s California advocacy campaigner.
He also said REDD, while potentially saving tropical forests, can simply allow companies in California to continue to pollute as they have in the past, meaning the communities around facilities in the state would see no improvement in their environment as a result of the program.
But Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank dedicated to reducing global poverty and inequality, said while CARB would certainly consider those concerns, the most likely reason a REDD program was left out of the draft proposal was that the carbon trade program itself is in need of rescuing. She said the California Legislature is currently deciding whether to authorize the 10year extension of the program.
“My understanding was that the goal this time around was to get the whole capandtrade system extended past 2020 to get past the Legislature. If there were bells and whistles that could be taken off to facilitate that in this round, that’s what CARB wanted to do,” she said. “But REDD is by no means dead. This is just a delay.”
The draft proposal said linkage with a state of the art, jurisdictional sector based offset program can provide “significant benefits” to California’s cap and trade
program by assuring an adequate supply of compliance offsets to keep the cost of compliance within reasonable bounds.
Linkage would also support California’s broad climate goals, as well as global biodiversity and tropical forest communities, CARB said. The agency said it will begin a new series of public meetings about REDD this fall.
Kevin Poloncarz, a partner at Paul Hastings LLP, said CARB has been working on a REDD program for years and that there is a lot of momentum to do it.
“I didn’t get a sense that this was slamming on the brakes,” he said of the draft proposal. Instead, he said the delay suggests California wants more time to coordinate with the governors of Quebec, which is already linked to California’s system, on what an appropriate sector based linkage would look like.
Another reason CARB may not want to start up a REDD program right away is that it may not be economically necessary right now, said Michael Wara, a professor at Stanford Law School. He noted that recent sales of allowances, or permits to pollute, have actually failed to generate healthy market activity.
“CARB really wants to create confidence in the market that there’s going to be a use for these allowances after 2020 as the caps fall. Right now, there’s real uncertainty about whether the program’s even going to exist after 2020. That question mark has reduced demand for allowances,” Wara said.
Offsets, like the ones that would come from a sector-based program in Acre or Chiapas to reduce emissions from deforestation, are like additional supply, he said, so CARB is now trying to create a belief among market participants that there’s going to be additional demand.
“They don’t want to create the belief that there’s going to be additional supply because that might reduce how many allowances they sell, and they desperately want to sell their allowances right now to restore the confidence — especially in the California Legislature — in the program,” he said.
He said it’s more likely that a REDD program will take off when CARB and the market have a firmer belief there are too many allowances and not enough emissions.
“They’ve been working on REDD for a really long time, and I think that they’re committed to it, but they’re fighting for their life right now,” Wara said. “So this has to be on the back burner because it’s a distraction from whether there’s a cap and trade program at all.”
http://www.law360.com/articles/819284/calif-carbon-plan-puts-rainforest-credits-down-not-out
Jul 19, 2016
The United Nations’ disastrous REDD+ offset program has hit the ground internationally. Its potential adoption by the California Air Resources Board will only make things worse.
Luan F. Makes Marks, Ph.D.
The Basics
Some state, national, and international governments, such as the State of California, limit pollutants and/or greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Some governments also sell or allocate permits or allowances to emitting companies to help in compliance with those limits.
Permits allow an emitter who holds them permission to discharge a specific quantity of emissions within a period of time. These emissions permits can be bought and sold. In addition, offset projects that provide quantifiable emissions reductions may be developed for credits to offset emissions. These offset credits can also be bought and sold. The buying and selling of permits and offset credits are part of international emissions trade in these and similar commodities.
The State of California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) has developed various programs, called offset project protocols, to govern certain areas of potential GHG emissions reductions and the development of emissions offset projects. One particular area for offset projects is forestry, as living forests store carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and their destruction releases it into the atmosphere.
The United Nations has also developed a forestry carbon offset program, REDD, now REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). CARB has considered the adoption of REDD+ carbon offset project credits for approval under California’s cap-and-trade program, allowing international forestry carbon offsets to be used and traded by California emitters in compensation for their emissions.
The Seeds of Emissions Trade and Ecosystem Commodities
The vaunted promises of environmental salvation and new profits from the development and trading of offset permits and credits has spurred on, and been spurred on by, an immense new industry of insiders, corporate investors, environmental nonprofits, national and international government officials, and the emitting industries themselves.
Despite the financial softness of the carbon markets, carbon offsets, whether voluntary and mandatory, have become trading commodities that elicit huge investments, with the potential for gains and losses internationally. Its drivers are concerns for a changing climate as well as development opportunities and market returns. Now the influential CARB is set to adopt REDD+, which will further spread its flawed protocols.
The idea of emissions trading as a market-based incentive to control pollution first sprouted from the seeds of speculative theories, in 1966 by American economist Thomas D. Crocker and in 1968 by the Canadian economist John H. Dales.[1] Over the next five decades, these theories would be cultivated by Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown.
In the decades since then, emissions trading has grown into a pollution-control mechanism in the United States. Twenty years ago, carbon emissions trading was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol. REDD and its rebrand, REDD+, were initially cultivated at the international level through the United Nations as a market-driven mechanism to preserve, protect, and enhance the capacity of forests to sequester carbon. In actuality, “[t]he offset mechanism allowed an industrialized country or company in these countries to emit more CO2 than the Kyoto Protocol permitted.”[2]
Global carbon trading is slated to become a massive commodity market. A particular focus has been on the remaining tropical rainforests. But the burgeoning financialization of nature has expanded to include derivatives and futures of the entire commodity supply chain of ecosystem services. The Green Economy claims to salvage both the planet and capitalism’s claims of dwindling supplies of investments: “The [United Nations Environmental Programme], the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Bank and others . . . say that ‘green growth’ will address these multiple crises in one sweep.’”[3]
But the air we breathe, the water we drink, could have a value, be commodified, sold, and traded, while greenhouse gas emissions, development, and resource extraction continue relatively unabated: “Ecosystem service markets offer this permission [to pollute and destroy] in the form of offset credits.’”[4] This market may come to control the fabric of our lives at a profound cost.
REDD+ Victims
As the UN’s REDD/REDD+ became global policy, it was widely reported that the development and trading of international forest offset projects are infested with problems, including: no real progress in carbon sequestration; amplified resource extraction, development, and pollution; rampant carbon speculation; pervasive land grabs; endemic corruption; and extreme violation of rights, including forced removal of indigenous populations from their traditional lands, the reduction of their territories and territorial tenures, and violence.
REDD+’s victims have ranged from individuals to many governments and industries, all investing heavily in the idea that forest offset projects will somehow buffer lifestyle transgressions and fix the Earth’s atmosphere. But its biggest victims are the indigenous peoples who are traditional caretakers of the many forested lands now under siege. They are losing their homes, land rights, livelihoods, and lives. Their land tenure and rights are eroding whether through legislation, court decisions, government treaties, contracts and leases for resource extraction, seizures, and illegal occupancies, because those lands now offer speculative value as eco-resources. The promise of immense capital put into forest carbon project development has not trickled down significantly to indigenous peoples.
This is massive neocolonialization on the suddenly valued carbon frontier.
Other new epithets have grown up alongside carbon offset and REDD+ developments to articulate their negative reputations.
Carbon cowboy denotes a breed of con-artist speculator descending on indigenous peoples to quickly close fraudulent deals for land rights in indigenous communities.
Carbon violence was coined “to give context to the diversity of structural, social, political, economic, and cultural harms connected with the way carbon markets have evolved, and explores green resources’ role in the carbon violence experienced by the villagers and the local ecosystems they inhabit.”[5]
Carbon chaos aptly describes the worldwide disruptions of lives, communities, lands, governments, industries, and the markets through carbon trading and offset projects.
Nothing to Count On
Despite the many substantive critiques against emissions trading, carbon offset projects, REDD+, and the financialization of nature, the industry has continued unchecked, impelled by monied interests. REDD+ and the rest have become firmly entrenched for speculative profit, even though they are touted as a solution to climate change. The “solution” is false and empty; emissions trading and offsets fail to address the stated problem of carbon build-up in the planet’s atmosphere, while at the same time causing substantial harms.
Major criticisms are that such trading is fundamentally fraudulent, as a free-market mechanism developed under corporate, neoconservative/neoliberal agendas to serve a for-profit speculation in developing and non-developed communities at the expense of the environment. Emissions trading theory has been implemented without solid proof of efficacy, and it is currently failing to produce expected results. It is not leading to conservation of resources, but to extensive development, resource extraction, and concentration of wealth.
Global emissions trading and projects may represent environmental strangulation for the Earth, as more sustainable and effective solutions have been ignored and dismissed. Caught up by that web, indigenous peoples and environmentalist allies have risen in resistance internationally to mount their own critiques of social and environmental injustice.
Economist Thomas D. Crocker, who originally developed the theory of tradable emissions permits as a University of Wisconsin graduate student in 1966, indicated his own doubts in 2009 as retired academic, “‘I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,’ . . . He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem”:[6]
Mr. Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power” . . .
The other problem . . . is that quantifying the economic damage of climate change—from floods to failing crops—is fraught with uncertainty.[7]
The other originator of emissions trading, John Dales, “was also a skeptic of using the idea to tame global warming.” “‘It isn’t a cure-all for everything . . . There are lots of situations that don’t apply.’”[8]
Carbon Emissions Accounting: Flawed and Fraud
Carbon emissions, carbon offset projects, REDD+ and the resulting schemes to commodify nature defy accurate accounting. There are inherent problems with attempting to measure and decide the many intangible facets of such enterprises, including the costs and damages of climate change and carbon offset project baselines, additionality, and leakage.
The difficulty of measuring the entire range, from atmospheric CO2 levels to emissions trading to financialization of nature, leads one to conclude that the project is like measuring the proverbial emperor’s new clothes.
Yet flawed carbon accounting has become institutionalized, per the following from wikipedia.org:[9]
[E]xamples for products based upon forms of carbon accounting can be found in national inventories, corporate environmental reports or carbon footprint calculators. Likening sustainability measurement, as an instance of ecological modernisation discourses and policy, carbon accounting is hoped to provide a factual ground for carbon-related decision-making. However, social scientific studies of accounting challenge this hope,[10] pointing to the socially constructed character of carbon conversion factors[11] or of the accountants’ work practice[12] which cannot implement abstract accounting schemes into reality[13]. . . The trustworthiness of accounts of carbon emissions can easily be contested.[14]
Ingmar Lippert, in his Enacting Environments, cited above, “establishes how carbon emission facts are produced and co-configure climate change realities.” Such facts are constructed “to stage the company, and in consequence capitalism, as in control over its relations to an antecedent environment.”[15]
Developing greenhouse gases and other ecosystem metrics and accounting has been deemed by many critics as an impossible task. Consider these further expert evaluations of the system:
A case in point is the continuing attempt . . . in various countries to tackle the riddle of “additionality” in offset markets (that is, how to prove that a project goes beyond business as usual), to which, as carbon trader Mark Trexler noted years ago, there is no correct answer. Constantly manufacturing and reaffirming the notion that offset projects’ shortcomings are due either to imperfect methodology or incorrect implementation, ten years of regulatory effort have only further skewed the political economy of the offset markets . . . in favour of corporations locked into fossil fuel use, since it is only they who have the resources necessary for navigating the regulatory mazes that the additionality debate has made ever more intricate. Ironically, of course, this is an effect which, logically speaking, should itself enter into calculations of carbon saved and lost . . . The recent establishment of a private carbon rating agency, as well as proposals for “programmatic” and “sectoral” carbon credits, which would help sidestep impossible “additionality” requirements, reflect a continuing commitment to “better calculation” in the face of irresolvable tensions between the needs for high-volume, predictable carbon credit output and for market credibility;[16]
And:
The calculation of the number of offsets generated by a project is inherently problematic. The key difficulty lies in the need to compare the projects’ actual emissions to a counterfactual scenario reflecting another reality, one in which the activity is not implemented as an offset project. This scenario is referred to as the “baseline” scenario, and the number of generated credits is equal to the difference between emissions in the baseline scenario and emissions resulting from the project. There is no fail-safe way to divine what the baseline scenario would be. Various methodologies, protocols, and rules-of-thumb can be devised but ultimately the scenario cannot be known with certainty;[17]
And:
[T]he damage caused to the global environment by each incremental emission of CO2 is very small and perhaps unknowable, making it very hard to put an accurate price on emissions.[18]
Carbon emissions accounting fraud has now entered the language of the accounting field.[19] It is an acknowledged problem that carbon fraud exists in carbon accounting. Even saying that there is an accurate and overarching carbon accounting standard for the industry is so untrue that it could be considered a form of fraud.
Analyst Chris Lang indicates the conflicts of interest and potential for fraud that are inherent in the industry in establishing carbon project metrics:
Clearly, it is in the REDD project developers’ interest to have a baseline that predicts a high rate of deforestation in the project area. The higher the rate of deforestation in the baseline scenario the more carbon credits will be generated. And the less the project will have to reduce deforestation.
Of course REDD project developers can’t pick their own baselines and hope that the rest of the world believes they are not just making things up. The methodology proposed by the project developers has to be validated and project has to be audited. This is where voluntary certification schemes come in, like the Verified Carbon Standard, Plan Vivo, CarbonFix Standard, and so on.
But there’s a catch. The voluntary certification schemes make their money from generating carbon credits. The more carbon credits generated, the more money they make.
And the validators and auditors that are accredited by the certification scheme are paid directly by the project developers. In order not to lose future work opportunities, auditors are unlikely to be too picky about approving their clients’ methodologies.
This is a blatant conflict of interest at the heart of the REDD mechanism.[20]
Lang also addresses the fraudulent natures of baseline metrics:
Baselines allow project developers to put an exact figure on the number of tonnes of carbon that have not been emitted as a result of their project. But this number is based on a fiction.
There is no way of testing whether a baseline scenario is true or not, because it is something that might have happened had the REDD project not gone ahead. As the authors conclude, “the baseline scenarios in REDD+ projects amount to untestable guesses”. . .
Fraud would be a better way of describing what REDD project developers are doing when they set bogus baselines. The voluntary certification systems, such as [Verified Carbon Standard], are complicit in this fraud.[21]
Seyller et als., in their study of REDD+ projects, concluded that these projects “resemble ‘virtual emission reduction machines’ designed to inflate the production of carbon credits and that they do not structurally change the local economy characteristics which drive deforestation.”[22]
The Gaming of Carbon Accounting
Despite negative critiques, individuals and organizations have continued to influence the establishment of standards for carbon accounting. Many have an inside track and may stand to profit or lose from future resolution of the current metric challenges. Indeed, we all may stand to profit or lose from it, since it is currently deemed pivotal to the issue of climate change.
It is not a simple or easy issue to resolve: “Accountancy can be a way of making things appear uncontroversial and non-political, but the technical debates about accountancy rules and standards sometimes involve intense power struggles.”[23]
Multiple, diverse offset standards (or protocols) now exist internationally:
Offset protocols for a wide variety of project types abound. These protocols have been developed for offsets in voluntary carbon markets and the few mandatory carbon markets that exist, including under the Kyoto Protocol/United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Protocols developed for use in the UNFCCC regime are by far the most numerous. [24]
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has established protocols and approved other organizations’ standards to govern development and operation of CARB offset projects.
The REDD+ program has been under consideration by CARB for a number of years, with opposition reported from environmental and social justice organizations, including CARB’s own Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC). EJAC’s initial draft recommendation was to not include REDD in CARB’s Scoping Plan update.[25]
Their final recommendation was:
ARB should minimize carbon offsets, and prevent use of international forestry offsets such as REDD, that could diminish direct emission reductions in disadvantaged communities in California and compromise [greenhouse gas (GHG)] reductions in-state. Any offsets used need to have accompanying data that verifies GHG reduction and that it is additional to business as usual.[26]
The EJAC’s request for data verifying greenhouse gas reduction and additionality is referential to some of the same, extant carbon accounting problems that remain unaddressed.
Next Nexus for Metrics
There has been a drive within the carbon industry since 2009 to provide a global, standardized carbon accounting system, based upon satellite monitoring and shared software. This drive has been spearheaded by Dr. D. James Baker, Director of the Forest and Land-Use Measurement Program of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Since at least 2007, Baker has held multiple titles in various metamorphoses of the Clinton Foundation’s programs, including the Global Carbon Measurement Program, Clinton Climate Initiative—Carbon and Poverty Reduction Program, Carbon Measurement Collaborative, and the Clinton Climate Institute.
Among his other achievements, Baker was appointed Under Secretary of Commerce and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1993 by Bill Clinton, serving in that capacity until 2001: “as the longest-serving official in that position, he significantly influenced U. S. climate and ocean policy.”[27] During his term of office, “he guided the completion of the modernization of the National Weather Service, initiated new climate forecasting services, and merged civil and military environmental satellite systems.”[28]
Baker was pivotal in the rise of global warming and climate change discourse. In 2013, he was a member of the Technical Advisory Panel for the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.[29] He has been a long-time advisor to Vice-President Al Gore.[30]
In the course of his career, Dr. Baker has lamented the difficulties of accurate metrics and pointed to the need to maintain
long term observations for the understanding and prediction of ocean and climate change. These observations have to be globally distributed and carried out over long periods of time. But a means of obtaining these observations . . . is not in place today. There is no global system of routinely funded long-term, high quality measurements to provide the necessary understanding of climate in general . . . Long term biological measurements are in an even more limited state of development.[31]
He has continued his interest in promoting observation and measurement through the Clinton Climate Initiative, which “helps countries comply with international measurement and reporting verification (MRV) standards, building a credible database on which to advance international agreements on deforestation.”[32]
As of January 2016, the “Clinton Climate Initiative [is] leading institutional arrangements”[33] in the anticipated development of second generation carbon estimating and reporting tools,” to be delivered and governed through a dedicated foundation, Moja Global:
A new second-generation integrating framework is under development that can greatly reduce duplication of future efforts by providing a generic platform that works with existing or new modules developed to address national circumstances. [34]
It remains to be seen what will develop out of the Moja Global foundation platform framework. After seven years of attempts to resolve accounting issues, the next generation has not yet been delivered.
Analysis
The promotion of these new measurement tools cannot be allowed to eclipse the issues that have haunted REDD+ and other emissions offset-project developments. The very basis of emissions trading projects—measurement—is error prone no matter how the accounting system performs. There are irresolvable structural issues such as additionality, leakage, permanence, enforceability, verifiability, and validation. Systemic fraud and carbon violence against indigenous peoples will not go away under the REDD+ and other trading regimes.
Fraud also exists in the underlying premise that the free market can best resolve climate change crises, even those that were caused by the free market. It is extant in the basic premise that financial incentives will stop pollution better than consumer reductions, legislative restrictions, and tax increases. It is found when initial logging of forests to lower initial project baselines is preferable to leaving forests ecosystems and their indigenous caretakers alone and fossil fuels in the ground. It continues in the premise that the global market needs emissions trading and the financialization of nature as investment commodities to prevent economic collapse.
Emissions metrics and the emissions trading markets are fatally, systemically flawed and fraudulent, in theory and in practice. The international REDD+ and other offset projects are creating carbon violence and chaos. It is time for the California Air Resources Board to weed out REDD+ and carbon offsets permanently and to rectify the damages of carbon trading.
[1] www.britannica.com/technology/emissions-trading; www.wsj.com/articles/SB125011380094927137.
[2] www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Financialization-of-Nature-brochure-English.pdf, 5.
[3] Ibid., 2.
[4] Ibid., 6.
[5] Frédéric Mousseau and Shannon Biggs, “The Darker Side of Green: Plantation Forestry and Carbon Violence in Uganda: The Case of Green Resources’ Forestry-Based Carbon Markets,” (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute, 2014), 3, www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/Report_DarkerSideofGreen_hirez.pdf.
[6] Jon Hilsenrath, “Cap-and-Trade’s Unlikely Critics: Its Creators,” The Wall Street Journal (13 August 2009), www.wsj.com/article_email/SB125011380094927137-IMyQjAxMDI5NTEwMzExMTMzWj.html.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_accounting.
[10] Larry Lohmann, “Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting: The Cases of Carbon and Cost–Benefit,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (April 2009): 499–534.
[11] D. MacKenzie, “Making Things the Same: Gases, Emission Rights and the Politics of Carbon Markets,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (April 2009): 440–455.
[12] Ingmar Lippert, “Extended Carbon Cognition as a Machine,” Computational Culture 1 (2011), computationalculture.net/article/extended-carbon-cognition; Ingmar Lippert, “Carbon Classified? Unpacking Heterogeneous Relations Inscribed into Corporate Carbon Emissions,” Ephemera 12 (2012): 138–161.
[13] Ingmar Lippert, “Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Augsburg, 2013).
[14] Frances Bowen and Bettina Wittneben, “Carbon Accounting: Negotiating Accuracy, Consistency and Certainty across Organisational Fields,” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 24, no. 8 (2011): 1022–1036.
[15] Ingmar Lippert, “Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Augsburg, 2013).
[16] Larry Lohman, “Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading.” In Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko, eds., The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2010), www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Neolib&Calc.pdf, 9, citing Mark Trexler, “A Statistically Driven Approach to Offset-Based GHG Additionality Determinations: What Can We Learn?” Sustainable Development, Law and Policy 6, no. 2 (January 2006).
[17] www.co2offsetresearch.org/consumer/Additionality.html.
[18] www.britannica.com/technology/emissions-trading.
[19] Shamima Haque and Muhammad Azizul Islam, “Carbon Emission Accounting Fraud,” in Corporate Carbon and Climate Accounting, ed. Stefan Schaltegger, Dimitar Zvezdov, Igor Alvarez Etxeberria, Maria Csutora, and Edeltraud Günther (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 243-257, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2771580.
[20] Chris Lang, “The Virtual Economy of REDD: Conflicts of Interest, Hot Air, and Dodgy Baselines,” (2 June 2016), www.redd-monitor.org/2016/06/02/the-virtual-economy-of-redd-conflicts-of-interest-hot-air-and-dodgy-baselines/.
[21] Ibid.
[22] C. Seyller, S. Desbureaux, S. Ongolo, A. Karsenty, G. Simonet, J. Faure, and L. Brimont, “The ‘Virtual Economy’ of REDD+ Projects: Does Private Certification of REDD+ Projects Ensure Their Environmental Integrity?” International Forestry Review, 18, 2 (2016).
[23] Heather Lovell, Thereza Sales de Aguiar, Jan Bebbington, and Carlos Larrinage-Gonzalez, “Accounting for Carbon,” Research Report 122, Certified Accountants Educational Trust for the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, in partnership with International Emissions Trading Association (London, 2010), www.accaglobal.com/content/dam/acca/global/PDF-technical/environmental-publications/rr-122-001.pdf.
[24] web.law.columbia.edu/climate-change/resources/international-resources/offsets-protocols.
[25] www.arb.ca.gov/cc/ejac/meetings/06062016/draft_ejac_recommendations052516.pdf, 7.
[26] www.arb.ca.gov/cc/ejac/meetings/041014/appendix_a.pdf, 32.
[27] vjel.vermontlaw.edu/files/2013/06/James-Baker.pdf.
[28] Committee on Assessment of Impediments to Interagency Cooperation on Space and Earth Science Missions, Space Studies Board, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, National Research Council, Assessments of Impediments to Interagency Collaboration on Space and Earth Science Missions, National Academies Press, 2011, 62.
[29] environment.harvard.edu/climate-extremes.
[30] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._James_Baker.
[31] D. James Baker, Ray Schmitt, and Carl Wunsch, “Endowments and New Institutions for Long-term Observations,” Oceanography 28 (July 2007).
[32] theredddesk.org/countries/actors/clinton-foundation-clinton-climate-initiative.
[33] Werner A. Kurz, “Introduction to the Use of Carbon Accounting Models and How They Could Be Used to Determine a Reference Emissions Level,” at BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes Workshop to Discuss Landscape-Level Carbon Accounting Approaches (Washington, D. C., 2016), 29.
[34] Ibid., 33.
