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Comment 47 for Comment on the potential for international, sector-based offset credits in the Cap-and-Trade Program (sectorbased2015-ws) - 1st Workshop.
First Name: Lauren
Last Name: Withey
Email Address: lwithey@gmail.com
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Subject: Comments on Sector Based Offset Credits
Comment:
I am a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program, where I study REDD programs. My fieldwork takes place on the Pacific coast of Colombia, where USAID is supporting a large-scale REDD+ project among Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. I am concerned about California’s interest in including international offsets in AB32 because REDD poses a risk to the people in the communities involved, will be more costly than presently recognized, and is likely to pose a serious threat to the legitimacy of the entire AB32 effort. As you have already received much feedback on the white paper, I will focus my comments on the elements of concern that I see most clearly in my own fieldwork. To offer a little context, the region where I work is made up of some of the wettest and most biodiverse tropical forests in the world, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Most of the land has been granted to Afro and indigenous communities in collective land titles over the last 20 years as part of Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, which focused on pluriethnic rights. USAID has been working in the region for many years through a sequence of projects, all of which have involved some “alternative development” efforts, whether as an alternative to deforestation or to coca growing – or both. In 2011, USAID began a program called BIOREDD+ in the region. It aimed to incorporate one million hectares of land under collective title in the Pacific into a series of REDD+ projects that would offer alternative, sustainable development and the promise of funding via carbon credits down the road in exchange for reduced deforestation. The program also now incorporates some projects of reforestation on land destroyed by gold mining. Presently, 19 communities are involved in projects that have been validated, and are entering an 18 month phase in which they are aiming toward project verification that could allow them to begin generating carbon credits and receiving funding on the voluntary market. I want to be clear that the program is not, to date, part of any jurisdictional REDD effort, though this would be the aim as Colombia further develops its program. Other than the jurisdictional issue, however, this program would seem to be an ideal REDD project in many ways: USAID has a long history in the region and knows the communities well; the projects are taking place on collectively titled lands where processes of free, prior, informed consent are required under law and have been observed in the four-year development of these projects; and the communities are not being asked to take on the expensive technical costs of REDD, but can rather rely on USAID to fund carbon measurements and complex social, economic, and ecological analyses required for determining deforestation projections. Indeed, USAID invested some $26 million over the first four years of the program to get to the point of validation. My time in the field suggests that this program, however, suffers from some major challenges, many of which much other research confirms are not unique to the Colombian context. The BIODREDD+ program, like REDD as a whole, is clearly the result of a kind of magical thinking about “development” that has yielded remarkably few encouraging results over the last fifty years, and indeed has resulted instead in a well-documented series of perverse consequences. The idea is essentially that if the “developed” world can give enough money and technical support to some entity in the “developing” world, a desired result can be realized. The politics of REDD in the international climate change context are such that many have set aside these decades of experience in a naively hopeful view that somehow this time will be different, that with enough hand-holding by UN-REDD and the Green Climate Fund toward readiness and enough emphasis on safeguards, that the wide-ranging goals of REDD+ are realizable. I will not attempt to summarize here all of the problems with these assumptions, but a few are worth bearing in mind in the context of REDD. First, the local level where REDD projects are taking place have just as many political and personal complexities as those places that are trying to pay them to offset their own emissions. The main difference is usually that what is in law in these places has little bearing on what actually occurs on the ground. A solid primer on what this means in the field is James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine of 1991. In my field work, there are community leaders that have accepted REDD on behalf of the community because they think the funding associated with it from USAID can bring some temporary jobs (including for them and their families), but they have little belief that they will be able to have any impact on deforestation. This is because, though they have title and officially are supposed to have control over the territory granted them by the state, many armed outsiders live from entering their territories and cutting wood. Additionally, they are understandably loathe to take away one of the only livelihoods of their community – a community where most live on less than $2 a day. It would be wonderful if USAID money could pay for some extra boats for those who cut wood to also fish, or to teach them to plant and harvest cacao, but few are likely to leave timber harvesting if it is more lucrative in the immediate and is what they have done their whole lives. In an area where, as in many parts of the world, those fighting on behalf of clean water and intact forests have been killed for their work, leaders are also very cautious about confronting the armed actors that are financing these activities or taking wood out themselves. As in many forest regions around the world, there is also little capacity or will for enforcement by state actors, who are also risking their lives – and those of their families - if they decide to take action. In the communities where I work, the “state” is generally seen as providing little and, when it does enter, as either providing goods that unneeded, putting restrictions on their traditional ways of life, or threatening the communities by putting them in the middle of battles between the military and the armed actors. There are instances of community leaders in this region deliberately keeping certain members of the communities in the dark about development projects in order to save the benefits for their supporters or friends – they become their own personal pork projects, in other words. As a result, though these projects have all technically gone through an FPIC process, it is hard to find people outside of the leadership board who actually have heard of REDD or know what it is. When people do know what REDD is, they describe it consistently to me as the project where “gringos come to take out oxygen.” Yet such an interpretation of REDD can hardly come as a surprise. Not only is there a long history of gringos and Europeans taking key resources from this region, but REDD is extremely challenging to understand, even for those with Master’s and Ph.D.’s who have worked in the field for years – it is a small wonder there is suspicion around it. Even where well-educated leaders have really tried to bring the whole community in to understand what REDD is about, it is hard to find a community member who can explain climate change or what trees have to do with it. Trees and the territories they are on have a very different meaning for them than what REDD applies to them. While FPIC is therefore an important step in concept, it is laughable to suggest that everyone in these communities, many