Two views of California?s new cap and trade programme, both looking at problematic forestry offsets. The first looks into carbon offsets from forestry operations in California. The second looks at the impact of REDD-type projects in Chiapas, Mexico.
Last week, NBC Bay Area broadcast a short investigation into the risks of using California?s forest operations to generate carbon offsets by ?improving forestry management?. Bruce Castle, an activist with Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch tells NBC Bay Area, ?This is a bonus to them to be collecting millions of dollars for the carbon offsets that they were going to do anyway.?
Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) has a carbon offset proposal that, if approved by the Air Resources Board, could see SPI earning millions of dollars for trees that were planted 15 to 20 years ago.
Brian Nowicki of the Center for Biological Diversity explains how the rules have been weakened to accommodate the timber industry:
?Under earlier versions of the California Carbon Offset programs forest clear cutting was not allowed to qualify as a reduction, as a carbon offset program? This most recent version (of the Cap and Trade law) that we are using now has as part of the carbon offset program a written cooperation with the timber industry in order to accommodate their current business practices and that explicitly includes forest clear cutting? ?By saying that business as usual forest practices should qualify and not putting in criteria that would improve forest management in California, or don?t forget other states, as well, because the program exists outside our borders is a tremendous missed opportunity.?
Click on the image below to watch NBC Bay Area?s report:
California?s carbon offsets can also be sourced from overseas, including from the forests of Chiapas in Mexico, under the Governors? Climate and Forests Taskforce, an agreement signed when Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California. Global Justice Ecology Project has documented the impacts of REDD-type forest conservation on local communities in Chiapas since visiting the area in March 2011.
A couple of days ago, an article was published in La Jornada about a report by the Network for Peace Chiapas (the report can be viewed or downloaded below in Spanish) critical of two state programmes that are closely linked to the REDD-type activities in Chiapas: the Productive Reconversion of Agriculture (that aims to stop farmers growing subsistence crops like maize in favour of industrial products like rubber and oil palm), and the Sustainable Rural Cities Programme (that moves peasant farming communities into prefab housing settlements supposedly as a way to ?improve their economic conditions?). It?s difficult to imagine a more Orwellian title than ?Sustainable Rural Cities? to describe the rows of badly built, badly designed shacks that rural communities are being moved into.
The commodification of forests justifies displacing communities in Chiapas
By Hermann Bellinghausen, La Jornada, 20 May 2012
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas., May 20. Among the main economic motives for displacing communities from their forest homes is the sale of carbon credits, say civil society groups belonging to the Network for Peace Chiapas (SIPAZ, Desmi, Frayba and others). At COP 16 (Conference of the Parties) in Canc?n in December 2010, Mexico entered the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD Plus) program, whose basic idea is that countries that are willing and able to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation should be financially compensated.
In a 122-page report, critical of the Sustainable Rural Cities project and the environmental policy of the state of Chiapas, released this week, civil society groups recall that the state governor signed an agreement with his then-counterparts in California (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and in Acre, Brazil, (Arnobius Marques de Almeida), which initiated a market for buying and selling carbon credits as part of REDD Plus.
In 2009 the Action Program on Climate Change in Chiapas (PACCCH) was established with support from the British Embassy, Conservation International, conservation NGOs (?acting as intermediaries with the communities?) and academic institutions such as El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, which have worked with the National Forestry Commission to implement REDD Plus. There have been recent attempts by some of these groups to publicly distance themselves from the project, but these efforts have not been undertaken with sufficiently clarity.
The governor of Chiapas, the report notes, ?is convinced that taking part in ?payment for environmental services? is a project of life,? and he quotes the president: ?Your children and grandchildren will thank you because they will live, they will receive money for taking care of the environment, we are placing this bet for them, for the little ones, so you can be certain that your children will live in the future, will live from conserving the reserves, from tourism and from the production rubber or oil palm.?
The ?ecological? interests of these development plans involve the commodification of forests, for which the authorities deem it necessary that ?the communities within the reserves be relocated, or not use the land for farming, as they have agreed to do in El Triunfo, the reserve with which the Chiapas state government entered the market for carbon credits.? But the crown jewel in this market would be the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in the Lacandon jungle.
The report of the Network for Peace says: ?As is well known to Indigenous Peoples, corn, grown in Chiapas for thousands of years, has great nutritional and cultural importance.? Nevertheless, one of the government?s proposals for conserving biodiversity is for communities to stop planting corn. The president has said that corn ?does great harm to the planet, while the Reserve, which is the great wealth of its inhabitants, is being destroyed.?
REDD Plus promotes ?productive reconversion? to urge peasant farmers to stop producing their own food, like corn, and to cultivate products for fuel or building materials (such as rubber, and oil palm). The transnational sale of carbon being established in the forests of Chiapas also involves the displacement of communities to carry out another government project: the sustainable rural cities.
Translation from Spanish by Jeff Conant, for GJEP
The report mentioned in the article can be downloaded here (in Spanish) (11.0 MB).
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