Jul 16, 2016
Yesterday, California’s Air Resources Board released a preliminary draft of proposed amendments to its Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) aimed at extending the cap and trade scheme beyond 2020. The big news for REDD watchers is that the ARB’s preliminary draft excludes making a decision on whether to allow REDD credits in California’s cap and trade scheme.
The preliminary draft is available here.
Tucked away on page 22 of the The 443-page preliminary draft is the following:
ARB staff is not proposing any regulatory amendments related to sector-based offset crediting or tropical forests in this rulemaking; rather, ARB staff anticipates that ongoing discussions with stakeholders will resume with additional informal public meetings outside of this rulemaking starting in the fall of 2016.
REDD, then, is being given a decision-making process outside the rulemaking process outlined in ARB’s preliminary draft. The REDD process will “resume” in Autumn 2016.
The rulemaking process
The process for the rulemaking (not including REDD) is as follows. On 19 July 2016, the Air Resources Board will present the preliminary draft to the Office of Administrative Law, which will conduct a review of the draft.
The Air Resources Board may revise the draft based on the Office of Administrative Law’s review. On 2 August 2016, the Air Resources Board will post the revised version of the draft on its website.
A formal public comment period will then run from 5 August to 19 September 2016.
On 22-23 September 2016, the Air Resources Board will hold a hearing to discuss the proposed amendments. A second hearing to vote on the proposed amendments will take place on 23-24 March 2017.
The REDD process
Here are the two paragraphs relevant to the decision about REDD in California:
4. Linkage with External Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Systems and Programs
…
b. Other Linkages and Linkage-Related Partnerships
Sector-Based Crediting Programs, including Acre, Brazil
As described in Chapter I of this Staff Report, ARB held public workshops on a number of topics that helped inform the amendments contained in this proposal. Four of those workshops addressed the potential of approving the use of sector-based offset credits from the tropical forestry sector within the Cap-and-Trade Program by developing a set of regulatory standards against which potential partner jurisdictions’ tropical forestry programs would be assessed for linkage. More information on these workshops is presented in Chapter IX and Appendix F of this Staff Report. ARB staff identified the jurisdictional program in Acre, Brazil as a program that is ready to be considered for linkage with California. ARB staff received numerous informal comments following the workshops. Some comments suggested specific recommended approaches, some opposed any action, some supported ARB staff’s initial thinking as outlined in an October 19, 2015 staff paper and as described in the four workshops, and some recommended that staff conduct additional stakeholder engagement before proposing any regulatory amendments.
ARB staff has presented information about how linkage with a state-of-the-art, jurisdictional sector-based offset program can provide significant benefits to California’s Cap-and-Trade Program by assuring an adequate supply of high-quality compliance offsets to keep the cost of compliance within reasonable bounds, up to the quantitative usage limit for sector-based offsets. Linkage would also support California’s broad climate goals, as well as global biodiversity and tropical forest communities. (ARB 2015a) After reviewing the workshop results, and in order to ensure coordination with Québec and Ontario, ARB staff is proposing to continue discussing with stakeholders and partner jurisdictions, including Acre and others in the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force, on the regulatory path to optimize the multiple benefits of including sector-based offsets in California’s program, including through a linkage with Acre, in time to be used to meet compliance obligations incurred in the third compliance period and thereafter. ARB staff is not proposing any regulatory amendments related to sector-based offset crediting or tropical forests in this rulemaking; rather, ARB staff anticipates that ongoing discussions with stakeholders will resume with additional informal public meetings outside of this rulemaking starting in the fall of 2016. These meetings will also solicit and consider additional tools the State of California could employ to mitigate tropical deforestation, including measures to encourage sustainable supply chain efforts by public and private entities.
So discussions on REDD in California will re-start in Autumn 2016, separate from the rulemaking process outlined above.
ARB’s pro-REDD, pro-carbon trading, pro-neoliberal bias
The bias in the second paragraph is blatant. As is the bias in the White Paper on REDD that the Air Resources Board produced in October 2015.
The ARB makes no mention in this second paragraph of the problems associated with REDD, just the “significant benefits” to California’s cap and trade scheme of providing cheap carbon credits.
According to the ARB, REDD would support California’s climate goals. Of course the ARB doesn’t mention the awkward fact that carbon trading does not reduce emissions. For every REDD credit sold from Brazil, an additional tonne of CO2 would be emitted in California.
The ARB argues that REDD will benefit “global biodiversity” and tropical forest communities. Then again, it could undermine peasant farming and lead to increased land conflicts, without protecting biodiversity.
The ARB does not mention the low-income communities and communities of colour in California who are opposed to letting polluting industry continue to poison their air.
Kicking the REDD can down the road
Nevertheless, ARB staff are not proposing making a decision on including REDD in this preliminary draft. Instead ARB proposes discussions with “stakeholders and partner jurisdictions”,
on the regulatory path to optimize the multiple benefits of including sector-based offsets in California’s program, including through a linkage with Acre, in time to be used to meet compliance obligations incurred in the third compliance period and thereafter.
The third compliance period runs from 2018 to 2020.
One possible reason for the ARB’s decision to delay a decision on REDD is to try to avoid additional controversy. The most recent auction sold only 10% of the allowances put up for sale. The cap and trade scheme faces a lawsuit from the Chamber of Commerce that argues that allowance auctions function as a tax – an unconstitutional tax since it was introduced without the two-thirds majority in the Legislature that is required for new taxes.
Brown in talks with big oil
Meanwhile, oil industry leaders are talking to California Governor Jerry Brown’s administration. The purpose of the talks, according to Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the President of the Western States Petroleum Association, is “to improve the state’s current climate change programs.” WSPA has spent US$12.8 million on lobbying in the 2015-2016 legislative period, making it the top spending lobby group in California.
As Dan Bacher points out,
Underneath California’s reputation as a “green leader” is a dark and oily reality—the state is the third largest petroleum producer in the nation, and the oil industry is California’s largest and most powerful political lobby.
No wonder Brown’s administration is so keen on REDD and carbon trading.
Jun 2, 2016
By Chris Lang
REDD Monitor
In order for REDD projects to generate carbon credits, a “baseline scenario” has to be created. This is supposed to reflect what would have happened under business-as-usual, or what would have happened in the absence of the REDD project.
The baseline is also necessary to show that the REDD project is additional, that the reduced emissions would not have happened without the project.
Conflicts of interest
Clearly, it is in the REDD project developers’ interest to have a baseline that predicts a high rate of deforestation in the project area. The higher the rate of deforestation in the baseline scenario the more carbon credits will be generated. And the less the project will have to reduce deforestation.
Of course REDD project developers can’t pick their own baselines and hope that the rest of the world believes they are not just making things up. The methodology proposed by the project developers has to be validated and project has to be audited. This is where voluntary certification schemes come in, like the Verified Carbon Standard, Plan Vivo, CarbonFix Standard, and so on.
But there’s a catch. The voluntary certification schemes make their money from generating carbon credits. The more carbon credits generated, the more money they make.
And the validators and auditors that are accredited by the certification scheme are paid directly by the project developers. In order not to lose future work opportunities, auditors are unlikely to be too picky about approving their clients’ methodologies.
This is a blatant conflict of interest at the heart of the REDD mechanism.
A new paper published in the International Forestry Review, looks at two REDD projects and asks a series of questions:
- What can we learn from the study of baseline settings in REDD+ projects?
- Does it sufficiently address the issues of permanence and additionality?
- More importantly, can certification standards provide a legitimate guarantee that chosen baselines are reliable measures for predicting CO 2 emissions’ reductions in the long term?
The paper is titled “The ‘virtual economy’ of REDD+ projects: does private certification of REDD+ projects ensure their environmental integrity?“, and the authors are Coline Seyller, Sébastien Desbureaux, Symphorien Ongolo, Alain Karsenty, Gabriela Simonet, Jean-François Faure, and Laura Brimont.
The two projects that the paper looks at are the Mai Ndombe REDD project in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena REDD project in Madagascar. Both of these projects were certified under the VCS system, in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
The authors note that,
It is tempting for project developers to design a ‘convenient’ baseline scenario to generate more credits in order to seek financial profit or, as currently appears to be the most frequent case, to render a high-cost REDD+ project financially viable.
Mai Ndombe, DRC
The baseline for Mai Ndombe was established, not by looking at historical trends of deforestation in the project area and extrapolating into the future, but by using a reference area.
According to VCS guidelines the reference area does not have to be adjacent to the project area. In the case of Mai Ndombe, the reference area is about 600 kilometres away: the Mayombe forest in Bas-Congo province.
The authors point out that there are important differences between the two areas. Mai Ndombe is a dense, humid forest. Mayombe is a mosaic forest. Mai Ndombe is about 50% further from Kinshasa, the capital of DRC, than Mayombe. Mayombe is close to major shipping harbours. Bas-Congo province has a high population density. Mai Ndombe is sparsely inhabited.
The authors describe the reference area as “a dubious choice”.
The developer of the Mai Ndombe project, Wildlife Works, chose the following baseline scenario:
Where deforestation is initiated by the primary agent through legally-sanctioned commercial harvest and the area is ultimately converted to non-forest by the secondary agent through unplanned deforestation (e.g. subsistence agriculture)…
The authors question the assumption that in the absence of the REDD project, the forest would be logged (legally) and then converted to agriculture by local communities:
Ultimately, the loss of forest cover in DRC depends on many drivers including commercial or illegal logging, mining, farming and industrial agriculture. The weight of each driver on deforestation and forest degradation may reflect the degree of compliance with the law by logging/mining/agricultural companies, the local context of poverty and land tenure, and overall, the capacity of state bureaucracies to implement an efficient command and control system.
Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena, Madagascar
The CAZ project, set up by Conservation International, also uses a “questionable” reference area. The reference area in this case is 22 times the size of the project area.
Differences between the reference area and the project area include elevations and slopes, farming practices, and population density (the reference area is more densely populated than the project area). The authors conclude that, “there are major differences between the CAZ project area and its reference area.”
There are differences in the deforestation rates in the two area. The reference area has an annual deforestation rate between 1% and 1.26%. In the project area the annual rate is somewhere between 0.5% and 0.6%.
In its project design document, Conservation International takes the higher rate of deforestation for the reference area as a baseline scenario. And then assumes this same rate to be the historical rate of deforestation in the project area!
“The deforestation rate inside a well-established protected area is 0.20%/yr, being an 84% reduction of the historical deforestation rate within CAZ 1.26%/yr).”
The authors point out that without doing anything on the ground, Conservation International could, on paper at least, reduce deforestation by half. This, the authors note, with a hint of academic dryness, “could lead to the so-called ‘hot air’ phenomenon”.
Baselines are “untestable guesses”
Baselines allow project developers to put an exact figure on the number of tonnes of carbon that have not been emitted as a result of their project. But this number is based on a fiction.
There is no way of testing whether a baseline scenario is true or not, because it is something that might have happened had the REDD project not gone ahead.
As the authors conclude, “the baseline scenarios in REDD+ projects amount to untestable guesses”.
[W]ith REDD+ projects there is a kind of irreducible uncertainty regarding what the ‘right reference scenario’ should be. Our case studies show that only small differences in baseline scenarios – whether designed intentionally or not – can have severe financial (positive for business actors) and environmental (negative for the climate) consequences. The interest of the project developers is obvious: as the market price of carbon credits falls, the financial viability of a project (that relies on the carbon market for financing) declines. ‘Optimizing’ the parameters, notably those related to baseline settings, seems to be the only way to maintain the viability of a project’s business model.
The authors of the paper are careful to talk about project developers “optimizing the parameters” or using a “convenient baseline scenario”.
Fraud would be a better way of describing what REDD project developers are doing when they set bogus baselines. The voluntary certification systems, such as VCS, are complicit in this fraud.
May 31, 2016
by Chris Lang – REDD Monitor
At a recent workshop in Sacramento, Environmental Defense Fund’s Steve Schwartzman was waving around copies of a letter in favour of California using REDD offsets in its cap and trade scheme. Following the letter was a list of NGO logos, including that of Greenpeace Brazil. But Greenpeace has consistently opposed REDD offsets in California. How did Greenpeace’s logo appear on a letter supporting REDD?
