The Mumbai Porto-Alegre Forest Initiative
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Organizations and representatives from social movements from Eastern and Western Europe, as well as North and South America came together in Buenos Aires, Argentina over the first half of December, 2004 to tell the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s tenth Conference of the Parties (COP 10) to ban GE trees from the Kyoto Protocol —the international global warming treaty.
By the time the international negotiations on climate change in Buenos Aires ended on Saturday 18 December 2004, workers had already started dismantling the conference facilities. Yet after two weeks of negotiations, the best that the more than 6,000 participants could achieve was an agreement to hold another meeting.
The hydropower industry has long relied on subsidies to build large dams. Hydropower proponents are now promoting dams as "climate friendly" in a desperate attempt to gain carbon financing for dams.
The International Hydropower Association (IHA), together with the World Wind Energy Association and the International Solar Energy Society, has formed the International Renewable Energy Alliance (IREA). IREA held a side event during the international climate change meeting in Buenos Aires in December 2004.
“To prevent the climate change, we have to change” [COP 10 motto]
The possibility of observer status to the 10th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change held in Buenos Aires this past December immediately created conflicting expectations in me.
by Phetsavanh Sayboualaven
1) Introduction
Wangari Maathai and Florence Wambugu have dramatically opposing approaches to tree planting in Kenya. Maathai’s approach is anti-colonialist and empowers the people planting trees. Wambugu’s is neo-colonialist and makes the people planting trees dependent on biotechnology.
Proponents of industrial tree plantations often argue that plantations can relieve pressure on forests. Brazil’s pulp and paper industry exposes this myth for the pro-industry propaganda that it is. Rather than growing more wood on less land, the industry grows more wood on more land. Every year the area of plantations increases and every year the area of forest decreases.
The Chilean forestry sector seems to accept no limits to the expansion of its monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations. On the one hand it has turned to repression and lies to face local opposition. On the other, it has extended its operations to other countries, such as Argentina and Uruguay, where it has installed plantations, timber industries and pulp mills, thus increasing its impact on other environments and populations.
The 21,000 Yanomami who live in some 360 widely scattered settlements in the forested mountains and hills between Venezuela and Brazil were largely uncontacted by westerners until the middle of the 20th century. In their myths, the Yanomami recall a far distant time when they lived alongside a big river, ‘before we were chased up into the highlands’ but by the time their existence is first recorded, in the mid-18th century, they were already well established in the Parima hills between the Rio Branco and the Upper Orinoco.
The indigenous Twa ‘Pygmy’ people of the Great Lakes region of central Africa are originally a mountain-dwelling hunter-gatherer people, inhabiting the high altitude forests around Lakes Kivu, Albert and Tanganyika – areas that have now become part of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The current Twa population is estimated at between 82,000 and 126,000 people.
The Malapantaram are a nomadic community numbering about 2000 people who live in the high forests of the Ghat Mountains of south India. Early writers described them as “wild jungle people” and as “wandering hillmen of sorts”, and tended to see them as social isolates, as a survival of some pristine forest culture.