This new report published by Rainforest Foundation Norway and Friends of the Earth Norway documents the political incoherence of the Norwegian government, which spends an annual 500 million US dollars and huge political capital on rainforest protection while investing some 13.7 billion dollars in industries destroying it.
Available at http://www.regnskog.no/languages/english/_attachment/29989?_ts=13660256314
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ATM (the Alliance Against Mining), the largest anti-mining network in the Philippines, has issued a press release reporting that President Benigno Aquino III recently signed an Executive Order on mining. The EO focuses on establishing environmental safeguards and the need for a new revenue-sharing scheme, to maximize the country’s profits from mining. It did not mention other concerns of communities, not only in Palawan, but also in other mining-affected areas, such as social impacts and human rights violations.
Six Garifuna´s cooperatives that have recovered their land are facingat this moment the threat of paramilitaries who move around on motorcycles and 4x4 vehicles with heavy weapons and could massacre the Garifuna inhabitants who are resisting the dispossession of their ancestral territories.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has ruled in favour of the Sarayaku indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon in the case of Sarayaku v. Ecuador. The ruling, made public on July 25, ends a decade-long legal battle waged by the Sarayaku after a foreign oil company was allowed to encroach on their traditional lands in the early 2000s without their consultation.
A video documentary launched on July 27 by ALDAW, showing the cultural values of Palawan and the encroachment of mining operations in ancestral domains.
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An article that analyzes the law passed in the Brazilian state of Acre in 2010 to create the State System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA). The law is considered a model and example for the world; however, it ultimately serves to turn over the state’s natural wealth, including its forests, to the financial speculation market.
A leaflet on the Green Economy and the financialization of nature, published by Friends of the Earth France, ATTAC and AITEC.
Available at http://www.amisdelaterre.org/IMG/pdf/nature_is_not_for_sale.pdf
Members of farmers’ organizations, women’s movements and civil society organizations from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, the DRC and Mozambique gathered on August 15-16 in Maputo, Mozambique, to analyze the multi-dimensional global crisis and the response of African governments.
A Carbon Trade Watch report that links the demand for biomass in the UK, the role of the EU’s Emissions Trading System and the destructive expansion of industrial monoculture tree plantations around the world.
Land grabbing is characterized by the acquisition of vast areas of land in countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia for a variety of different uses, including large-scale monoculture plantations, mining, tourism, hydroelectric power plants and food production for export, among others, by companies, investment funds and financial markets in general (see WRM Bulletin Nº 177). This has wide implications on communities and their forests, livelihoods, traditional knowledge and indeed, on their present and their future.
Rather than shifting course, the so-called Green Economy strategy unveiled at the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development drives nature further into the global marketplace by defining an economic value on what the Earth “does” for humans, detachedly called “ecosystem services.” Proponents of this scheme of “commoditizing” soil, forests, and fresh water profess that by putting a price on the natural world, it can be ‘saved’.
The goal of the private investment firm Terra Global Capital is “to facilitate the market for land use carbon and other environmental credits (…) by providing technical expertise for the measurement and monetization of land use carbon credits and carbon finance through a dedicated investment fund.”