California’s Air Resources Board is currently considering whether to include REDD offsets in its cap and trade scheme (AB 32). The ARB is holding a series of technical workshops about this proposal, one of which took place in Sacramento on 28 April 2016.
The day before the workshop, Carlos Rittl, Executive Secretary of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of 40 NGOs in Brazil, sent a letter to California’s Governor, Jerry Brown. The letter was in support of California including REDD in AB 32:
We write to express the support of the Brazilian Climate Observatory to the State of California for its significant efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions domestically, and also for considering the importance of tropical forest conservation and the involvement of local communities in these efforts.
A day after the workshop in Sacramento, Steve Schwartzman, Senior Director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund referred to the letter in a tweet:
The link in Schwartzman’s tweet is to the letter from Carlos Rittl, posted on EDF’s website.
Manufacturing consent
For the meeting in Sacramento, Schwartzman printed out copies of the letter. Schwartzman’s version of the letter was the same as that on EDF’s website, but with one very important difference. Schwartzman had added several pages to the letter, featuring the logos of the member organisations of Climate Observatory – including Greenpeace Brazil.
A few days later, Jonah Busch at the Center for Global Development, tweeted about Schwartzman’s version of the letter:
A colleague sent REDD-Monitor a link to Busch’s tweet, with the following comment:
“I have to admit that I’m more than average surprised that Greenpeace supports to include REDD+ as an offset mechanism in California.”
I was also surprised, given Greenpeace’s vocal opposition to California’s REDD plans.
So I asked Greenpeace about this. And Greenpeace asked Climate Observatory. Very soon, a clarification letter appeared from Carlos Rittl. It turns out that the original letter to California’s Governor Brown was signed by Rittl only. It was a “network-led initiative that contains its single signature”.
Rittl’s explanatory letter is posted below. Busch, at least, tweeted Rittl’s clarification.
Schwartzman didn’t bother.
To whom it may concern.
The Brazilian Climate Observatory (OC) is a network comprising a broad spectrum of Brazilian civil society organizations. OC’s positions and recommendations on any issue are developed after consultation processes among its members aiming to reach consensus.
OC’s position about any given issue represents the average views of its members, and does not necessarily correspond to any individual organizations’ views or positions on the same specific subject.
OC has recently submitted a letter to the Honorable Governor of California, Mr. Jerry Brown, expressing its support for the inclusion of REDD+ activities on the States’ AB32 program. That letter was a network-led initiative that contains its single signature.
It has come to our attention that third parties have shared that letter with stakeholders from different groups in the United States alongside a list of OC members, without previous consent of any or all network members. Unfortunately, that could have been mistakenly understood as a list of associated signatures to the letter from each individual OC member. That was not the case. The referred members list does not represent a list of additional signatures to the letter.
Greenpeace Brazil is one of OC members. Its well-known public positions, as well as the positions Greenpeace International, Greenpeace US or any other Greenpeace national organization, have not changed and do not endorse the inclusion of REDD+ activities in any offset mechanism or legislation worldwide. However, during the Climate Observatory internal consultation process, Greenpeace Brazil has kindly not expressed its opposition to the OC letter to the Governor of California as a matter of respect to the views of some other members.
In last few days, external stakeholders have approached Greenpeace USA about the issue with questions related to its positions on the subject of the letter. Therefore, I hereby certify what has been already stated above. The letter to Governor of California expresses the average views of OC members for its own position on the issue only. It was not signed by OC individual members and do not necessarily expresses the position of each network’s member organizations.
May 18, 2016
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2016
New York – A false solution to climate change known as REDD+ causes conflict and is a new form of colonialism and must be immediately canceled, Indigenous Peoples denounced at the United Nations. REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) is a carbon offset mechanism that uses Nature as a sponge for greenhouse gas pollution instead of cutting emissions at source.
“The sacred air we breathe is being sold to the highest bidder. We implore the UN to have compassion for humanity and Mother Earth by immediately canceling carbon trading, carbon offsets, and REDD+ projects in or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories” said Calfin Lafkenche of the Mapuche Nation in Chile.
“We are here today in the UN to stop the offensive of the Green Economy and its market systems of carbon trading, carbon offsets, the Clean Development Mechanism, and REDD+, which constitute a new form of colonialism and have caused conflicts, forced relocation, threats to the cultural survival and violations of the rights of Indigenous peoples, especially the rights to life, to lands and territories, and to free, prior and informed consent,” said the Mapuche leader.
Over 1500 native leaders are attending the 15th session of United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which is addressing conflict and climate today.
“For centuries, Indigenous Peoples have suffered from colonialism and genocide. Now the United Nations itself is promoting false solutions to climate change that imperil the very survival of our peoples and Mother Earth. We are on the frontlines of protracted conflicts with governments and extractive industries that want to steal our land, territories and resources. We are also on the frontlines of climate change and the false solutions to climate change like REDD. As Guardians of Mother Earth we should be protected and honored not persecuted and threatened with new forms of genocide,” noted Tom BK Goldtooth, Executive Director, of Indigenous Environmental Network.
“To really address the issues of conflict, the UN needs to heal its relation with Mother Earth and stop promoting false solutions to climate change that threaten the survival not only of our peoples but of all of humanity. The UN’s Paris Agreement on climate does not cut emissions at the source and treats Nature as capital with no real nor effective safeguard mechanisms that could guarantee the prevention of land grabs and the protection of the rights of Indigenous peoples. The Paris Agreement is a crime against humanity and Mother Earth.”
“The Paris Agreement is a trade agreement, nothing more. It promises to privatize, commodify and sell forest and agriculture lands as carbon offsets in fraudulent schemes such as REDD+. These offset scams provide financial laundering mechanisms for developed countries to launder their carbon pollution in the Global South. Case-in-point, the United States’ climate change plan includes 250 million megatons to be absorbed by oceans and forest offset markets. Essentially, those responsible for the climate crisis not only get to buy their way out of compliance but they also get to profit from it as well,” says Alberto Saldamando, human and Indigenous rights expert and attorney with the Indigenous Environmental Network.
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Learn more at: no-redd.com
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
UNHQ, New York, May 18, 2016
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On behalf of the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Indigenous Educational Network of Turtle Island,
I would like to make the following recommendation to stop the offensive of the Green Economy against Indigenous Peoples that is creating new sources of conflict for Indigenous Peoples by commodifying, privatizing and selling the sacred air that we breath, the sky, the forests, the soil, the fields, the wetlands, the mangroves and even the deserts, as well as promoting genetically engineered trees, and greenwashing extractive industries like Shell Oil, Chevron and the Rio Tinto mining company.
The recommendation reads as follows:
1. The Permanent Forum recognizes that carbon trading, carbon offsets, the Clean Development Mechanism, and REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) even in its pilot phase, constitute a new form of colonialism and have caused conflicts, forced relocation, threats to the cultural survival and violations of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, consecrated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, especially the rights to life, to lands and territories, and to free, prior and informed consent.
2. With compassion for humanity and Mother Earth, the Permanent Forum recommends the immediate cancellation of carbon trading, carbon offsets, the Clean Development Mechanism and REDD projects in or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories, including those to be implemented under the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Convention Framework on Climate Change as “results-based payments” and the emerging Global Market-Based Mechanism, as well as under voluntary carbon markets including under the auspices of the aviation industry.
Apr 28, 2016
Cap-and-Trade Workshop – Sector based – English:
CalEPA Headquarters, Byron Sher Auditorium, 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Coordinator: Sean Donovan sdonovan@arb.ca.gov File: 491820
Video: http://www.calepa.ca.gov/broadcast/player/?group=LiveVideo&source=byron&id=491820
Audio: http://www.calepa.ca.gov/broadcast/player/?group=LiveAudio&source=byron&id=491820
Cap-and-Trade Workshop – Sector based – Spanish:
Video: http://www.calepa.ca.gov/broadcast/player/?group=LiveVideo&source=vtc01&id=497698
Audio: http://www.calepa.ca.gov/broadcast/player/?group=LiveAudio&source=vtc01&id=497698
Apr 28, 2016
A new report released today highlights how forest dependent communities in Cross River State, southeast Nigeria, are losing rights and livelihoods, as their forests are being locked down by the government, which seeks cash through a United Nations backed ‘carbon trading’ scheme, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE.
The report, ‘Seeing REDD: Communities, Forests and Carbon trading in Nigeria’, by Nigerian organisation, Social Action, was presented today in Lima, Peru at an event at the People’s Summit on Climate Change, which coincides with the 20th Conference of Parties (COP20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in the Peruvian capital city.
The report shows how the implementation of the REDD+ mechanism is having a devastating effect on the economies of affected communities around the Cross River forests. With neither adequate consultation nor alternative livelihood options, community members, who have depended on the forests for generations, are now being victimised by government agents following a ban imposed on economic and cultural activities in the delineated forests. Thus, REDD+ has restricted access to forests where indigenous communities gather food, medicine and energy. Local nutrition and livelihoods are seriously threatened and the attendant scarcity of food products caused by government’s actions have led to increase in the prices of basic food products. Ironically, higher wood prices, occasioned by REDD+, is encouraging illegal logging in the forests.
The report shows how communities are grappling with being implicated in the false solutions to the problem of climate change. While community members suffer the negative effects of climate change which they did not create, they are, through schemes like REDD, liable to being criminalised in the process of enforcing carbon market policies.
“The reduction of emissions from fossil fuels should be the main goal. But measures like REDD+ are diversionary market schemes which are driven by those who cannot see beyond profits”, according to Isaac ‘Asume’ Osuoka, Director of Social Action. “Communities that depend on the forests are at risk of human rights violations, as authorities could now see them as impediments to maintaining the carbon marketing potentials of forests. Unfortunately, there is no corresponding mitigation of climate change, as we are seeing.”
With REDD+, greenhouse gas polluting countries and companies in the developed world could pay for schemes that promise to reduce deforestation in the developing countries. Thus, developing countries, especially African countries having vast expanse of tropical forests, become ‘sinks’ for greenhouse gases, most of which are emitted from developed countries.
“This is a new form of colonialism”, according to Nnimmo Bassey, Coordinator of Health of the Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF). “REDD+ is subjugating African communities and driving new land grabs akin to the colonisation of the continent.”
With the ongoing UN climate conference seeking agreements for global action including the implementation of REDD+ mechanism, citizens groups at the People’s Summit are demanding people-oriented measures that will actually curtail climate change worldwide.
Other speakers at the event included Ruth Nyambura of the African Biodiversity Network, Kenya, Tom Goldtooth of Indigenous Environmental Network, USA and Cassandra Smithies, a researcher/campaigner on climate justice.
Download the Report here
Source: http://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/172824-new-report-highlights-problems-forest-carbon-trading-scheme-nigeria.html
Apr 28, 2016
April 21, 2016
Ini Ekott
A patch of forest in Akamkpa, Cross River State. The state holds over half of Nigeria’s standing rainforest
Things were looking up for William Obio when he decided to invest more in his logging business. For the first time in years, his nine children and three brothers were eating well, and he could support his over half-a-dozen team of machine operators, saw men, scouts, and wood carriers.
Such success, rare in Owai, a heavily forested and impoverished community less than 20 kilometres from Nigeria’s southern border with Cameroon, emboldened Mr. Obio. He took a chance and purchased a small cassava crushing machine and got more saws.
“God answered our prayers; things really changed,” said the part-time pastor.
Everything indeed changed in 2008, Mr. Obio said, when the Cross River government imposed a sweeping ban on forest use in the state’s 18 local government areas, including Mr. Obio’s Akamkpa – where Owai is located.
Governor Liyel Imoke had said wealthy merchants, mostly from outside the state, were taking advantage of lax laws to deplete the state’s forest cover.
The site of more than half of Nigeria’s remaining rainforest, the governor warned, Cross River needed to save its green stock to boost investment and tourism. Under this plan, the state would become Nigeria’s pilot site for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a United Nations climate change mitigation programme that offers payment to states and communities for conserving their forest.
For a state that had lost monthly federal payments to oil producing states, following the ceding of oil-rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon in 2008, the proposal drew wide support. Besides, Cross River’s forest cover had declined from 7,920 to 6,102 square kilometres between 1991 and 2008, according to figures from Nigeria’s Ministry of Environment.
