For peoples struggling for their rights in forest areas, climate change appears to be far removed from their immediate concerns. However, whether they know it or not, they are one of the most important and committed actors in protecting the Earth’s climate.
For instance, those opposing industrial logging operations in their territories may feel that their struggle is only about rights and livelihoods. And that’s what it’s about for them, of course. However, by stopping logging operations, they are also preventing the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions –the main greenhouse gas leading to global warming- which is safely stored in the forest biomass.
Issue 136 – November 2008
Climate Change
CLIMATE CHANGE
While in the meeting rooms of the Convention on Climate Change there is talk of complex and convoluted formulas and instruments to “sell” emissions and “compensate” for pollution – so that the major interests of oil, mining and logging companies and of large capital assets do not suffer – in the real world the people are taking action.
Any struggle for protecting forests is an action in favour of the climate; any opposition to polluting and destructive megaprojects is an action in favour of the climate; any complaint against projects affecting nature is an action in favour of the climate.
The articles included in this bulletin describe very diverse realities and situations, but all of them, without exception, have a link with climate protection. In spite of this fact, what communities receive is not applause but repression and, in the best of cases, disregard.
It is time for the Climate Change Convention to look at the right side, the side of those who are in fact acting in favour of the climate. It has the responsibility to do so.
Download the complete bulletin as pdf
WRM Bulletin
136
November 2008
OUR VIEWPOINT
WHAT THE CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE DOES NOT SEE
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25 November 2008The present development model has been strengthened on the basis of large-scale models – production, marketing, consumption – and the activities sustaining it are also on a large scale and basically involve intensive land use. They are the causes of the greatest problem presently hanging over an unconcerned humanity: the stepping up of greenhouse effect gas concentrations in the atmosphere, responsible for climate change. One of these industrial economic activities is deforestation – generally to obtain timber and/or gain land for industrial cattle ranching or industrial monocrops (food, fuel or trees).
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25 November 2008In Colombia the State resorts to criminalizing social and grass-roots organizations as a method of repression aimed at imposing by force the global market’s agribusiness, large scale infrastructure works and the extraction of natural resources involving high human, social and environmental costs. Criminalization has been an effective method whereby – by using discursive and symbolic strategies, combined with the formal use of legality – social actors are delegitimized and penalized for opposing unjust working conditions, environmental destruction, and policies damaging the survival of the planet, subordinated to corporate profitability and earnings.
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25 November 2008DRC’s rainforest --the world’s second largest-- is disappearing through logging. According to a report from The Guardian (1), “today a dozen large, mostly European, companies dominate the industry and have vast concessions: Trans-M has Lebanese owners; another group, which controls around 15m acres, is owned by the Portuguese Trinidade brothers; the American Blattner family has more than 2m acres; the German Danzer Group has 5m. To make worthwhile the tricky task of exporting wood over the rapids near the capital city of Kinshasa, the demand is for the highest quality wood for European kitchens, floors and furniture. Peace has exacerbated the problem, opening up the forest to smaller companies.”
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25 November 2008On 17 December 2001, by Resolution # R-578-2001-MINAE and in a totally underhand manner, the Costa Rican Ministry of the Environment and Energy (MINAE) granted a concession for the exploitation of an open-cast goldmine using leaching with cyanide to Industrias Infinito S.A. a branch of the Canadian transnational corporation Vanesa Ventures. The plans of Industrias Infinito S.A. are to exploit an area of 18 square kilometres in Crucitas, in the north of the country, between the mountains La Fortuna and Botija, some 3 km from the San Juan River. This involves the felling of over 190 hectares of forest (including species that are protected such as almond trees) because, as described by the journalist and opponent to the project, Marco Tulio Araya:
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25 November 2008"The Mekong matters to the people who live round it perhaps more than any other river on earth," wrote Fred Pearce in his book about the world's rivers, "When the Rivers Run Dry". Something like two million tons of fish are caught in the Mekong River each year, second only to the Amazon. In Cambodia, 70 per cent of villagers' protein comes from fish. The Mekong is also extremely diverse, with about 1,300 species of fish, again second only to the Amazon.
