WITHOUT MUCH stronger safeguards, the deal on the table here to protect forests – the world’s most important carbon sinks – will only “intensify and worsen” existing conflicts in regions such as the Amazon, according to critics.
The Accra Caucus on Forests and Climate Change, a coalition of more than 100 groups in 38 countries, issued this warning in the wake of the approval by Brazil’s senate of controversial changes in the country’s forest code that would reopen the Amazon to logging.
The proposed changes in the code – which have shocked conservationists – would provide an amnesty for illegal deforestation predating 2008, stop illegally deforested areas being fully restored and allow non-native species to be planted in Amazonia.
Conservation International called on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to honour her commitments to reduce deforestation and veto the legislation, which former environment minister Marina Silva said would have “devastating consequences for the climate”.
Luiz Alberto Figueriedo, head of Brazil’s delegation at the UN climate conference, insisted on Tuesday that his country was playing its part in the fight against climate change with the rate of deforestation in the Amazon now at its lowest level since monitoring began in 1988.
The draft text on REDD+ (the UN’s programme to reduce emissions from deforestation) – tabled for adoption in Durban today – “could result in the biggest land-grab of all time”, said Hortense Hidalgo, of the Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples.
By making forests available to developed countries as a vehicle for offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions “it will inevitably promote privatisation of forests and soils through carbon markets. This could commodify almost the entire surface of the Earth”, she warned.
Alberto Gomez of peasant farmers’ alliance Via Campesina complained that they would only benefit from payments by developed and major developing countries to sequester carbon in the forests “if they sign up to a technical package, use GM seeds and grow biofuel crops”.
Berenice Sanchez of Mexico’s Indigenous Women’s BioDiversity Network said “the supposed safeguards are voluntary, weak and hidden in the annex”, and her group was in Durban to “demand an immediate moratorium to stop REDD+-related land-grabs”.
On a more positive note, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature welcomed Guatemala’s recognition of wider land rights for indigenous peoples and local communities, making it possible for these groups to access benefits and payments under REDD+. Guatemala “is already investing 1 per cent of the national government budget – close to $40 million per year – in results-based action for sustainable management of forests, reforestation, forest restoration and agro-forestry”, the union said yesterday.
Seven countries in the Congo basin joined their donors – Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Australia, the EU and US – in announcing an initiative under REDD+ to protect the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world, covering more than 200 million hectares.
British minister of state for energy and climate change Gregory Barker said his government was backing it because “destruction of the world’s forests contributes more to climate change than emissions from all the planes and cars put together”.