In the years that followed, the government fiercely enforced the embargo and chased out local traders like Obio, seized wood, and raided timber markets. Officials also stopped locals from hunting game and fetching bush mango and afang – popular delicacies in the region.
William Obio sits in front of a small shop he managed to set up after the forest ban cut off his source of livelihood
As the new policy disrupted traditional livelihoods many forest communities relied on, the government failed to provide alternative means of support, despite making clear that promised benefits from REDD+ payments would take years to come.
Michael Eraye, Cross River State’s Commissioner of Environment told PREMIUM TIMES that the government did make efforts to equip those affected with new skills, but poor funding affected the plans. He said the government built roads in affected areas, as part of its compensation plans.
Salisu Dahiru, Nigeria’s UN-REDD Coordinator, said efforts to find affected communities and determine how their livelihoods are linked to the forest, were ongoing. But he acknowledged that training programmes had yet to commence nearly eight years after the first ban, and four years after the start of the REDD+ programme.
Meanwhile, only a few years after the REDD+ initiative got underway in Cross River State, Governor Imoke, who had once championed the programme, quietly began to back away even as the ban continued. In May 2015, days before leaving office after eight years as governor, Mr. Imoke told shocked officials that REDD+ did not return on investment.
“I got to the point when I felt that it was not worth my effort,” Mr. Imoke said, according to the UN-REDD National Programme Semi-Annual Report January to June 2015 edition. Two senior officials who attended the meeting confirmed the former governor made those remarks. They said the governor directed his comments at Odigha Odigha, head of the state forestry commission at the time.
The report said months before the meeting, state officials demonstrated diminishing interest in REDD+, and the ambitious programme began to stall.
The first phase, known as the Readiness Phase, is now set to end in December 2016, nearly two years later than originally intended. Local communities will have to wait much longer for REDD+ resource-based payments, if they ever come. While they wait, little to no help has come from the state.
A PREMIUM TIMES’ examination of Cross River State’s anti-deforestation and climate change mitigation programme, which began in 2008, shows how the implementation of an otherwise well-intentioned policy deprived forest-dependent communities of their primary source of livelihood. It also provides a glimpse into the abuse and policy missteps that characterised the government’s execution of the programme.
For this report, this newspaper reviewed relevant documents on the project and interviewed several state and national officials, community members and leaders, traders, civil society members, and officials of the United Nations’ REDD programme over a period of three months.
Living off the forest
Forests play an integral role in regulating the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When present, they absorb carbon emitted by human activity—an estimated 25 per cent of these emissions over the past four decades—and help moderate the effects of climate change. When lost through deforestation, they release carbon back into the atmosphere and are responsible for up to 20 per cent of global manmade carbon dioxide emissions.
REDD+ is a global mechanism designed to reward governments in developing nations for preserving forests and constraining the impacts of climate change. To date, REDD+ has pledged nearly US$ 10 billion to developing countries, with $4 million allocated for Nigeria’s National Programme, of which Cross River State is a pilot model.
The first formal steps taken by the Governor Imoke administration toward monetizing Cross River State’s vast forest resources began in October 2009, a year after the forest embargo went into effect. Mr. Imoke worked with the then Minister of the Environment, John Odey, a Cross River native, to apply to be part of REDD+.
In addition to joining the Governors’ Climate and Forest Task Force, based in the United States, Mr. Imoke attended COP 15 in Copenhagen later that year, where he announced efforts to protect Cross River’s tropical forests.
In April 2010, Nigeria became a UN-REDD partner country, and from then, followed through with a series of REDD+ programmes.
Despite such efforts, the government failed to provide economic relief for the local population and did not fully engage with them before and after the ban, those interviewed told PREMIUM TIMES.
Tony Attah, in charge of the Cross River forestry commission’s outreach programmes, acknowledged that the ban and initial phase of REDD+ were not well communicated. Despite initial missteps, he said that extensive community engagements were carried out by the state between January and August 2014.
Many environmentalists who support forest conservation, however, have taken issue with the REDD+ programme, blaming it for loss of indigenous land rights and branding it as property colonisation by developed nations. They also argue that the programme lacks mechanisms to ensure pledged payments reach affected people and are not pocketed by greedy politicians or other representatives.
They argue that forest-dependent communities like Mr. Obio’s Owai, who have yet to receive any payments years after the forest ban went into place, are made to pay more than their fair share for environmental clean-up, and for the pollution caused by developed countries.
“REDD is a dangerous eco-business,” said the NGO group, Environmental Rights Action, as Cross River State entered the early stages of preparing to implement the programme. “It enriches polluters and impoverishes forest community people who have conserved the forests over the years.”
Uncertain futures
The Cross River timber union has said thousands of its members and affiliate workers, lost their livelihood—some, allegedly, even their lives—after the ban. They include timber dealers, machine operators, saw men, scouts, and carriers.
“Our members lost out when the ban started, some died of shock. Many lost everything they had,” said David Essien, the head of Akim Timber Market union, the biggest timber market in the state.
Reliable statistics depicting such damage are hard to come by in the state, but studies conducted in the area paint a gloomy picture.
Workers seen at Akim timber market, Calabar, Cross River State
The Social Development Integrated Centre, a Port Harcourt-based policy analysis group, in a 2014 report on the impact of REDD in Cross River, concluded that “the move towards REDD has been made without any clear community development programme that addresses livelihoods and income generation alternatives for forest dependent communities”.
Before 2008, to harvest timber in Cross River, the state required loggers to pay between N20, 000 (US$102) and N50, 000 (US$254)—of which 70 per cent went to communities as royalty. Dealers were also required to plant five seedlings as replacement, and be cleared or “stamped” by forestry commission officials that harvested timber was mature.
The ban stopped the royalty and kept communities from harvesting wood even to build their homes, said Oyi Akama, the village head of Owai. Importantly, it kept many youth out of work.
Stephen Mbeh, head of nearby Oban town, told PREMIUM TIMES how a government task force twice seized timber he harvested to construct a home. He succeeded the third time after young people in the town helped ward off the enforcers.
“This is our own oil. This is all we have, and even to cut mango at your backyard, we could not,” he said..
Oyi Akama, the village head of Owai community, Akamkpa, Cross River
Mr. Obio began his lumber business in Owai, a small community with no access road, electricity or potable water, in 1998. His mother, the family’s breadwinner, had died five years earlier.
After getting clearance from the government to harvest from areas with mature timber, Obio logged at least once a week and sold to buyers from distant towns. “We were beginning to do well a little. I even paid fees for my brothers,” he said.
By the time the ban came into force, Mr. Obio’s business was booming. He purchased six sawing machines and had broken ground on a block family home—a rarity in Owai where the majority of people live in mud houses.
He initially brushed off the news as rumour when he heard about the ban on the radio—as many others did—in August 2008. Two days later, he says, he saw members of the state anti-deforestation task force rounding up a man who frequently bought timber from him. The operatives confiscated the logs and forced the man to drive to Calabar, the state capital.
“That was when I knew it was serious,” Mr. Obio said.
In the days that followed, a brutal crackdown unfolded. The taskforce barred Obio and others from removing harvested wood from the forests. This claim was echoed by other timber dealers PREMIUM TIMES interviewed in the region.
Anietie Bassey, vice president of a timber market in Calabar, said the task force not only seized his timber, but also seven of his sawing machines during a raid in 2010. Mr. Bassey suffered a stroke shortly after the incident, an ailment he says was brought on by the loss of his business. He is yet to fully recover.
“I am a dead man…a dead man!” Mr. Bassey said repeatedly during an interview recently. “What can I do?”
Mr. Obio said he lost four of his six sawing machines in a similar raid.
Anietie Bassey, vice president of MCC timber market, Calabar
“A lawless task-force”
Seized machines and timber were never recovered. Those arrested were freed after the payment of fines ranging between N150, 000 to N1 million, dealers said.
Those interviewed, including government officials, community leaders, timber traders and activists, accused the armed taskforce of violating people’s rights—even attacking dealers with supplies from outside the state—and arbitrarily detaining people and seizing their equipment for years after the ban went into effect.
The head of the taskforce at the time, Peter Jenkins, told PREMIUM TIMES he could not immediately respond to the claims without knowledge of where they originated from. The communities, he said, initially told the government they needed roads and some were indeed provided. Though he defended the government’s policy, he acknowledged that more could have been done to ease the impact of the ban.
Asked about allegations of highhandedness, Odigha Odigha, the former chairman of Cross River’s forestry commission, told PREMIUM TIMES that the taskforce refused to submit to his supervision.
He said Mr. Jenkins repeatedly told him, “Odigha you know I don’t report to you, I report to the governor.”
Odigha Odigha, former chairman, Cross River’s Forestry Commission
Two senior forestry commission officials in Calabar, who asked not to be named, told PREMIUM TIMES that they believed both the ban and its implementation were flawed.
“The ban on logging was wrong, but its implementation was worse. The anti-deforestation task force was supposed to be under the forestry commission, but it was lawless, reporting directly to the governor,” the first official said.
“REDD did not say don’t cut down trees, it is a wrong perception. You can’t say don’t cut down the forest without alternatives,” said the second. She also spoke of a “lawless taskforce”.
Edem Edem, the programme coordinator of Green Concern for Development, an environmental advocacy group in Abuja, said he initially supported the ban until “they started violating people’s rights”.
“That was when I backed off,” Mr. Edem said.
Dangote gets concession, communities don’t
Initial funding for the $4 million project was meant to finance preliminary REDD+ processes like preparing an action plan, training officials, providing environmental and social safeguards, and others. The money was not meant for the communities. Mr. Edem said the state spent much of its budget organising endless “workshops and seminars”.
Regarding community engagement, the Nigerian National Programme’s Annual UN-REDD Report for 2014 said, “few initiatives exist, yet they are dispersed, with no guidelines and no funding for community REDD+ projects and for REDD+ pilots.”
Bridget Nkor, the state coordinator of REDD+, told PREMIUM TIMES that the state was worried about not providing alternatives for the affected communities. “That is one area that raised a lot of concerns,” she said.
Due to the structure of the REDD+ programme, it’s likely that any economic benefit for affected people could take years to materialise.
But Mr. Dahiru, the national coordinator for the programme, used the example of a charcoal vendor to illustrate the impacts that REDD+ programs can have on local communities.
Instead of continuing to use wood—which destroys the forest—REDD will support the person with needed skills to grow bamboo, he said.
“The bamboo can mature in one year, and reach full maturity to give you charcoal in three years,” Mr. Dahiru said. “And bamboo, once planted, will continue to grow. When you harvest this year, the other offshoot will continue to grow, and there is almost no limit to what you can do to the bamboo.”
The only problem is that the REDD+ programme would not directly support the funding needs of such initiatives. Though it could help those trained receive support from donors at the later Investment Phase, this third stage could take five or more years to attain.
Such trainings in Cross River State are currently targeted at only 30 pilot communities. Even so, they remain mere proposals seven years after the first ban started. An October 2015 UN-REDD progress report said proposals had been submitted and approved, but implementation would not start until late 2016, four years after the REDD+ project started.
Activists say a rapid response should come from the state government, which so far has done little in support of the communities.
Despite the ban on community use of the forest, the state government under Mr. Imoke granted bigger business interests access to the same land, and allowed it to harvest and sell timber to local dealers.
One firm given such a concession is Dansa Allied Agro, a subsidiary of the Dangote Group that is owned by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man. The company secured over 75,000 hectares of land at Oban community for its pineapple farm, used as the fruit base for the popular Dansa beverage.
Tons of timber sourced from the land during clearing process were sold to local dealers, for months under the protection of the government taskforce, PREMIUM TIMES confirmed from several government officials and traders.
Dansa Company did not deny it sold timber, when contacted.
Pressed on the propriety of such deal when locals had been barred with no alternatives, a senior Dangote group official told PREMIUM TIMES that the company has helped the community in many other ways, like providing jobs and palm seedlings to farmers. The company promised a formal response to our questions, but never followed up.
The forestry commission explained the concession, saying that despite the ban, the Ministries of Land and Agriculture retained the right to licence promising investors.
