The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be meeting in Milan, Italy, from 1-12 December. Unfortunately, expectations from the meeting are extremely low, given that the whole process has shifted from addressing climate change to marketing carbon emissions. Money-making is what the meeting will be mostly about, unless public pressure forces government delegates to change course.
Bulletin Issue 76 - November 2003
Climate change
The Focus of this Issue: Climate Change
This issue of the WRM bulletin is entirely focused on the crucial issue of climate change. Its aim is to provide people with relevant information and analysis as a means of empowerment to counter the false solutions being promoted by governments to suit the interest of corporations. Climate change is affecting us all and will affect future generations even more. Life on Earth is at stake and civil society must intervene to force governments to change course. We hope that the information contained in this bulletin will encourage people to include climate change in their social and environmental agendas in order to increase pressure for making true solutions possible.
WRM Bulletin
76
November 2003
OUR VIEWPOINT
BACKGROUND TO CLIMATE CHANGE
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14 November 2003The climate of our planet is a complex system resulting from the interaction of five factors: the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice and snow regions (criosphere), living organisms (biosphere) and soils, sediments and rocks (geosphere), while in turn, all are directly related to the sun. It is only in these terms that we can understand atmospheric energy and matter fluxes and cycles, which is essential to investigate the causes and effects of climatic change. However, there is an additional factor to be taken into account: the anthropogenic factor, resulting from human activity. From “Greenhouse” to “Oven”
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14 November 2003The Earth Summit, a melting pot for awareness and hope The first United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), or Earth Summit, was a milestone in arousing world environmental awareness. Despite a lot of disagreement about the links between environment and development, many national leaders did express concern about the way the prevailing development model damaged the environment and generated and increased poverty. At long last, 20 years after the First Earth Summit in 1972, environment had come to the fore, creating great expectations for the changes governments promised to make.
THE BAD GUYS
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14 November 2003The climate crisis is a lot like other environmental crises. Coming to terms with the science is the least of the problems. What’s harder is to organize effective and democratic strategies for action. What’s the political landscape in which climate activists must operate? Who can you make alliances with and how? Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys? To a lot of environmentalists, especially in the North, it all used to seem pretty simple.
THE GOOD GUYS
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14 November 2003For most people, the climate change issue may seem too complicated to grasp, its solution entirely in the hands of experts and governments. However, many sectors of organized civil society are making positive contributions, often in confrontation with the very governments that have committed themselves to solve it. Forest peoples Many indigenous peoples and traditional forest communities are resisting activities that not only have an impact on their living conditions but also exacerbate climate change.
CARBON DUMPS IN THE SOUTH
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14 November 2003The World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund’s (PCF) Plantar project has been heavily criticized by NGOs and civil society movements ever since it first emerged as the first industrial eucalyptus tree plantation to claim carbon sink credits from the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. The Plantar project involves 23,100 hectares of monoculture eucalyptus plantations for the production of charcoal, which will be used in pig iron production. The project is one of the largest in the PCF, claiming 12.8 million credits over 21 years, more than the total amount being claimed by all 13 renewable energy projects currently listed on the PCF website.
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14 November 2003The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change may be totally useless to address climate change, but it may prove to be good business for some parties. The assumption is that in return for investment in a project that cuts or reduces emissions in a southern country, companies will earn certified emission reductions (CERs) that industrialized countries may use to meet Kyoto Protocol commitments.
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14 November 2003The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has big plans for plantations in Laos. World Rainforest Movement has obtained a leaked report of a recent ADB mission to Laos which describes how the Bank hopes to attract international pulp and paper companies to invest in Laos. Over the past ten years, the ADB has funded an area of approximately 12,000 hectares in Laos through its $11.2 million “Industrial Tree Plantations Project”. Under its planned “Forest Plantations for Livelihood Sector Project” the Bank intends to finance 30,000 hectares of plantations.
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14 November 2003Earlier this year, several officials of the Ugandan government received large concessions for land suitable for afforestation and reforestation under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (see WRM Bulletin 74). Whilst the Ministry of Water, Lands and Environment, responding to public pressure, issued a statement arguing that these land allocations were to be seen as part of a process by the ministry to ‘revitalise’ degraded forest reserves by releasing them for private development through the Department of Forestry, the ministry failed to mention the likely connection to the Clean Development Mechanism, which offers carbon sinks credits to companies that plant trees.