South Africa

How air quality offsets were set in place

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The short film “Sacred Voices”, supported by the African Biodiversity Network and the Gaia Foundation, shares the messages of eight traditional Sacred Site Custodians from Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and Uganda. Sacred Sites in Africa are being increasingly threatened by mining companies, investors, plantations, tourist developments and governments. “They do not respect our ancestral lands or our Sacred Natural Sites, which are potent healing places for maintaining vitality of our planet.

In 1969, at the age of 3 my parents were forced to move from the home in which I was born, in a neighbourhood of people of all colours, ethnicity and even class, to a sand dune cleared of all its vegetation and left naked except for poorly constructed block houses with no internal electricity, plaster or ceilings and crowned with an asbestos roof.

The Global Coalition Against REDD in alliance with the No REDD in Africa Network (NRAN) and supported by many international organizations launched a Declaration at the Civil Society Alternative Programme to the World Forestry Congress, which was held in Durban, South Africa, in early September.

In September 2015, the UN Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO) will held the World Forestry Congress in Durban, South Africa, on the “Sustainable Future” of the world’s forests. Policy makers will also attend this meeting, controlled by the timber industry.

On the occasion of the XIV World Forestry Congress, organized by the FAO in Durban, South Africa, between 7 and 11 September, we, members of the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations (RECOMA), along with diverse grassroots organizations, are disseminating this letter of protest to express our outrage with the erroneous and exclusionary manner in which FAO is once again organizing this event.

Dear all In Durban we will march to protest the expansion of industrial tree plantations that destroy ecosystems and biodiversity, steal community land and resources, and impact on people's health through the pollution of land, rivers, wetlands, lakes, oceans and the air by the global timber, pellet, pulp and paper industry.