Indigenous peoples can suffer from pollution compensation plan.
FORGET ANY spin. In the end, the recent UN gathering on
climate change in Cancún repeated Copenhagen’s failure in 2009. Again, the
world’s industrial economies refused to set new binding reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions, despite dire warnings by scientists. Instead,
delegates again vaguely promised money for climate adaptation and mitigation:
this time $30 billion to the developing world by 2012, and $100 billion more by
2020.
Once more, the industrialized countries appear to have
pledged much of this money in a salvage measure dubbed “REDD’’ — Reduced
Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries.
Established by wealthy nations, venture capitalists, the
World Bank, and the United Nations, REDD would pay for the carbon absorbed in
developing countries, to compensate for pollution caused by industrialized
countries.
The initiative would allow polluters to buy carbon
credits from companies, communities, non-government organizations, or countries
that promise not to destroy forests for a specific period. To polluters,
setting aside money for carbon absorption in a REDD forest is far less costly
than reducing emissions at tailpipes or smokestacks.
But even if it works — itself a point of contention —
this carbon-offsetting simply postpones any weaning off the fossil-fuel
economy.
Perhaps the people least impressed by this half-measure
are the ones who most urgently need a solution to climate disruption. From the
Amazon basin to the African savannahs, traditional indigenous peoples depend
directly on their local environment for sustenance, and so they are the most
vulnerable to climate change. At Cancún, indigenous leaders again watched as
REDD technocrats tried to “save’’ their territorial forests as global carbon
sinks, instead of cutting their own countries’ emissions.
REDD can target the tropical forests
exactly because indigenous communities have carefully preserved them
for many thousands of years. But the initiative seems to have little use for
the forest inhabitants themselves. The UN climate talks relegate indigenous
peoples to “observer’’ status. At least eight national REDD plans funded by the
World Bank would allow bans on the kind of small-scale, biodiverse farming that
is practiced by many indigenous peoples and is misnamed “slash and burn.’’ At
the same time, at least 19 of the plans explicitly contain provisions for tree
plantations, which displace forest dwellers, degrade biodiversity, and cause
high fire risk. Plantations are tolerated under the United Nations’ definition
of forests. They satisfy carbon investors who like precise measurement and
predictability — not messy, biodiverse forest habitat.
This mentality inspires what critics call “fortress
conservation’’: non-government organizations and national authorities cordon
off land to protect species and institute carbon-offset projects, driving out
of their forests the indigenous stewards, who become “conservation refugees.’’
John Nelson, Africa policy adviser for the Forest Peoples Program, estimates
that some 150,000 to 200,000 people in the Congo basin alone have suffered this
fate.
“Imagine waking up one day,’’ he says, “to find a
boundary outside your village — with armed paramilitary guards telling you that
you cannot enter the forest.’’ If people cannot go there, they cannot teach
their children how to live in the traditional ways, and these ways, with all
they might have to teach the larger world about storing carbon and repairing
forest ecosystems, will be lost. “Mitigation policies of the developed world,’’
Ramiro Batzin, a Keqchikel Maya from Guatemala, recently told the World Bank,
“will kill us before climate change does!’’
Despite their long residence in the forests, many
indigenous peoples have fought for decades to establish legal title to the
land. But nothing at Cancún required REDD programs to establish or secure those
rights, or to obtain genuine consent for projects in indigenous communities.
This neglect, and the fortress conservation it allows, is
not only an injustice but also a missed opportunity. Studies have shown that
traditional land management, when title is secured, sinks carbon far more
effectively and cheaply than conventional efforts favored by REDD.
The Emberá of Panama, like the Ogiek of Kenya, have been
the stewards of the land for millennia. But at best REDD would promise them
compensation — and a dubious dependence on a cash economy, which tends to erode
traditional culture. Especially in an age of climate chaos, the erosion of such
stewardship is unacceptable. And in any case, nobody should mistake the
initiative for a real solution to a changing climate. That remains what it was
in Kyoto, and what it will be later this year in Durban: cut greenhouse gas
emissions.
**Dennis Martinez, a Native American forest-restoration
specialist, is on the steering committee of the Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural
Climate Change Assessment Initiative. Laird Townsend of the non-profit media
organization Project Word, a project of the Tides Center, contributed to this
article.