The Dangote group got the sprawling property with a promise to provide 10,000 jobs to locals, build a five-star hotel, roads, schools, and a mini market. The company has yet to make good on many of its promises.
At an elaborate event March 2014, Governor Imoke praised Dansa Allied Agro for donating 8,000 palm oil seedlings to host communities and constructing a bridge to link Oban, Okarara, Ekong Anaku, Neghe, and Ekpene Eki communities.
Mr. Dangote’s brother, Sani Dangote, who runs the Dansa affiliate, promised that the company would provide more oil palm seedlings and said Dansa was planting five trees for every one harvested during the clearing.
“Not worth my effort”
Overall, steps that could have quickened the delivery of REDD+ benefits to the communities and the state faced delays and haphazard implementation due to “dwindling political will”, according to the UN’s 2015 progress report.
An earlier progress report in 2014 noted that the programme “has suffered an important delay in delivery of outputs and finance, due to a mix of factors, some internal and some external”.
One senior official said part of the problem was because the forestry commission had “serious leadership problems”.
“For example, a politician was named as head of the REDD board, and when the board was dissolved, there was no replacement,” the official told PREMIUM TIMES. Nearly two years would pass before the state finally reconstituted the REDD+ board in October 2015.
As Governor Imoke prepared to leave office in May 2015, he issued a scathing criticism of the state’s REDD+ programme.
The time it would take to receive results-based payments was “ridiculously long for anybody to earn anything,” said Mr. Imoke during his handover remarks before top level civil servants and his successor, Ben Ayade.
Alluding to the violation of the state’s deforestation ban by large corporations, Mr. Imoke said although there was an “opening for sustainable management within the framework of REDD+,” the forestry commission lacked the capacity to manage sustainable logging in the face of “corporations [that] come in with so much money they can corrupt anyone.”
Sources say the governor admitted that he “got to the point when I felt that it’s not worth my effort…I won’t insist on sustaining it to the incoming governor, because it’s not giving any return.”
Mr. Odigha, the former forestry commission chairman, whom officials said was the focus of the governor’s criticisms during the meeting, told PREMIUM TIMES that everyone involved in the programme had been well advised that the REDD+ programme takes years to yield benefits.
When asked about claims that he might have misadvised the governor, Mr. Odigha said that “anyone saying that does not know how REDD works. All over the world, REDD is not implemented as a stand-alone.”
The UN report for October 2015 supported the notion that senior forestry commission staff also became detached from the programme—ostensibly following the governor’s example.
“Despite participation in various one-off training and workshop events, only a handful of FC staff understand the fundamentals of REDD+ and fewer have shown interest in the programme,” the report noted.
Mr. Imoke did not respond to multiple calls for comments. He requested questions to be sent via text message, but he ultimately did not respond to our inquiry.
On shaky ground
Former Cross River Governor, Liyel Imoke
Mr. Imoke’s successor, Ben Ayade, only agreed to continue with REDD+ after the national coordinator, Salisu Dahiru, intervened.
The new governor initially relaxed the ban and replaced the anti-deforestation task force with the “green police,” which was made up of members from all local government areas of the state. He left coordination of the partial ban to the forestry commission.
Since taking over, Mr. Ayade also named a ministry in charge of climate change – the only state in Nigeria to do so. The commissioner in charge of that ministry, Alice Eku, did not also respond to request for comment.
Despite the relaxed embargo, Obio William told PREMIUM TIMES that he would never return to timber trading, as the government could always reinstate a full ban. “I don’t want to die,” he said.
He foresaw tomorrow. About two weeks after we interviewed him, the Ayade administration reinstated a full ban on forest use in late October 2015 after a five-month hiatus.
Mr. Ayade courted additional controversy with a plan to build a 260 kilometre “superhighway” through the protected forests. Initial plans to construct the highway straight through Cross River National Park, however, were changed after President Muhammadu Buhari learned that a required environmental impact assessment had not been filed. The new route will come within seven kilometres from the border of the park, which some environmentalists say still poses risk.
The governor has also revoked the occupancy rights of thousands of more forest dependent villagers on ancestral lands on either side of the six lane 260 kilometre super highway.
Mr. Odigha, who now runs a nongovernmental environment advocacy, warned that the government’s superhighway could deny the state carbon credit under the REDD+ programme.
“The REDD Programme had $12 million dollars for carbon credit paid to any country and community that meets its requirements for reducing carbon emission through forest conservation,” he was quoted by the News Agency of Nigeria as saying on March 12, 2016. “Even the rural people would benefit from this carbon credit, and it would serve as means of their livelihood.”
In Owai, Mr. Obio—who said he could barely feed himself and family after the ban in 2008—now sells pepper, salt and other food ingredients. He depends on Ekum Obio, his brother he helped train, to send his children to school.
Outside where he lives sits a rundown cassava grating machine he bought before the ban. The machine became useless after he could no longer replace parts. Nearby, the block house he had proudly started constructing at the height of his timber business sits unfinished and overgrown with weeds.
Ubong Edet contributed to this investigation.
Mar 30, 2016
Declaration by the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), March 2016
To Berta Cáceres and the Lenca People, the struggle continues!
In March, the world commemorates two important dates: International Women’s Day (March 8) and International Day of Forests (March 21). Women play a key role in the conservation of and struggles to defend forests, water and land. The misnamed “Green Economy,” rooted in the patriarchal capitalist system, generates and deepens gender injustice—especially and disproportionately impacting women.
In recent years, “official” discussions on the importance of forests have gained such notoriety, that the United Nations General Assembly decided to launched the International Day of Forests in 2013, with the aim of raising awareness about the importance of forests. However, these discussions do not address the direct and underlying causes of deforestation, quite the opposite. Forests and the biological diversity they contain have been reduced to providers of “ecosystem services,” which can be assigned an economic value; allowing for the expansion of corporate opportunities for profit. This process is part of the “Green Economy,” (1) and it is intensified by the United Nations’ and FAO’s erroneous definition of forests, which does not distinguish them from monoculture tree plantations. (2)
The “Green Economy” does not mean transforming the current economy into a non-harmful one that respects forests and recognizes the importance of the people who depend on them. On the contrary, its proponents seek something very different. The forests of the “Green Economy” reinforce the colonial notion of “preserving” a collection of species that must remain untouched by humans. Denying the role that people have played in forest conservation over thousands of years especially impacts women. It is precisely women who have played a key role in the conservation and traditional use of forests, the transmission of traditional knowledge, and the provision of food, water and medicine for their communities. They also have a leading role in resistance struggles to defend their territories.
The “Green Economy” has facilitated the spread of offset projects, such as REDD+ and biodiversity compensation mechanisms, where polluting companies responsible for deforestation can continue their activities by claiming they are “offsetting” the destruction they cause. Thus, forests are in service to the same oppressive and patriarchal economy that continues unabated, with its attendant destruction.
And what has happened to women in this “Green Economy” push?
“Conservation” projects like REDD+ tend to impose a host of restrictions on communities’ traditional use of forests, arguing that these traditional uses are the main cause of deforestation. Meanwhile, they allow the expansion of oil, gas and mining exploitation, industrial monoculture plantations, the construction of mega highways and dams, among other projects.
Experience with REDD+ and similar projects and programs has shown how these projects drastically change the lives of forest-dependent communities. They are imposed without proper consultation, let alone consent, and they have deprived communities’ access to their territories and forests vital to their survival (3). Communities that have lived in forests for countless generations now face laws, regulations and contracts that seek to prevent them from continuing their traditions, livelihoods and ways of life. And those communities facing growing capitalist exploitation must continue fighting eviction, pollution and the violence that this entails. In this context, women are greatly affected.
The dominant patriarchal system has assigned to women the tasks of food provision, housework and family care. Prohibiting and restricting their use of forests implies a greater and more difficult workload for women, in order to carry out the tasks of subsistence farming, collecting water and medicines, etc. In addition, the increased workload further limits women’s possibilities to actively participate in decision-making processes, to which they are invaluable and which are important to women, too. The Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change against REDD+ states that “REDD+ clearly constitutes a new form of violence against women, because it limits or prevents their access to land where they grow and harvest food and obtain water for their families.” (4) In rural communities throughout the world, such activities are mostly in women’s hands; even as they own less, inherit less and generally have less access to community assets.
Another negative impact of the “Green Economy” specifically affecting women is the increase in violence by police forces that companies or states hire to monitor these projects. There are numerous accounts of women telling of violence police exert upon breaking into houses and carrying weapons without authorization (5).
An attack on food sovereignty, territory and communities’ autonomy is a direct attack on the vital role of women.
The logic of the “Green Economy” increases economic and political interests in land. On the one hand, offset mechanisms facilitate extractive activities, plantations, dams, infrastructure, etc.—intensifying the destruction. And on the other hand, land grabbing of forest areas for “conservation” projects that house “ecosystem services,” craved by capital interests, further increases pressure on territories. This double land grabbing has consequently led to an increase in conflict and sparked resistance struggles. This in turn has led to militarization and the use of satellite and drone technologies to conduct surveillance on communities living in forest areas that have been designated as “ecosystem services” providers. This significantly increases the violence.
Women are central in processes of resistance to the “Green Economy,” just as they are in processes of building other paths toward radical, supportive and restorative social transformation. As Berta Cáceres, defender of the Lenca people asserted: In our worldview, we are beings that come from the earth, the water and the corn. The Lenca people are ancestral custodians of the rivers, and we are protected by spirits of the girls who teach us that giving life in many ways to defend rivers is giving life for the good of humanity and this planet….Merely contemplating the self-destruction caused by capitalist, racist and patriarchal pillaging will shake our consciences.
There are countless examples of organizations and struggles led by the strength of women—walking together, learning, building solidarity and inventing new ways of creative and courageous resistance.
We stand in solidarity with the struggles of women defending forests and land.
- See WRM Newsletter 222. “The Green Economy: giving
(2) Watch WRM’s video about the FAO’s promotion of the International Day of Forests , http://wrm.org.uy/other-relevant-information/in-relation-to-water-plantations-are-not-forests-either/
(3) See WRM’s book, “REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies” http://wrm.org.uy/es/libros-e-informes/redd-una-coleccion-de-conflictos-contradicciones-y-mentiras/
(4) http://www.ienearth.org/global-alliance-of-indigenous-peoples-and-local-communities-on-climate-change-against-redd-and-for-life/
(5) http://wrm.org.uy/es/articulos-del-boletin-wrm/seccion1/economia-verde-en-brasil-mujeres-relatan-los-impactos-del-proyecto-redd-de-spvs-y-de-un-area-protegida-de-la-fundacion-boticario/
Mar 23, 2016
By Chris Lang 15 March 2016
AB 32 REDD, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (or AB 32) requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. A cap and trade mechanism is part of AB 32. In 2013, the cap was set at 2% below the emissions forecast for 2013. In 2014, it was set at 2% lower.
Every year from 2015 to 2020, the cap reduces by 3%. The first thing to note about these emissions reductions targets is that they are pathetically low. Better than nothing perhaps, but not by much. AB 32 was passed in 2006. The first emissions reduction targets were seven years later.
In 2011, Kevin Anderson wrote that “Annex 1 nations need 8 to 10% p.a. emission reductions”, in order to “remain within their fair contribution to the 2°C carbon budget”. His analysis was based on recorded emissions from 2009/10, since when emissions have increased. By 2014, Anderson was arguing that reductions need to be more than 10% per year:
“if we are serious about avoiding the 2°C characterization of dangerous climate change, then those absolute reductions need to be in double figures (i.e. over 10% p.a.).”
(The “we” in Anderson’s sentence refers to “companies, governments and individuals, at least the wealthier among us”.)
The low targets are further weakened by the “trade” part of California’s cap and trade scheme. Instead of reducing their emissions, companies covered by AB 32 can buy carbon offsets to meet 8% of their emissions target. AB 32 sets limits for the total number of carbon offsets that can be used in each compliance period:
2013-2014: 25.8 MMtCO2e
2015-2017: 91.8 MMtCO2e
2018-2020: 83.1 MMtCO2e
In total, 200 million carbon offsets can be used between 2013 and 2020. That’s 200 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution that will not be cleaned up in California.
