What we're doing wrong

Can’t see the trees for the deforestation

13th December 2008

Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand accused of ignoring the land rights of indigenous groups

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Deforestation is the hot topic at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poznan, Poland, this week.

The loss of trees accounts for 20 to 25 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide – more than oil-fuelled transportation – because of the amount of carbon dioxide the forests stop removing and the exposure of soil, which then releases stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Discussion for the post-Kyoto treaty, to be signed in December, 2009, centres around the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program in developing countries.

The goal is to create a market in which developed countries could offset emissions with carbon credits from other countries, which would protect their forests in return. In essence, rich countries would pay poorer ones not to cut their trees down.

But indigenous groups staged a protest against REDD on Tuesday, accusing Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand of having a clause deleted that would have recognized the land rights of indigenous groups, which they say could be exploited under the program.

“Our forests are being negotiated away for REDD projects, [which could] cause poverty, forced displacement and the destruction of our cultures,” said Marcial Arias of the Kuna People of Panama via e-mail. He was in Poland as a policy adviser from the International Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests.

The Friends of the Earth International has also released a report to state their concerns. REDD would give developed countries “permits to pollute” and it would also result in zero overall decreases in global emissions, FOE’s International Climate Campaign Co-ordinator, Joseph Zacune, said in Poznan.

“These proposals would create the climate regime’s largest-ever loophole,” he says.

And because there is no clear definition yet of what constitutes a “forest,” Mr. Zacune says, plantations could count. So diverse, virgin rain forests could be cut down and replaced with monocultures, which often store only 20 per cent of the carbon that a virgin forest does. “This may do more harm than good.”

But Louis Verchot, a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a chief scientist with the Centre for International Forestry Research, disagrees.

REDD is still the best idea, he says, because it could be effectively “linked with sustainable development.”

Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail

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• Tags:
• Climate Change
• Deforestation
• Indigenous Rights

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