The global push toward renewable energy, intended to reduce climate-aggravating emissions, has revealed how the environmental and social costs of extracting the minerals it requires fall disproportionately on local communities and ecosystems.  

Many argue that electromobility and renewable energy technologies will help mitigate climate change – but adopting them on a large scale would require a massive increase in the mining of minerals such as lithium, which are key to their development.  

According to the World Bank, the extraction of 3 billion tons of minerals over the next 30 years is crucial to powering the global energy transition. The International Energy Agency further predicts a four-fold increase in mineral extraction by 2040 to meet climate targets.  

However, the rush for these so-called “critical” minerals risks amplifying the very crises it seeks to help solve, exacerbating ecological degradation and perpetuating socio-economic injustice in the Global South. 

Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains

The very naming of these transition minerals as “critical” creates a false sense of urgency, reinforcing the current damaging system of extraction, and failing to consider the protection of communities, ecosystems, and species in areas of exploitation. 

While mainstream strategies emphasize technological fixes, a deeper examination reveals that, without addressing the broader implications of mineral extraction, the quest for a greener future may only deepen existing environmental and human rights violations.  

UN-backed principles 

The UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals was formed in April this year to identify common and voluntary principles that will help developing countries benefit from equitable, fair and sustainable management of these minerals.  

The Panel brings together strange bedfellows – not least China and the US – and will need to work hard to create consensus to identify principles and recommendations for governments, companies, investors and the international community on human rights, environmental protection, justice and equity in value chains, benefit-sharing, responsible investments, transparency and international collaboration. It must raise the level of ambition and listen directly to civil society organizations and rights-holders, including local communities.  

Our reflection on what the Panel cannot ignore points to three elements: a status quo approach to “development”; a high level of technological optimism concerning mining; and a lack of urgency regarding ecosystem limits and communities’ rights.  

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

First, we acknowledge that the Panel is under pressure from powerful actors, but it will need to resist the assertion that mining is always beneficial to the economic growth and prosperity of nations. This status-quo perspective reinforces the notion of unlimited natural resources for human consumption, mirroring the economic development promises of the early 20th century, which contributed to the current climate crisis.   

The Panel must not fail to consider the possibility of degrowth or the imposition of limits on mining activities that could lead to reduced material and energy consumption. Nor should it neglect other forms of traditional and local knowledge that may offer possibilities for alternative development. 

Then, on the impacts, pollution and other ecosystem disruptions caused by mining, it is consistently stated that assessments and evaluations are necessary – and that these can preserve ecosystem integrity.  

The Panel must acknowledge the irreversibility of certain mining impacts on ecosystems, which are already evident. This belies the optimistic view that all mining problems can be resolved through technology, a notion that is both false and unrealistic. What’s more, it undermines the precautionary principle, which calls for protective action from suspected harms, even before scientific proof exists.  

Finally, in the dominant narrative, transition minerals are found in “empty” places, deemed void of life, where only the resources to be extracted are counted. This ignores both the biodiversity and traditional communities that inhabit these areas.  

Indigenous rights at risk 

More than half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are found in or near indigenous territories, which are already facing the consequences of the climate and ecological crisis, such as extreme aridity, permanent water shortages and scarce water availability.  

These impacts may be increased by mining project pressures and mineral extractive activities, which are already facing the impacts of the climate and ecological crisis, such as extreme aridity, permanent water shortages or scarce water availability.  

It is essential to ensure respect for the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination; to obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before projects are begun; to carry out human rights and environmental due diligence; and to ensure not only remediation of impacts but also the ability of local people to maintain their own cultural, social, economic and political ways. 

Lithium tug of war: the US-China rivalry for Argentina’s white gold

In addition, current plans for the extraction of transition minerals are limited to the scale of the mining concession in question, without considering the cumulative impacts derived from others operating in the same area and ignoring the socioeconomic activities already taking place in these ecosystems.  

Instead, it is essential to ensure the bio-capacity of ecosystems to maintain their life-supporting functions and the diversity of uses by communities in territories, not just industrial ones. Decisions on mineral extraction should not be based solely on market demand, but also on the biophysical limits of ecosystems and, more sensibly, on the balance of water systems.    

The UN Panel has been established at a time when we can apply the lessons learned from the historical impacts of mining worldwide. This calls for the Panel to raise the level of ambition of its work by generating and advancing binding guidelines and mechanisms.  