The companies that benefit from carbon offsets are some of the most polluting companies in California. Recently, the California Environmental Justice Alliance listed the top ten offset users in California:
The California Environmental Justice Alliance is a community-led alliance that works to reduce pollution in California. The organizations vision is a future in California without fossil fuels and dirty energy, where the lives of people and communities are more important than corporate profits, and without discrimination against low-income communities and communities of color.
The California Environmental Justice Alliance is campaigning against the inclusion of REDD offsets in California’s cap and trade scheme:
In reality, offsets are a huge loophole that give big corporations a cheaper way to pollute without making real emissions reductions on site – or at all. Offsets are also dangerous because they do nothing to reduce our burning of fossil fuels that cause irreversible damage to our biosphere.
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) are international offset projects that claim to preserve forests in tropical countries. Despite widespread critique of offsets and REDD, California is poised to adopt REDD forestry offset credits into its Compliance Offset Program in 2016.
The California Environmental Justice Alliance is encouraging people to write to the California Air Resources Board opposing REDD.
An infographic explains why:
The California Environmental Justice Alliance puts forward the following arguments against REDD:
Why do we need to keep REDD out of California?
1. Big Businesses Win While Communities Suffer
Since California’s top offset buyers are the state’s most profitable oil companies and big utilities, those standing to gain the most from REDD are big corporations, carbon consultants (offset brokers), and speculators. Offsets also discourage California-based polluters from making greater emissions reductions on site, which threatens our state’s most vulnerable communities. While nearly half of all Californians live within six miles of a polluting facility, they are disproportionately people of color (62 percent compared to 38 percent of whites).
2. Human Rights Violations Against Indigenous Peoples Around the Globe
REDD gives governments, loggers, miners, lawyers, traders, brokers, and Wall Street an opportunity to control and profit off of Indigenous Peoples’ forests. Many Indigenous groups living in REDD territories face the threat of land grabs, institutional violence, evictions, and imprisonment for continuing their cultural practices on the land.
3. Increased Deforestation and Toxic Emissions
REDD does not equal less emissions: The idea behind all offset projects is that they must create actual reductions in emissions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, but all these additional emissions reductions, are difficult – if not impossible – to prove.
REDD creates the perverse incentive of designating more forests for clearcutting: Governments are encouraged to cut down more trees now in order to claim that they are reducing deforestation later.
Protections for forests can be reversed: Even when a government pledges to “avoid deforestation” in an area for a certain number of years, it can later turn around and cut down that same forest after that period is over.
REDD doesn’t make scientific sense: When fossil fuels are extracted and then burned, it increases the net amount of carbon circulating in the biosphere. Trees are also part of the natural carbon cycle, unlike fossil fuels. So no amount of planting or saving trees can make up for all the CO2 that gets added to our climate when fossil fuels are burned.
Dec 15, 2014
Lima, 11 December 2014
The Summit of peoples climate change, held in Lima from 8 to 11 December 2014, is expression of the processes of mobilization and resistance undertaken by a variety of organizations, movements, platforms, networks and collective social, labor, women, indigenous, peasant, youth, environmental, religious, artistic and cultural Peruvian and international. We met to continue discussing and sharing the multiple forms of struggle and resistance, the construction of social justice, against the capitalist system, patriarchal, racist and homophobic, for the respect of the various forms of life, without exploitation and plundering of the resources of nature, by the ability of peoples to decide on their energy sources community, by the reduction of social inequalities, as well as promote good living as a model of life in harmony with nature and mother earth.
Capital seeks to deal with their systemic crisis by imposing the capture water, the sacking of the territories and the natural heritage, predation, fossil fuel production, the increased exploitation of workers, the repression of the social movements and the physical and psychological violence, increasing multiple forms of criminalization of struggles of peoples militarization and territorial control. This is encouraged by media corporations. In addition, this reality you must add capture States and their bureaucracies by economic power, the payment of debts, unjust and corrupt, and a variety of events that benefit exclusively to the true powers after Governments, docile to the mandate of national enterprises and large transnational corporations and their political operatives.
At this juncture the people’s Summit represents the voice of the areas exploited and oppressed of the world, of the marginalized by economic and cultural system that subordinates them to racist, fundamentalist, sexist and employers who benefit from the capitalist model. At this crucial moment facing humanity, in which very serious climate change we are currently experiencing requires urgent part of global society actions, demand to Governments and the United Nations system met the COP 20 agreements that respect and value the life of urban, rural and native peoples, and to promote the preservation of global biodiversity. We reject any market mechanism arising as a solution to climate and environmental problems.
Who we met at this Summit, we collect and make part of processes of earlier struggles that have woven in our villages, and reach this point with that force and collective construction. From this we express and we demand:
The Governments of the world who respect our territories, rights and lifestyles, our cultures, customs and world views on life and the world we inhabit. We denounce the exploitation of our natural resources and territories by extractive industries, affecting our ways of living, our source of identity and the harmonious relationship of our communities with mother earth. We demand the recognition of land ownership of the communities that have traditionally lived on their land. We do not accept external control of the territories, nor the processes of negotiation and implementation of the false solutions to the climate. Governments should have as the central axis of our ancestral ways of life respect and recognition to our self-determination as Nations and peoples.
We demand the States open a debate with civil society on the concept of net emissions avoided, allowing a climate deal 2015 to compensate non-industrialized countries for not exploiting fossil energy sources and so they can finance their energy matrix transformation. We urge adoption of a global tax on international financial transactions, which provide sufficient funds to ensure a just transition towards an inclusive model of social justice.
We also clarified that the set of initiatives to reverse the destructive climatic trend toward which our planet, has been conducted should be considered the historical responsibilities of developed countries and the recognition and repair of historical and ecological debt they have with the global South. In particular, transnational corporations from developed countries private capital must be held responsible for their actions and practices globally. We demand full justice in cases of pollution by Newmont, Doeran in Peru, and Chevron-Texaco, among others, which during his tenure in the Amazon left as a legacy one of the biggest ecocides in the history of the planet.
Governments and companies we demand they accept and respect our human right to decent work, with full exercise of individual and collective rights, and to ensure a transition process fair in a world that will allow us to improve the quality of life. Guarantees universal access to protection and social security systems, we demand respect for our freedom of Association and to a fair and equitable distribution of the wealth produced with our work and expertise.
We believe that no action to tackle climate change will be viable or efficient if not is promoted with effective public policies in favour of small peasant and family agriculture, agrarian reform, sovereignty and food security of our peoples, the auto production sustainable, based agro-ecological, native and free of GMO and pesticides, oriented to human consumption and the preservation of biodiversity. We believe that to move towards a just world and a local economy, solidarity-based, cooperative, feminist and community, it is essential to recognize the human right to food, as well as the great contribution of peasant family farming, which contributes more than 70% of the power in the world. We demand to stop the production and expansion of agrofuels, that promote deforestation, erosion of the land, the source of water and air pollution, and mean a form of territorial recolonization.
As an expression of this strategy of capital, the processes of privatization, marketization and financialization of nature, expressed in the principles of the green economy, which presents us with the false solutions to the climate crisis have intensified in recent years. Some of them are: mechanisms of clean development (CDM), projects for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation of forests (REDD), transgenic, agrofuels, geoengineering, nuclear plants, hydroelectric megaprojects, split hydraulics (“fracking”), climate-smart agriculture.
The strategy of capital also goes through what we call architecture of the impunity of transnational corporations and Governments, through the Treaty of free trade and protection of investments, among others, seeking to privatize essential services such as water, education, health and housing, and threaten the human rights of workers and peoples. The people’s Summit rejects all of these strategies of capital.
As we expressed before, denounce the capitalista-patriarcal system that maintains the oppression and control over the body, work and life of women, promotes sexual violence and trafficking, it marginalizes them from various fields of social and public life. It is necessary to move to another social division of labour, that eliminates the subordination of women’s work, that does not invisibilice the work of care that enables social reproduction or subordinated it to the mandates of the market. We demand a radical change that recognizes the reproductive work as the basis of human sustainability and the relationship between individuals and communities. All alternatives should incorporate a feminist perspective and promote a fairer relationship between men and women.
We advocate the promotion of a consumption responsible and not alienated, based on the adoption of habits and consumption patterns, and according to the need for human, not subject to the ambition of the capital. A consumer who does not contribute to environmental pollution or climate change. We encourage the responsible use of vital resources, recycling and sustainable management of solid waste. We are committed to promoting awareness citizen with respect to the actions that we can take forward individually and collectively to advance towards a world more just.
States should take decisions and measures of protection, conservation and restoration of watersheds, ecosystems, high mountains, wetlands, wetlands, moors, steppes, forests, aquifers, lakes, rivers, springs, coastal marine zones, which feed on mother earth. These ecosystems and water sources are affected by the activities of the extractive industries, such as mining, oil, coal and gas, the felling of trees and the bravery of waste, among other causes. It must guarantee the human right to water and sanitation, in equal conditions, access and health. This only they can guarantee with companies public in hands public.
The Summit of peoples questions the inconsistency of the Peruvian Government in its capacity as President of the COP 20. By environmental, labor and tax policies recently adopted in favour of private investment by lowering standards and regulations that affect groups, environmental and cultural rights. We denounce the repression suffered by indigenous representatives, trade union leaders and peasants, environmental activists, as well as the harassment to delegations that arrived at the Summit of peoples from different regions of the country and abroad.
The Summit of peoples questions the corporate capture of the framework Convention of the United Nations on climate change. Large transnational corporations “to companan” to Governments in the global negotiations to agree on measures that have the sole purpose cleaning responsibilities to industrialized countries by their gas emissions of greenhouse effect gases and for being the main cause of climate change. We demand that payments for services of external and internal debt – which choke the people and limit the ability of States to meet basic needs of the populations, intended to deal with the environmental and climate crisis because it depends on the survival of humanity and all living species on the planet.
The people’s Summit salutes the committed and enthusiastic mobilization of tens of thousands of citizens from around the world who participated in the great Global March in defense of mother earth (10/Dec) in Lima and other cities of the planet. This large concentration of organizations, movements, and delegations of the Peru and numerous countries is the clearest expression of the position of the people in favour of a just and democratic world that ensures harmony between human existence and the rights of nature and mother earth.
We will continue to strengthen the articulation of our struggles, active and permanently in multiple demonstrations of 2015, with a special moment of activism in Paris, France, where the COP 21 will take place. Now the social movements of the world prepare to give continuity to the struggles from our territories in defense of life, until our demands are met. We will continue in the struggle to change the system… Not the climate.
Summit of the peoples
Lima December 10, 2014
Dec 12, 2014
From Democracy Now
The controversial carbon trading scheme known as REDD, or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, has set off protests not only in Africa, but also in South America, especially in the Amazon region. We speak to Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Federation of the Huni Kui, an indigenous group in Brazil. He has traveled to the U.N. climate summit in Lima to voice his opposition to REDD.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn right now to the controversial carbon trading that [Nnimmo Bassey] was talking about, known as REDD—again, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, R-E-D-D, which has set off protests not only in Africa, but also in South America, especially in the Amazon. Earlier this week, I interviewed Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Federation of the Huni Kui, an indigenous group in Brazil. He traveled to Lima to voice his opposition to REDD.
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] My name is Ninawa, and I am the president of the Federation of the Huni Kui people in Acre, Brazil, in the Brazilian Amazon.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many people do you represent?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] I represent 10,400 people in 90 villages in two indigenous territories in five provinces of the state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about why you’ve come to Lima for the U.N. climate summit? What is your message?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] I came to Lima with the hope of telling the world that the historic discussions here at COP 20, amongst the 195 countries and indigenous people of the world and civil society of the world, on climate change are historic. Of course, the peoples of the world include indigenous peoples of the world, and we are here to denounce the problems that the governments are causing in our territories.
My message is from my people and the children and elders of my community. And we are saying that the climate change proposals that the government is tabling here at the United Nations are false solutions to climate change. Specifically, we are here to denounce REDD—R-E-D-D, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.
