No REDD! Indigenous Peoples’ Guide
Launch of Indigenous Peoples’ Guide:
No REDD!
No CO2LONIALISM of Forests!
November 30, 2009 Bemidji, Minnesota,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Indigenous Environmental Network is pleased to announce the launch of the Indigenous Peoples’ guide to No REDD! This guide is a useful resource for preparing for the UN negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark that begins on December 7, but above all the No REDD! guide is useful to warn our communities about how REDD threatens our rights and could result in land grabs. From every forested region of developing countries, the World Bank, the UNREDD Program, voluntary carbon market REDD projects, conservation NGOs, private corporations and governments are aggressively encroaching into indigenous communities. We invite you to download the guide at http://www.ienearth.org/REDD/redd.pdf and share it by posting it on your organization’s webpage or use it in workshops and talks in your community or as input for community radio programs as well as in media outreach. In the event that you would like to print booklets, we would be happy to provide you with the formatted file.
Tom Goldtooth Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network
“According to the “Little REDD Book, the basic idea behind Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is simple: Developing countries that are willing and able to reduce emissions from deforestation should be financially compensated for doing so. However, according to many Indigenous Peoples, REDD is CO2lonialism of Forests because it allows Northern polluters to buy permits to pollute or “carbon credits” by promising not to cut down forests and plantations in the South. The
newspaper The Australian calls REDD a “classic 21st century scam emerging from the global climate change industry.”
REDD will probably include forests in the carbon market which raises a crucial property rights issue: REDD commodifies and privatizes the air and forests. Carbon traders require legal title to the carbon in the forests or rights to the land. REDD projects that utilize carbon market financing could also generate profits for loggers, polluters and forest destroyers and reduce forests to mere carbon sequestration experiments. REDD-type projects already exist on the voluntary carbon market without a clear and agreed upon framework that ensures Indigenous land and forest rights, land tenure reforms and good governance. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is negotiating a mechanism for implementing REDD in the post-Kyoto Protocol 2012+ framework. REDD could be the cornerstone of the Copenhagen Deal.
There are hundreds of REDD-type pilot projects in the world and, as this booklet shows, many of them violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights and have resulted in militarization, evictions, fraud, disputes, conflicts, corruption, coercion, conmen, crime, plantations and 30-100 year contracts, deals with oil companies and other climate criminals. Furthermore, economic speculation with carbon credits from REDD may contribute to the next market crash and Indigenous Peoples could lose out if their “benefits” are subject to the volatile price of carbon. Lastly, Indigenous Peoples could be held liable if REDD projects fail due to natural ecological or climate change-related disasters such as floods, droughts, forest fires, storms, pests or plagues.
Download here [pdf 3,3mb]
