REDD: the cheapest ways to reduce emissions

REDD is supposed to be about reducing emissions from deforestation. Unfortunately, if you really look at the agreements and what’s behind it, you find that that’s not exactly what REDD is designed to do. REDD is really—has been designed as a way for—and is being pushed by the United States—as a way for industries and Northern countries, industrialized nations, to avoid actually reducing their emissions at the source. So, countries and companies can continue polluting by saying that they’re protecting forests somewhere else that will supposedly sequester the carbon that they’re putting out into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no credible science behind the notion of offsets. So, in fact, what’s going to happen is, because they’re not reducing their pollution, because they’re not reducing their carbon emissions, global warming will continue, which will inevitably damage, destroy and completely eliminate forests, eventually, if global warming isn’t stopped.

The idea is that instead of, for example, BP or Shell reducing their own emissions, they can buy some forests in another place, say Brazil, and protect the carbon in that forest so that that supposedly offsets the carbon that they’re putting into the atmosphere. But in order to actually secure that carbon and to say, OK, the carbon in this area is not going to be disturbed in any way, it requires making sure that there aren’t any people who could use that carbon, either for shelter, for firewood or anything like that, which is why a number of indigenous groups are opposing this, saying that this is going to displace indigenous communities. This is going to have very serious impacts on indigenous communities while allowing pollution and global warming to continue.

The issue with REDD-plus, the issue with the REDD scheme in general, is that it’s not addressing the underlying drivers of deforestation, and therefore it’s not going to solve the problem. The other organization that I work with, the Global Forest Coalition, just did a multi-year study of what are the actual drivers of deforestation around the world, and REDD is not addressing those. So even if you successfully protect a forest in, say, the Congo, if you haven’t eliminated the pressures to—the pressures for wood, for example, you’re just going to push that logging into a different forest. And they call that “leakage” in U.N. speak. So you have to address these underlying causes of deforestation, and REDD just plain old doesn’t do that.

And Robert Zoellick, of course, can hardly be considered an altruistic force. He’s one of the architects of the Project for a New American Century that led to the war on Iraq. The World Bank has for years coerced developing countries to go along with trade regimes that are not in their best interest. So this is just one more in a long series of schemes that the World Bank uses to control developing countries.

The billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros mentions is that this will be one of the cheapest ways to reduce emissions. And what that means is, it’s more expensive for a company to actually figure out how to reduce its emissions at the source, so it’s much cheaper to just go buy a forest somewhere. But if you actually look at how much money it would take to stop deforesters from doing the deforestation, the studies have shown that it’s more like $2.7 trillion per year that needs to be spent if you really want to stop deforestation. So it is in fact not a cheap way to do this. And I want to know where this funding is going to come from, if it’s not going to come from the private sector and from the markets. And once you get the markets involved, then, all bets are off, as far as the impacts on poor people, people who live in these forests, who are never benefited by the markets.

most of the forested land that’s left on this planet is inhabited by indigenous people, who have very carefully taken care of those forests. But in many cases, the land titles to their ancestral lands are very unclear. So that opens the door for investors to come in and take over those lands and use them for these carbon offsets. And as I mentioned, in order to actually ensure that the carbon is not disturbed, there has to be—you have to ensure that there’s no human activity on that land.

if you look at these actual climate negotiations, I mean, industry is everywhere. I mean, they’re invited into the back rooms. They’re invited to the receptions. I mean, industry has incredible influence in these climate negotiations, whereas the environmental NGOs, like the ones that I work for, are being increasingly marginalized, shut out and ignored. And I think that is a very clear example of what REDD is going to mean. We are very concerned about the rights of indigenous peoples being respected, and there just isn’t—aren’t those safeguards in REDD.

I think Jane Goodall and many other people are grasping at REDD because they’re so desperate. I mean, the world’s forests are falling at an alarming rate, and something has to be done. Unfortunately, REDD is not going to be the solution, and that’s what I think people don’t understand yet. But a perfect example of why REDD will not be the solution was the World Forestry Congress in 2009, where the World Bank got up in front of this plenary session full of timber industry executives, foresters, forestry students, and explained very clearly, “REDD will be extremely beneficial for forestry”—not for forests, for forestry. REDD is going to benefit the largest forest destroyers in the world, while displacing the people that have traditionally protected the forests for all their lives. And that is a serious problem.

Discussion with Anne Petermann

Anne Petermann, Executive Director of the Global Justice Ecology Project.

- from democracynow.org