New Zealand Youth Delegation

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

This week I had a slightly different experience of COP20 to that of my NZYD teammates, as I spent the week on the outside looking in. Entry to the official proceedings requires an accreditation pass, of which we were only able to secure four this year, so two of us have split one pass, giving us one week each. This gave me a a chance to simultaneously follow what was happening inside through my friends, while walking in the shoes of the many activists here in Lima who for one reason or another have not been granted access.

Voces por el Clima

My first stop was Voices for the Climate, an official COP20 event aimed at communicating climate change information to the public in an interactive and accessible way. Here I found a plethora of talks throughout the week broken into the broad categories of forests, mountains and water, oceans, energy and sustainable cities. I set up camp for a day at the forest pavilion where I heard a range of perspectives on forest carbon stock management, biodiversity, rights of indigenous and forest communities and the controversial United Nations REDD+ scheme. I heard stories from throughout the Amazon region, about the fauna, the people and the challenges they are facing. While I didn’t agree with everything I heard, it was fascinating to hear about work being done in the region and to learn more about the realities behind the statistics.

The other area which hooked me at Voces was the Indigenous Pavillion; the product of collaboration between the Peruvian Ministry of Environment, AIDESEP (Interethnic association for the development of the Amazon basin), and COICA (Coordinator of the Indigenous Organisations of theAmazon Basin), with support from the Norwegian government. Exhibition spaces weave a narrative around how climate impacts affect indigenous groups throughout Latin America and beyond, and challenge the dominant paradigm of extractive based ‘development’.

CasActiva

In another part of Lima activists gather to ‘Change the system, not the climate’ in a convergent space hosted by local organisation TierrActiva. The convergent space is provided for all people to come together for workshops, discussions, art, and action planning. When I discovered this little gem, I was welcomed by a beautiful wall to wall mural and a giant noticeboard covered in post-it notes about all the activities on offer. With my new friends I shared a delicious locally-sourced vegetarian meal prepared by volunteers, I made paper-meche corn cobs amid screen printing and weaving of giant dream catchers, and I met young people who plan to cycle 5,000km to COP21 in Paris next year. The coming together of diverse groups of people to work together towards a common goal creates a wonderful energy and is a working model for how to create the kind of change we want to see in the world.

Looking ahead

As I contemplate my week ahead within the COP, there is a small part of me which is questioning the need to enter at all. During my week on the outside I have encountered people and organisations which have spoken to certain ideas that have been percolating within me for some time. For me, the United Nations does not offer much hope. I have seen signs of the corporate capture of the COP process, and I am dissatisfied with the false and inadequate solutions being offered up, such as carbon trading and REDD+. I see that current market-based attempts to halt deforestation are simply re-entrenching existing inequalities and neo-colonial appropriation of resources in developing countries. I am increasingly convinced that we cannot achieve sufficient action on climate without addressing the root cause: the reality that our global system is inherently unsustainable, as it requires unrelenting economic growth fuelled by consumption of resources. Until we redefine our relationship with the earth and our way of relating to it, we are simply throwing band aids at a gaping wound.

So then why will I be entering COP20 tomorrow with my shiny new observer badge? Well, because I believe that it is still crucial to be there to contest that space. The absence of critical voices would grant free reign to governments to avoid implementing change, and mean that corporate influence, both on individual governments and the UNFCCC process itself would continue unchallenged. I believe, as do many others, that it is important to highlight the inadequacy of the UN process, shine a light on examples of corporate influence and communicate the need for deeper action to address this crisis. What’s more, there are a good number of voices which have not been granted access and whose concerns and experiences warrant a mouth piece on the inside, if only to be that nagging moral conscience as our negotiators stall the process.

Perhaps my experience as an ‘outsider’ at COP has radicalised me somewhat. But I also believe it has allowed me to synthesise my ideas about climate change and the UN process in a coherent manner, alongside others who feel many of the same things. Now I have the connections at my disposal to begin to engage with the question of what action is needed, and the confidence to engage with delegates and speak my truth, knowing the volume of stories which underlie my views.