AMY GOODMAN: How does REDD affect your community?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] So, the first impact is that the state of Acre is one of the first states in the world that is promoting REDD, and it is the first state of the Brazilian Amazon that is doing REDD. And it has already violated Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which guarantees indigenous people’s right to free, prior, informed consent and the right to say no to projects that affect us. So, Brazil is violating Convention 169, because indigenous peoples have not been consulted about REDD and it is moving forward.
So, the second impact of REDD is that it has divided indigenous leaders, who before were united to defend the territories and Mother Earth. A third impact of REDD is that it has resulted in the co-optation of some leaders who have accepted money and bought cars with that money, and they don’t even know where that money is from and what it means.
Another impact is that the government of Brazil, because it is opening its doors to this carbon-offset mechanism, is that it’s gutting the laws and the legal framework on indigenous people’s rights and the guarantees that have been enshrined to protect our rights to our territories.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the effect on the ground of REDD? What happens in your community when it’s enforced?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] The impacts are the following: The community is no longer to fish in their own land, to cultivate food, to practice agriculture. All of these activities are banned and have been declared illegal, and people are jailed if they participate in agriculture or go fishing.
So, another impact that is a very cruel impact of REDD pilot projects is that leaders are being criminalized for opposing the project, and communities are told that the services provided for education or transportation or healthcare will be suspended if they oppose the project.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the communities expected to do? Are they given the money to move?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] The truth of what is happening in Acre is that there’s now a program that pays the community. The program is called Bolsa Floresta. And a family gets 300 reais for three months, which isn’t enough to live on, and then they’re banned and prohibited from going into the forest, so that the government can sell carbon credits to multinational corporations in other parts of the world to offset their pollution.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you been offered money?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] Yes, the government of Acre offered two million reais to my community. They said it was to motivate strengthening our culture, but we understood it as a precursor to winning the acceptance of signing a REDD contract.
AMY GOODMAN: And who are the corporations and the government entities, states in the United States, that are doing this in Brazil?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] There are many actors that are promoting REDD in Acre and that have given money to the state of Acre to do REDD. One of them is the state of California in the United States. But there are also multinational corporations that are offering money to the Acre government to do REDD. And in August of 2014, Germany gave the government of Acre $280 million reais to do REDD.
AMY GOODMAN: Ninawa, you talked about the criminalization of leaders who oppose REDD. You’re a leader who opposes REDD. Have you been threatened?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] Yes, I have received threats, but I’m not the only one who has received threats. Leaders of the Mundurukú indigenous people have also received threats for resisting REDD. And other peoples and leaders are persecuted and criminalized, and our right and freedom of expression and of association and our freedom to struggle and to resist this and to oppose it is being violated. I, myself, have denounced REDD and have also received death threats.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ninawa, what do you say to those that say this is an environmental solution, that if corporations or states or countries are going to pollute, then they want to invest in places that remain pristine, that are not polluted?
NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] So, I respond to those that say that it’s a solution, that REDD is not a solution to climate change. It is a false solution to climate change. And furthermore, indigenous peoples are not the ones that are causing climate change. In Brazil, in Mato Grosso, the biggest soy baron is receiving funding and subsidies from the Brazilian government to cut down forests. This is not a solution to climate change. And furthermore, REDD is criminalizing us. And really, if they care about real solutions, they’ve got to talk to the logging companies, the soy barons, the corporations that are polluting and destroying nature. Indigenous peoples protect Mother Earth. We defend our mother, because she is our mother, because she gives us food. She gives us the air that we breathe. She gives us the Amazon. And the Amazon is important not just for indigenous peoples; it’s important for the whole world.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Huni Kui people in Acre, Brazil, as he sings us through our break.
Dec 11, 2014
“As long as nature is seen as property in law, there can be no justice for communities, the climate or nature”
The International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature took place on 5 and 6 December 2014 in Lima. On trial were corporations, the United Nations, and government. Cases included mining in Peru and Ecuador, oil extraction in Ecuador, the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, fracking in Bolivia and the USA, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, damage to the Australian Barrier Reef. And REDD.
The judges referred to the Rights of Nature and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010.
The president of the tribunal was Alberto Acosta, former president of the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador. Acosta said,
“As long as nature is seen as property in law, there can be no justice for communities, the climate or nature.”
The case against REDD at the Tribunal is explained here:
REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) is a global initiative to create a financial value for the carbon stored in native forests and tree plantations, soils and agriculture, including plankton and algae in the oceans. This involves the opening of the carbon cycling capacity of the Earth to economic valuation and trading in financial market systems. Indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, small farmers and peasants view REDD as a false solution for mitigating climate change that have resulted in land grabs, evictions and human rights abuses. REDD is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, trees and land by selling nature and air to generate permits to pollute. These permits to pollute also known as carbon or emission credits are used by polluters to avoid reducing greenhouse gas emissions at source. This Tribunal on REDD and forests will listen to testimonies on the concern of REDD and other carbon and emissions trading and offset regimes violating the rights established in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
Mary Lou Malig of the Global Forest Coalition spoke against carbon markets:
“[They’re] basically a mechanism to cheat. It’s about enabling you to pollute. Instead of cutting your emissions, you increase them and pretend to reduce by offsetting.”
Ninawa Kaxinawá, president of the Huni Kui people in Acre, Brazil spoke out against REDD. “Nature has no price. It’s our forest, it’s our food, it’s our spirit.”
In an interview with Democracy Now, Ninawa explains that REDD prevents communities from fishing on their own land and from practising agriculture. He says that, “leaders are being criminalized for opposing the project, and communities are told that the services provided for education or transportation or healthcare will be suspended if they oppose the project.” Ninawa has received death threats for opposing REDD.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now asked Ninawa how REDD affects his community. Here’s his reply:
The first impact is that the state of Acre is one of the first states in the world that is promoting REDD, and it is the first state of the Brazilian Amazon that is doing REDD. And it has already violated Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which guarantees indigenous people’s right to free, prior, informed consent and the right to say no to projects that affect us. So, Brazil is violating Convention 169, because indigenous peoples have not been consulted about REDD and it is moving forward.
The second impact of REDD is that it has divided indigenous leaders, who before were united to defend the territories and Mother Earth.
A third impact of REDD is that it has resulted in the co-optation of some leaders who have accepted money and bought cars with that money, and they don’t even know where that money is from and what it means.
Another impact is that the government of Brazil, because it is opening its doors to this carbon-offset mechanism, is that it’s gutting the laws and the legal framework on indigenous people’s rights and the guarantees that have been enshrined to protect our rights to our territories.
You can watch the full interview here:
Cassandra Smithie, a translator and interpreter, and Ivonne Yanez of Oilwatch presented evidence against REDD. Here’s how the Guardian reported Smithie’s contribution:
Casandra Smithie went even further, citing a whole series of peoples who have struggled against, or have been threatened by, Redd and calling it a “crime against Mother Earth, Father Sky, and humanity.” The key perpetrators, she noted, such as the UN, the World Bank, extractive industries, multilateral banks, chemical companies, governments and stock exchanges, all have their headquarters in the industrialised northern countries.
“[Redd gives] permits to pollute,” Smithie told the Tribunal. “[It means] forests of the world acting as a sponge for northern industrial countries’ pollution. They can pollute if they grab forests in the global south.”
Dec 10, 2014
Lima, Peru (Dec. 7, 2014)– The International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature judged twelve international and domestic cases; examining the violation of the rights of peoples and nature committed by corporations, The United Nations, and governmental entities. The judgments reference the legal framework of the Rights of Nature and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. The cases were reviewed on Dec. 5th and 6th in Lima’s Gran Hotel Bolivar.
According to Alberto Acosta, president of the Tribunal and former president of the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador, the rights of nature must have a universal validity. “This ethical tribunal arises when States fail to fulfill their obligation to preserve the lives of living beings,” said Acosta. “As long as nature is seen as property in law, there can be no justice for communities, the climate or nature.”
The Tribunal was dedicated to Shuar leader, José Tendentza, who was found murdered just days before the Tribunal. Tendentza of Southern Ecuador was scheduled to present the Condor Mine case. Acosta led the 13 judges through 12 cases that were determined by the judges to demonstrate egregious violations to rights of nature and human rights. Cases included:
False Solutions related to Climate Change and REDD+;
Peruvian cases: Conga Mine, Bagua Massacre – Defenders of Earth, 4 River Basins of Peru;
Ecuadorian cases: Condor Mine, Chevron/Texaco, and Yasuni ITT
Brazil: Belo Monte Dam
USA and Bolivia: Hydraulic fracturing “fracking”
Oceans: BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, coal mine and other threats to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
Of the cases, the oil exploitation of the Yasuni territory of Ecuador was condemned in addition to the relentless persecution Yasunidos are facing for their dissent. Since 2013, the Ecuadorian government green-lighted oil drilling in Yasuni National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world and home to two indigenous nations in voluntary isolation.
In protest, a group of young Yasunidos joined together to claim the rights of nature, which are guaranteed in the Constitution of Ecuador. They collected more than 800,000 signatures to call for a referendum on the oil exploitation, but their request was rejected by electoral institutions. The Yasunidos are now suing the Ecuadorian government, led by President Rafael Correa, and are waiting for their complaint to be reviewed by the tribunal of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH).
Additionally, the Tribunal for the Rights of Nature found Chevron-Texaco in Ecuador to be guilty of using inappropriate technology and causing irreversible damage to the environment. They determined that the corporation must fully compensate those affected by the environmental impact.
The Peruvian cases of Conga and Bagua were accepted as threats of violation to the rights of nature. An international special commission was appointed to visit the impacted Amazonian basins to collect more information on the contamination.
The case of the mining project in the Cordillera del Condor was found by the Tribunal to be in direct violation of the rights of nature. They determined that mining must be suspended and those affected must be compensated. They urge the state to investigate and punish those responsible for the death of José Tendentza, the prominent social activist that was in opposition to the mining.
Shannon Biggs, director of Movement Rights, shared testimony on the impacts of fracking [Hydraulic Fracturing], a process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. “You cannot do safe fracking,” said Biggs. “This technique should have never been invented. It is one of the most destructive activities against the environment ever seen.”
According to Biggs, 800,000 active oil and gas wells are being fracked in the United States, producing roughly 300,000 natural gas barrels per day. Severe water pollution and earthquakes have been linked with fracking. “We die from fracking. The population is suffering from cancer; my sister has died,” said Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca) of Oklahoma in her testimony. “The water is contaminated; we cannot fish. We are in danger of extinction.”
Plans to develop large-scale hydraulic fracking in Bolivia were reported by Martin Vilela of Platform Climate Reaction. In recent years the country has increased the production and export of natural gas. 82.4% of its production is exported, generating more than six billion dollars a year. Bolivia has 8.23 trillion cubic feet of gas, and YPFB plans to invest over 40 million dollars between 2013 and 2015. Vilela explained that in 2013 this corporation signed an agreement for fracking in the Chaco area, a region with water scarcity to extract 48 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Estimates determine that this would consume between 112 and 335 billion liters of water.
Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian architect, environmental activist presented on the contamination and temperature rise affecting Nigeria. According to Bassey, oil fields and pipelines have caused deep environmental degradation, deforestation, and countless oil spills. Life expectancy in these impacted areas is 44 years.
Bassey warned that climate change will have catastrophic consequences. “For every degree the temperature rises globally, in Africa it will rise an additional 50%.” In 2012 floods in Nigeria led to the relocation of 6 million inhabitants. Bassey speculates that in 2030 Africa violent conflicts will increase by 54% due to the lack of access to natural resources.
At the hearing on “false climate solutions,” geoengineering techniques that seek to manipulate climate without changing the conditions that cause climate change were reviewed.
REDD+ was also put on trial. President of the Huni Kui people of Acre, Brazil, Ninawa Kaxinawá (Hunikui) testified that “REDD is a lie. We do not accept putting nature on market because it is our soul and spirit; it is priceless, it is our voice.”
According to Ruth Nyambura, of the Biodiversity Network Africa, says that in Kenya, evictions are occurring as a result of REDD. “Four indigenous people were arrested,” said Nyambura. “A woman was hit by the forest service because she was outside of her land.”
The Tribunal is calling for a special hearing in Paris in 2015 to coincide with the upcoming UN COP 21 summit.
