Some of the world’s largest oil, mining, car and gas corporations will make hundreds of millions of US dollars from a UN-backed forest protection scheme, according to Friends of the Earth International.
The group’s new report — launched on the first day of the global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, where 193 countries hope to thrash out a new agreement — is the first major assessment of the several hundred, large-scale reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) pilot schemes. It shows that banks, airlines, charitable foundations, carbon traders, conservation groups, gas companies and palm plantation companies have also scrambled into forestry protection.
While forestry is billed as one issue where significant progress could be made at the talks, over the weekend in the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron, British Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne and the government’s chief scientists all played down the prospect of a global deal to cut carbon emissions.
“British ministers are going to Mexico this week with an approach that is both realistic and optimistic,” the prime minister wrote in the Observer. “Realistic, because we don’t expect a global deal to be struck in Cancun, but optimistic too, because we are viewing this as a stepping stone to future agreement.”
Huhne was more blunt: “No one expects a binding deal.”
But he said deforestation and longer-term climate finance were areas where progress could be made.
The REDD scheme is central to slowing or halting deforestation, which causes huge releases of carbon dioxide. However, critics say that the scheme amounts to privatization of natural resources.
Friends of the Earth’s report shows, for example, that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm Shell has linked with Russian gas giant Gazprom and the Clinton Foundation to invest in the Rimba Rey project, 100,000 hectares of peat swamp in Indonesia.
The project is expecting to prevent 75 million tonnes of carbon being emitted over 30 years, which could earn the three groups US$750 million at a modest carbon price of US$10 a tonne.
The “REDD rush” is limited to voluntary carbon offsets for now, but is expected to become a stampede if the 193 countries reach an outline forestry protection agreement that would allow governments to offset national emissions against conservation. It could result in cash flows of US$30 billion a year from rich countries — who need to offset emissions — to poor countries.
However, the report’s authors say great social risks attached to the schemes must be addressed.
“There are significant risks that REDD will lead to the privatization of the world’s forests, transferring them out of the hands of indigenous peoples and local communities and into the hands of bankers and carbon traders,” they say.
Many of the world’s greatest stretches of forests are home to indigenous peoples and millions of others may be dependent on forests, the authors say.
“Respect for indigenous peoples’ rights seems to be a missing element,” the report says. “REDD ... has the potential to exacerbate -inequality, reaping huge rewards for corporate investors whilst bringing considerably fewer benefits or even serious disadvantages to forest dependent communities.”
One major concern is that the weak legal definitions of “forest” and “degraded land” would let the powerful logging and palm companies carry on business as usual by persuading governments to redefine what constitutes a forest.
Greenpeace claimed last week that Indonesia planned to class large areas of its natural forests as “degraded land” in order to cut them down and receive US$1 billion of climate aid for replanting them with palm trees and biofuel crops.
However, some observers, including Lord Stern, say the REDD schemes offer the best opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions. They say that sophisticated options, such as carbon capture and storage, could take years to come into operation and are expensive.
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