On 28 November-4 December 2003, at Rasi Salai, Thailand, the Thailand-based Assembly of the Poor, USA-based International Rivers Network (IRN), and Southeast Asia Rivers Network (SEARIN) from Thailand, organized the Second International Meeting of Dam Affected People and their Allies, or Rivers for Life!
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As the global economy expands, pressure on indigenous lands to yield up minerals, oil and gas is intensifying, posing a major threat on them, their lands, territories and the resources that they depend on. The World Bank has been an instrument of such process, supporting mining projects that have been even condemned by the United Nations.
By Carbon Trade Watch, TNI/FASE
This collaorative brieing gives an insight into the history of monoculture eucalyptus plantations inBrazil and their impacts on local people and the environment. It also explores the new finances made available by the World Bank that allows the expansion of these destructive plantations through the carbon market.
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By Chris Lang
Published in Guerrero, D. (ed.) (2003) A Handbook on the Asian Development Bank: The ADB and its operations in Asia and the Pacific Region. Focus Asien no. 16. Asienhaus, Essen. November 2003.
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The 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.
By Chris Lang, published in "Pulping the Mekong"
In December 1993, the Asian Development Bank agreed a US$11.2 million loan for an "Industrial Tree Plantations Project" in Laos. Phase 1 of the project, which ran until 2003, aimed to plant 9,600 hectares with fast-growing tree plantations. Phase 2 of the project, "Tree Plantations for Livelihood Improvement" is currently under preparation and will go to the ADB's Board for a decision on funding in October 2003. Under phase 2 the ADB plans to plant a further 10,000 hectares.
The project raises several important concerns:
As we said in our last bulletin “the winds of change blow with increasing strength”. One of such winds was felt at the meeting of the “Network for Women in Natural Resources Management”, held during the last World Forestry Congress (WFC) in Quebec last September. For the first time in this kind of event a group of women with a diversity of interests gathered together to share their views on gender issues.
Just prior to the Vth World Parks Congress, a consortium of mining, oil and gas companies announced that they would accept that all World Heritage Sites were off limits to further exploitation.
As members of the global indigenous peoples' health caucus, Committee on Indigenous Health members prepared a number of technical briefing papers for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues – most of us who were attending the second session were focussed on the activities of the so-called UN specialised programmes and bodies.
Just as the World Bank has named Uganda as one of the African countries to benefit from its three carbon finance funds (Prototype Carbon Fund, Bio Carbon Fund and the Community Development Carbon Fund), information about an unprecedented ‘land grab’, opening Uganda’s public forests to private development, begins to emerge.
Described by carbon market analysts as a ‘PR disaster’, the World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund’s Plantar project continues to add to the impression that ‘no carbon credits’ are good ‘carbon credits’. In a ‘Note on the Plantar PCF Project’ the World Bank recently acknowledged that allegations by the Brazilian plantations company Plantar S. A. regarding falsified signatures on the first in a series of Brazilian civil society letters outlining the problems with the companies carbon sinks project were incorrect.