Comment Log Display

As a journalist and environmental justice advocate just returning
from the UN Climate Summit in Cancun, Mexico, I have deep concerns
about California’s participation in a REDD/carbon offset program.
 What I witnessed in Cancun was widespread criticism of REDD as a
strategy for addressing climate change; indeed, many indigenous
peoples’ groups and forest-dwelling peoples are concerned that
REDD may bring about what they are calling “perhaps the largest
landgrab in history”.

In Cancun, many organizations, including indigenous leaders from
the Amazon, youth groups, advocacy organizations like Friends of
the Earth International, research organizations such as
Biofuelwatch, Carbon Trade Watch, and others, as well as La Via
Campesina – the largest federation of smallholder farmers in the
world – were very vocal about their opposition to carbon offset
programs in general, and to REDD in particular.

Tom Goldtooth, director of the Indigenous Environmental Network,
was outspoken in Cancun as an ardent opponent of REDD, saying
“such strategies have already proved fruitless and have been
shown to violate human and Indigenous rights. Such agreements
implicitly promote carbon markets, offsets, unproven technologies,
and land grabs – anything but a commitment to real emissions
reductions. Language ‘noting’ rights is exclusively in the
context of market mechanisms, while failing to guarantee safeguards
for the rights of peoples and communities, women and youth.”

Using offsets to reduce emissions on paper has multiple negative
effects; on the one hand, it fails to actually reduce emissions at
the source, which will allow continued toxic exposure of California
communities such as those living near the Richmond refineries,
Kettleman City, and other hotbeds of polluting industries. On the
other hand, offset programs such as REDD use dubious standards and
profoundly troubling strategies, such as offering carbon credits to
agrofuel/biofuel plantations, waste-to-energy facilities, and other
projects that are falsely presented as “green.” Indeed, in the
state of Chiapas, Mexico, biofuel plantations of Jatropha curcas
are extending throughout  regions that previously or currently are
home to indigenous subsistence farmers. Such plantations – which
are erroneously called “forests” under the United Nations
definition – involve massive agrochemical inputs, low-wage labor,
and displacement of land-based peoples; at the same time, looked at
in terms of its entire lifecycle, biofuels have been shown to be
just as Co2 intensive as fossil fuels. 

In order for California to truly take leadership on the
environmental front, we must avoid toxic programs like REDD and
carbon offsets in general, which will fail to address the problem
of climate change while also leading to human rights abuses and
displacement of peoples from their lands in Chiapas and throughout
the global South.