Large-Scale Tree Plantations

With just five weeks to go before climate negotiators flock to The Hague to hammer out the implementing rules of the Kyoto Protocol, forests are more and more in danger of being reduced to a single commodity --carbon-- to be traded away under the Kyoto Protocol's so called "Flexible Mechanisms". The resulting "Kyoto forests" are likely to be tree plantations --supposedly a substitute for reducing carbon emissions-- and the implications of these for forests, forest peoples, biodiversity and sustainable development could be grave.

To avoid real action at CO2 producing economies at home, the industrialised countries have come up with other ideas on how to decrease global CO2, e.g. by reducing CO2 elsewhere or declaring forests as 'carbon sinks' to reduce CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Members of the Global Forest Coalition and other NGOs and IPOs that gathered in Lyon in September 2000 prepared a statement explaining the reasons for opposing to carbon sinks in the Clean Development Mechanism. Here there are some of the reasons: 1. Sinks are neither long term nor short term solution to mitigating climate change. The lack of verifiable ways of estimating the ability of forests and other ecosystems to 'compensate' for industrial emissions means that the inclusion of sinks in the CDM would destroy the Kyoto Protocol.

We, the undersigned non-governmental organizations, wish to express extreme concern about the role envisaged for tree plantations in helping industrialized countries meet their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Sixth Conference of the Parties, in November 2000 in the Hague, will likely determine the content of the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, which could allow many Northern countries to meet their emissions reductions targets by implementing projects in the South.

UPM-Kymmene Corporation --one of the world's largest forest products companies and paper producers, with industrial plants in 15 countries-- the APRIL Group (Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd.) and APRIL's majority shareholder have recently signed an agreement to sell APRIL's 51% interest in the Changshu paper mill to UPM-Kymmene. The value of the transaction is US$ 150 million. As a consequence of the agreement, the Finland-based UPM-Kymmene has now become the sole owner of the Changshu paper mill.

Vietnam has a history of tree plantation programmes dating back to 1956. According to a report by Nguyen Ngoc Lung, Director of Vietnam's Forest Development Department, between 1956 and 1992 an area of over 1 million hectares was planted with trees. However survival rates have been poor and much of the wood produced has been exported as wood chips to Japan or Taiwan.

Coinciding with the conquest of the vast territory of Argentina by the Buenos Aires centralized government, started in the second half of the 19th century in the name of modernization, forests in different regions of the country entered a period of decline which has continued until present times. The two cases mentioned below are only examples of a process happening throughout the country.

It is already a well-known fact that large scale tree monocultures result in a large number of social and environmental impacts. However, we had not yet heard of a situation such as that of Fiji, where plantations generated such acute social and economic tensions that they eventually led to a coup d'etat.

Friends of Hamakua is gravely concerned over a proposed plywood/veneer plant and about the State Forest Hamakua Management Plan, which would imply the harvesting of 4,000 acres of old "non-native" plantations. There are several reasons for this concern. Access roads will have to be built into all of these, many forested areas. Once harvesting begins, all public access to these roads will be closed off due to liability concerns. Once the roads are in place, access will be gained to the few remaining native tree stands, which the plan says, may be removed if necessary.

In 1997, the negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol came up with an ingeniously-named project: the "Clean Development Mechanism." For the lay person, the message was that the governments of the world had finally agreed to create a mechanism that would allow development atmospherically non-polluting. But what this wording hides is anything but clean.

Plantation projects using tree monocultures to sequester carbon being implemented in UGANDA by two Norwegian firms constitute a paradigmatic example of the rationale and the consequences of this kind of projects.

Giant AUSTRALIA is a major actor in the geopolitics of Oceania. With its particular situation in the Southern hemisphere but being a Northern country and included in the Annex I countries, Australia is the only country that enjoys the possibility of increasing its greenhouse gas emissions by 8% above 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012. Nevertheless, this country has enthusiastically embraced the idea of offering its territory for forestry-based carbon sink projects.