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25 November 2008On 15 October, the President of the Republic, the Economist Rafael Correa Delgado, and four Ministers of State issued Decree 1391 regulating industrial shrimp farming. The Decree is contradictory, because on the one hand it recognizes the illegal situation in which thousands of hectares of shrimp farms have been operating, together with the felling of mangroves resulting from this industry. But on the other hand it ends up by rewarding the shrimp farming industry by granting it concessions in areas that are a National Asset of Public Use (see http://www.ccondem.org.ec/ imagesFTP/6940.DECRETO_1391_10_2008_1_.pdf ), thus violating 56 legal provisions that have protected the mangrove ecosystems since the seventies.
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25 November 2008Vangujjars, a distinct nomadic tribe with a very rich cultural heritage has been living scattered in the Indian upland forests of the Uttrakhand since the last three centuries. They still maintain nomadic life with their buffaloes and travel between higher reaches of Himalaya in summer to lower Himalaya in winter. They have always received step motherly treatment by all the governments whosoever ruled Uttar Pradesh or Uttrakhand. But from October 2008 the attack on vangujjars has become more intensified and blatant. More than 100 hutments were totally smashed by the Rajaji National Park administration.
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25 November 2008The Italo-Argentine mining company TERNIUM is planning to mine for iron minerals in nearly 2,000 hectares of tropical forest in the Municipality of Coahuayana in the State of Michoacán (south-western Mexico). Among other negative impacts, this activity will leave the whole Municipality (15 thousand inhabitants) without water. The El Saucito River has already felt the consequences as have the mountains and forest, and the villages of Santa Maria Miramar, El Saucito, La Palmita, El Parotal and Achotan are already suffering from the effects and have asked the authorities to declare a Municipal Ecological Conservation Zone.
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25 November 2008Nigeria holds 11,700 square kilometers of mangrove forest: the third largest in the world and the largest in Africa. Most of this mangrove is found in the Niger Delta. Nigeria is also a major oil producer and most oil extraction takes place in the Niger Delta. There, petroleum or crude oil abounds in rock formations. The complex mixture of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds that make up the flammable liquid fossil fuel is extracted from oil wells found in those oil fields. When crude oil is pumped out it also drags associated gas with it. Such natural gas could be separated from the oil and be used but oil companies prefer to burn it off. Shell-BP was the first one to start with this practice in the 1960s.
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25 November 2008Two years ago, 5.3 million hectares across Indonesia were engulfed in flames in the worst fire season since 1997/98. Haze blanketed large parts of South-east Asia, hiding additional peat and forest fires in Malaysia. Over 75,000 fires burnt across Sumatra and Borneo. Peat expert, Professor Florian Siegert helped to analyse details from satellite images and concluded: “Most fires were set to clear land for plantations. Those burns often run out of control because the forests have already been damaged by illegal logging” (1). Similar fires now occur every year, though their scale varies depending on how long and dry the dry season is. Palm oil has become the main driver of peatland destruction, followed by tree plantations for pulp and paper.
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25 November 2008In spite of all the scientific evidence existing on the negative impacts of large scale monoculture tree plantations, the Climate Change Convention insists on promoting them under the false argument that plantations can alleviate the effects of climate change, acting as “carbon sinks.” The negative impacts of monoculture tree plantations in forest areas have been thoroughly studied and documented in nearly all the countries where they are located. However, there is a tendency to minimize the negative impacts these plantations cause on grasslands, the main ecosystem of countries such as South Africa, Swaziland, Uruguay, the south of Brazil and vast areas in Argentina, where such monoculture plantations continue to expand.
WRM'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEBATE ON CLIMATE CHANGE
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25 November 2008As a contribution for facilitating the involvement of civil society in the protection of the Earth’s climate, the WRM has recently published four briefings related to climate change: