Manuel Pulgar Vidal at REDD+ press conference on Monday
On Monday Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Peruvian environment minister and President of the COP20 opened a special press release celebrating REDD+. “It is a REDD+ day. It is a day to celebrate because we are getting closer to REDD+ implementation in developing countries.” The room was packed and buzzing, with many in attendance wearing ‘REDD+ Day’ badges and beaming smiles, as leaders from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico presented pledges to submit forest carbon reference levels to the UN REDD+ program. Richard Kinley, UNFCCC Deputy Executive Secretary announced, “today signals that REDD+ under the UN convention actually works, and that we’re moving from words on paper to action on the ground.”
Earlier in the day I had joined several activists in staging an action within the COP against REDD+. So what is REDD+ and why the disagreement?
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries, or REDD+, is a program of action aimed at incentivising the reduction of deforestation, through providing financial incentives to protect forests. Deforestation accounts for 20% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than the total transport sector and second only to energy, so protecting forests is an important component to addressing the climate crisis.
Unfortunately early REDD+ projects are perpetuating the same patterns of injustice and neocolonial appropriation that we have come to associate with fossil fuel extraction agendas. REDD+ is quickly accumulating a swag of human rights abuses, such as forced evictions, loss of land, and a lack of respect for indigenous rights. It has become apparent that carbon traders and governments are the ones who will profit from REDD+ projects, not the communities who are most directly impacted.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People, Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, concedes that the reality of many REDD+ projects is that Free, Prior and Informed consent of indigenous people is not being respected. She said at an official side event on Monday night, “We need to protect those who have been protecting the forest since time immemorial, and are willing to lay down their lives to protect it.”
Can adequate safeguards solve the problem? Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environment Network, doesn’t believe so. There is currently no mechanism for redress, or even to raise complaints, so it is unclear what will happen if conditions are violated. It will likely be up to the individual country to reconcile this – countries which are already legally bound to human rights standards, yet are failing to address the recent number of murders of environmentalists. Furthermore, Goldtooth sees the cost of safeguard implementation as prohibitive to countries truly committing to their implementation, as the attraction of REDD+ for governments is as a revenue stream. It is no surprise then that REDD+ negotiations collapsed last week because of a lack of agreement on safeguard information systems.
Even more fundamentally, REDD+ fails to address the root causes of deforestation, and treats forests only as carbon stocks, ignoring their role as functioning ecosystems which provide a range of benefits and services. The language of ‘enhancement of forest carbon stocks’ allows for industrial logging and conversion of native forest to plantation forests, reducing biodiversity and adversely impacting forest dependent communities. REDD+ attempts to solve the climate crisis with the same logic that created it, creating forest offsets which merely provide a panacea for developed nations’ guilt, while allowing them to continue with business as usual.
So if not REDD+, than what? NZYD would rather see a global emphasis on Land Tenure Reform, as collectively demarcating and titling indigenous people’s territories and land has proven to be one of the most effective ways of reducing deforestation. In her presentation on Monday, Tauli-Corpuz pointed out that from 2000-2012 deforestation within indigenous territories was less than 1%, as compared with 7% outside of these territories. There is a growing body of evidence for this; for example community managed forests in Brazil have been shown to have eleven times lower deforestation rates than surrounding regions. Recognition of traditional land ownership is the main demand coming from indigenous activists here at COP20, in order to protect their forests and collective rights. Across the Amazon rainforest, formal land title is lacking across nearly 100 million hectares of native land, according to the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), a vocal advocacy group here at COP.
Personally I saw nothing to celebrate on Monday, and felt more than a little uncomfortable with the self-congratulatory nature of the REDD+ themed events I attended. If the early stages of REDD+ are anything to go by, this program is going to create more problems than it solves. The world needs to pay attention to the demands of indigenous people, respect indigenous land rights, and value forests as more than mere carbon stocks.
Indigenous Peoples + Territorial Rights = Living Forests. Viva Amazonia action last weekend in Lima