illiterate, almost none having surpassed high school, are going to be capable of giving informed consent on REDD and all of the highly technical elements that accompany it. Additionally, this extreme complexity of REDD comes with high costs. As noted, USAID spent $26 million on BIOREDD over four years, and yet there is almost nothing to be seen on the ground for it today. Many have noted changing beliefs about REDD+ internationally – how, encouraged by very limited assessments like those of McKinsey and Nicholas Stern, it was initially seen as this cheap, quick bridge to reduce warming while the gritty question of industrial emissions was being sorted out at national and international scales, and how upon implementation attempts, the complexities and additional costs began to expose the ridiculousness of this initial, poorly calculated notion (see the Global Landscapes Forum). That there is cautious optimism around REDD today seems true, and seems to be where the ARB is presently. I would suggest that this optimism is not only naïve, but distracting and expensive, and therefore an actual threat to making real progress on climate change mitigation. These costs assume that having the right policies in place in these developing countries, coupled with enough money to actually replace benefits from cutting wood, can make REDD viable. What decades of experience shows is that laws on the books mean remarkably little on the ground, and that the money will probably not be used to replace these activities. If they do in one place, leakage is very likely to result. In the region I am working in, such leakage is seen most obviously in the illegal mining industry. Where the state comes in to crack down on one major mining spot, one shortly thereafter finds new mining projects spread around into nearby river basins. Whac-a-mole is an apt metaphor for this situation – with a slow-reacting “whac-er,” using a broken mallet, who probably has some benefactors in the mole community in charge. Local suspicion about REDD, and differing views on REDD within these communities can also be highly divisive. REDD, if actually implemented as in project design documents, would almost always carry high costs for some and changes in access to resources. It may also lead to violence and fear where, as noted earlier, leaders are asked to put their lives on the lines to halt deforestation in their communities. Whether this atmosphere of division and threat is conducive to achieving real, permanent deforestation reductions is an important question. At the same time, Another central question about REDD’s effectiveness over the medium term is whether REDD really addresses the biggest drivers of deforestation, and it emerges in the context of my field site. As I have suggested above, REDD in the context of my communities is aimed at getting some of the poorest, most disenfranchised members of Colombian society, to spend time and effort to stop one of the most lucrative activities available in their community, a community which still has one of the richest forests in the country. At the same time, across most of Colombia’s Andes, huge swaths of previously forested lands are now home to pastures that house a few trees and a few cattle, owned by some of the wealthiest people in the nation. Much of the wealth of these individuals has come from a long history of extractivism from these Afro and indigenous lands – often using the slave labor of Afro and indigenous people – and from deforestation and concentration of lands in the Andes region. This relatively poor use of land to benefit the few has therefore been the biggest driver of deforestation in Colombia historically. There have also been big companies, some foreign, some Colombian, which have been responsible for the biggest deforestation in the Pacific – this extraction was actually one of the main impetuses for Afro community organization to fight for collective title to their territories. More recently, there are other key drivers of deforestation, such as palm oil and rubber production (also funded by USAID), coca movement into forests in order to hide from fumigation planes (another US-funded project), mining, and sprawl. But the Afro and indigenous communities, many of which have no potable water or basic sanitation facilities, have clearly benefitted little from whatever wealth is created from these deforestation drivers, and their individual impacts on the land have been relatively few. That is not to say that there is not cutting of trees on their land, or to fall into the “ecological native” narrative common in this field, but simply to question whether asking them to not use their resources for their benefit, or to put their heads on the line to halt all deforestation on their territories, is fair given the history of and current main drivers of deforestation in the country. If they put in a lot of effort to stop deforestation and develop carbon credits on their land, they still face threats from the outside that they have little control over because of the realities of economic power in their country. If the state looks the other way while a business comes into the Afro territories again uninvited and begins cutting their trees again – a very real scenario that has occurred on multiple occasions - it is the community that suffers as a result, that loses valuable credits or must put a greater portion of every credit into the kind of insurance pool that the white paper describes. This question of equality in the REDD debate applies, obviously, in the context of offsets in general – is it right for the gringos who have so long benefitted from industrialization and the cheap exploitation of resources from these developing countries to ask these communities to not have the right to benefit in the same ways? The idea that money for alternative development is equivalent to what they might do with these trees or this land is one of the great falsehoods behind REDD, and is frankly offensive to those who desire sovereignty over their lands. There is much more I might say – about fundamental problems with additionality, perverse incentives in the certification process, and the near-impossibility of effectively assessing leakage - but I believe this gives you a sense for some of the ground-level realities that come to bear in REDD. Even in the most well-run of jurisdictional REDD programs, I believe ARB is likely to encounter some of these challenges. I fear that to really do this well, as is suggested in the White Paper, ARB is going to have to be far more engaged than it has the resources to be, and that such engagement raises important sovereignty issues. The challenges in international REDD cannot be equated to work with Quebec or work on domestic offsets. The forests that REDD is most focused on are in extremely different legal, cultural, and historic contexts – not only from Quebec and the US, but from one another. The idea of creating tradable credits out of these extremely complex, unique, and often highly volatile political and economic contexts is one that is highly problematic, and one which I fear will cost ARB, the world, the people of the communities involved, and the people of California far more than is presently recognized in the White Paper. I am happy to talk more about any of these points, or any other aspects of REDD I have not had the opportunity to cover in this brief summary of what I am finding. I am also happy to provide more good resources about early REDD pilots and what we might learn for REDD from past conservation and development experiences. Thanks for considering these thoughts. As a Californian, I want us to continue to be a leader in the climate change fight, and I hope that these experiences will help us to do so. Best regards, Lauren S. Withey University of California, Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy and Management
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Date and Time Comment Was Submitted: 2015-12-18 12:36:14
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