Cancun's REDD Agreement Seen as Land Grab by Big Polluters
Seeing REDD on climate change
As the Cancun summit closes, some environmentalists say the REDD scheme is a boon for financers, not forests
Aljazeera.net, Dec. 12, 2010
As
climate change negotiations come to a close in Cancun, Birginia
Suarez-Pinlac is seeing red. The environmental lawyer from the
Philippines is worried that a plan for Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) constitutes a land grab,
transferring natural wealth from the poor to the rich under the auspices
of saving the planet.
Last
year, she says, an Australian coal company tried to forge an agreement
with an indigenous tribe on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, a
poverty stricken area known for its high mountains and lush green
rainforest. "The company offered poor tribes people money in exchange
for their atmospheric space. They don't want to cut their own emissions
domestically. They want to find a way to profit from the carbon they
produce."
Forests
help take climate changing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
reducing global warming - a human induced process linked to wild weather
patterns including this year's deadly flooding in Pakistan and crop
destroying wild fires in Russia.
Green-washing
The
world is losing about six million hectares of forests each year - an
area roughly the size of Greece - due to human activities like logging.
REDD is supposed to be designed to allow companies to buy clean air
credits from people who live in forests to encourage them to protect the
trees. But some environmentalists say that when companies buy credits
abroad through what is now a voluntary scheme, they feel entitled to
pollute back at home.
"The
biggest buyers of REDD credits are the worst polluters - big oil and
big coal," says Bill Barclay, the research director for the Rainforest
Action Network in California. "They are looking for a cheap 'get out of
jail free card' - it's basically green-washing."
In
the Philippines, indigenous people "didn't understand that they were
giving away their atmospheric space to Australians" when they were
approached by a non-governmental organisation working with the coal
miners, Suarez-Pinlac says.
But REDD and similar initiatives based on trading credits in carbon
dioxide are not just about companies purchasing environmental legitimacy
from communities who actually take care of forests; the schemes being
discussed in Cancun could increase lucrative business opportunities for
hedge fund traders and financers.
"There is a lot of concern REDD will be brought into a carbon offset trading scheme," Barclay says.
Carbon
trading is based on the idea that a price should be placed on
emissions. Companies or countries would have a cap set on the amount of
pollution they could spew. Those who curtail their emissions below
targeted levels could sell atmospheric space to polluters who exceed
their limits.
The
European Union has such legislation; the 27-nation bloc has pledged to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by
2020. And carbon trading figures prominently into this plan, as the EU
is by far the world's largest carbon market.
And,
while Europe has done far better than other industrialised regions in
reducing its emissions compared to the size of its economy, some
analysts think the moves are too little, too late.
"We still aren't seeing key reductions that climate scientists say are
necessary," says Rachel Cleetus, an economist with the Union of
Concerned Scientists in the US.
'Carbon cowboys'
Environmental
scientists estimate that the world needs to see emissions cuts of at
least 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 to 90 per cent
by 2050 to stop catastrophic climate change.
While
Cleetus supports carbon trading as one of many policy tools for
tackling global warming, she says: "The carbon market only gets at one
market failure: the lack of a price on carbon. We need to get renewable
energy strategies in place."
Hedge
fund brokers and the speculators Barclay calls "carbon cowboys" believe
the free market is the best tool for tackling climate change and better
than an extension of internationally mandated emissions targets set out
by the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
"The
lack of a post-Kyoto agreement means that countries won't have legal
responsibilities to reduce emissions. They will have voluntary ones,"
says Steven Sorrell, the deputy director of the Sussex energy group in
the UK, a university based think-tank.
The
2009 Copenhagen Accord, an attempt to extend the Kyoto Protocol, does
not include binding targets. However, rich countries responsible for
most greenhouse gas emissions pledged to create a fund worth $100bn per
year by 2020 to invest in clean technologies and to help mitigate the
effects of climate change in the global south.
Eric
Bettelheim, an author and CEO of Forest Landscape Development, a
company that invests in products that "have a carbon and commodity
value" believes turning nature into a tradable resource is crucial for
protecting it.
"Everyone
who is rational about this realises global warming will probably never
be solved without the participation of businesses and markets,"
Bettelheim says. "Progress will be made on the recognition of forest
carbon credits from developing countries as being good currency in the
[carbon trading] system."
He
accuses certain environmentalists and political leaders - specifically
Evo Morales, the Bolivian president - of having an "anti-capitalist
agenda".
Morales,
whose country faces a major climate crisis resulting from pollution it
did not create, wants reparations from the rich industrialised countries
in the form of "climate debt".
Bettelheim's
view on leaders like Morales is shared by politicians with some of the
worst environmental records. The US refused to ratify the original
agreement while Russia, Japan, Canada and Australia have indicated that
they will not sign onto a second commitment extending the Kyoto Protocol
past its 2012 expiration date.
Before
becoming Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper called Kyoto "a
socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations".
'Two faced initiative'
But
good capitalists, it seems, can even make a profit from a "socialist
scheme". About $64bn changed hands in the emissions trading market in
2007, according to the World Bank.
Bettelheim
wants environmental regulations for the same reason that General Motors
believes in stop signs and other rules for driving: he says they are
good for business - and for the environment. Like grain, gold and oil,
he hopes trading in carbon emissions will become a fundamental activity
in the global economy.
"With
oil the question is scarcity, which creates a value people pay for," he
says. "In the case of greenhouse gas emissions, the problem is surplus.
How do you create a market from that? Legislation."
The
commodities trader does not believe an extension of Kyoto is feasible
because of domestic political and economic concerns in the countries
which pollute the most. On this matter he may be right on the money.
Regional
carbon trading markets, similar to that practiced in the European
Union, are being developed in East Asia by Japan and Korea and in the
western US with California's state government taking the lead in
representing a "simpler way forward than having more than 190 countries
sign onto rules" as Kyoto attempted to do.
But
that approach does not work for Suarez-Pinlac who believes carbon or
offset schemes including REDD are a "two faced initiative" from major
polluters in the developed world. Even if poor people in forests are
paid by polluting companies to protect the land, she wonders "how the
money [will] be managed when there is so much corruption?"
Even
in Europe, which has stronger institutions than other regions, carbon
trading schemes have been hit by billion dollar scandals involving
corruption and speculative trading which does not take carbon out of the
air.
"Negotiators
talk about 'safe guards' for REDD, but really these are non-binding
guidelines," says Barclay. "This has Interpol [the international law
enforcement agency] alarmed about the potential for corruption."
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