Gathered this week in Nairobi, the Panel is working to set the rules of the game, defining principles and recommendations which will be officially presented in September during the UN General Assembly. It has a unique opportunity to oversee substantive changes to the global energy system – one that we cannot afford to miss. 

The post The UN can set a new course on “critical” transition minerals   appeared first on Climate Home News.

For too long, Africa has supplied the raw materials which drive development abroad, while Africans remain locked in endless cycles of poverty at home.  

This has been happening even before Western European colonial powers carved up the African continent in the 19th century’s “scramble for Africa”, exporting rubber, diamonds, gold, ivory, palm oil and other wealth, to process and transform it into saleable commodities. 

Today, this damaging pattern remains intact, as wealth continues to haemorrhage from Africa in this way. 

To take just one graphic example: 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa – or 53% of the region’s population — still don’t have access to electricity on a continent that possesses all the minerals needed to build its own energy infrastructure.  

Now a new “scramble for Africa” has begun. This time, it is for the African minerals that will be crucial for the world to have any chance of halting climate chaos.  

Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains

The African continent holds vast quantities of the transition minerals – such as cobalt, lithium and nickel – which are used to help produce, transport, store and use electricity generated from cleaner sources such as wind and sun – and which are a prerequisite for a clean energy future.  

Tanzania, for instance, possesses huge reserves of nickel which is a key ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles. 

As the world rushes to secure these precious materials, Africans must break with the past.  

The wealth these minerals generate must spur African development, giving our citizens the roads, hospitals, schools, electricity and other basic services so many of them desperately need. 

“New” partnerships? 

Many of Africa’s historic exploiters are among the Western powers which are now rushing to secure transition minerals. 

The US-led “Mineral Security Partnership,” which includes the European Union and other most powerful economies from the OECD block, is positioning itself in Africa’s resource-rich countries.  

Concurrently, the EU is supposedly redesigning its ties with Africa and other mineral-rich nations through “Strategic Partnerships“.  

All those initiatives are committed to “bring economic benefits to local communities”, allowing partner countries to “move up the value chain” – but are effectively enveloping the continent from multiple angles in a concerted push for resources. 

And it is no secret that mineral exports are ruled by international trade policies set up, influenced and dominated by Western powers, allowing them to access African resources at a good price. 

Zimbabwe looks to China to secure a place in the EV battery supply chain

In this realm, it remains an open question whether these partnerships will pave the way for genuine development, or – as so often in the past – merely serve foreign interests.  

In other words, will they simply be a means of continuing business as usual – keeping Africa trapped in ‘extractivism’ – or offer Africa a path to self-determination? 

Challenging the status quo 

The OECD Forum on Responsible Minerals Supply Chains, taking place this week in Paris, is a crucial opportunity for African leaders to assert their vision for a new era of mineral resource management.  

This event remains a forum dominated by consumer regions’ representatives and priorities, but we Africans need to make ourselves heard.  

We cannot wait any longer. African leaders must challenge the status quo and advocate for deals and trade policies that empower producer nations. 

They can also insist that mining companies respect the rights of the Indigenous and local communities most impacted by mining – peoples whose way of life protects priceless ecosystems that are crucial for preventing climate change, biodiversity loss and the risk of future pandemics emerging from deforested landscapes.  

Calls for responsible mining fail to stem rights abuses linked to transition minerals

Free trade rules favour already industrialised regions. One of the ways to counter this is by creating a web of preferential trade agreements among African countries. This would allow them to access their neighbours’ transition minerals at lower prices, to help them build their own clean energy technologies.  

Regional collaboration is the key to ensuring that Africa gains its rightful place in the new power map drawn by the energy transition. The African Union, the Southern African Development Community and other regional blocs could play a pivotal role in this process, promoting intra-regional trade and economic cohesion. 

African civil society works across borders to ensure that deals signed by African governments with consumer regions reflect the continent’s collective interests. But we can’t do this alone. 

We need to unite with our leaders around a just vision for our minerals. Only then can the continent truly benefit from them, turning the page on a history of exploitation and underdevelopment.  

The post Africa must reap the benefits of its energy transition minerals  appeared first on Climate Home News.

New data from a Transition Minerals Tracker compiled by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) shows that more than 630 allegations of human rights violations have been associated with minerals mining since 2010. Of those, 91 were made in the last year alone.

The tracker monitors human rights abuses associated with the extraction of seven minerals including copper, lithium and bauxite, which is new in this year’s update. These elements are essential for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and electrification more broadly.

The latest BHRRC data points to widespread violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights – such as forced relocation, water pollution and denial of access to traditional land – as well as attacks on human rights defenders and workers’ rights abuses.

BHRRC also registered 53 allegations of work-related deaths since 2010, with 30 percent of those newly reported in 2023.

Supply chain FAQ: What you need to know about critical minerals

Caroline Avan, BHRRC’s head of natural resources and just transition, said the situation is not improving. “The sector is blatantly failing at protecting those who generate its profits, and this is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

“We are probably only capturing a fraction of abuses because we rely on public data and so many issues don’t get reported,” she added. The BHRRC gives companies an opportunity to respond to the allegations it documents.

Just ten companies are associated with more than half of all allegations registered since 2010 – including China Minmetals, Glencore, Grupo Mexico, First Quantum Minerals and Solway Group – while 46% of the total originated in South America.

Allegations of human rights abuses linked to transition minerals by category 

Source: Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

Avan explained that many abuses follow a pattern that begins with environmental violations –  such as water or soil pollution – compounded by inadequate consultation with local communities, which then leads to protracted conflict.

This has been the case at the Las Bambas copper mine in Peru, now owned by MMG Ltd – whose major shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation (CMC) – and formerly controlled by Glencore. It received the most allegations of rights abuses not only in 2023, but across the tracker’s full 13-year monitoring period.

The mine’s infrastructure, activities and expansion plans have led to a series of social and environmental impacts, provoking protests and blockades by Indigenous communities. Most recently, last November, 1,500 workers went on strike to ask for a larger share of profits.

CMC, MMG and Las Bambas have not responded to the BHRCC over the reported allegations.

New global principles

The persistence of human rights abuses in mineral mining is set to attract more attention, with the International Energy Agency estimating that mineral demand for clean energy applications is set to grow by three and a half times by 2030.

The BHRRC’s report notes that the mining sector is under pressure from civil society, Indigenous peoples and global policymakers alike to strengthen human rights protections.

For example, the new EU Batteries Regulation, adopted last July, obliges end users of battery minerals to carry out thorough supply chain due diligence.

“We are seeing the automotive industry asking more of the upstream mining sector, and that is good news,” said Avan. “But we are not seeing enough from the renewable energy sector in terms of asking mineral suppliers to ensure their operations are not linked with abuses.”

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Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a high-level Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals tasked with developing a set of global principles to “safeguard environmental and social standards and embed justice in the energy transition”.

Guterres said supply chains must be “managed properly” to ensure that developing countries get a fair share of benefits and that the environment and human rights are protected.

“Too often, production of these minerals leaves a toxic cloud in its wake: pollution; wounded communities, childhoods lost to labour and sometimes dying in their work. And developing countries and communities have not reaped the benefits of their production and trade,” the UN chief said in comments at the launch.

“This must change… The race to net zero cannot trample over the poor,” he added. The panel is expected to deliver initial recommendations ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.

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The BHRRC’s Avan told Climate Home it was “concerning that countries in the Global North are rushing to sign strategic partnerships with resource-rich countries in the Global South because they want to secure their mineral supply chains, but the companies who will be involved in delivering those minerals are not asked much in terms of requirements for human rights protections”.

For companies, recommendations from the centre’s new report include adopting human rights policies and giving affected communities access to the benefits and governance of projects.

Avan said government regulation and better business practices are essential “to ensure that the global energy transition is a just one, centred on respect for human rights, fair negotiations and shared prosperity”.

“The alternative is rising resistance, conflict, and distrust – all threatening to slow the pace of the transition,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Calls for responsible mining fail to stem rights abuses linked to transition minerals appeared first on Climate Home News.

Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.  

Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by UN and other experts. Their research confirms what we know firsthand.     

And yet political and economic actors continue to ignore the evidence, pushing us aside in their rush to build a system to replace fossil fuels, while guided by the same values that are destroying the natural world.  

Ironically, we released this declaration amid the UN’s sustainability week – renewable energy was on the agenda. We were not.  

Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains

Indigenous peoples are not opposed to pivoting away from oil and gas, nor are we opposed to investing in renewable energy systems as an alternative.  

But we must have a say. More than half the mines that are expected to produce metals and minerals to serve renewable technologies are on or near the territories of Indigenous peoples and peasant communities.  

Resource extraction causing triple crisis  

In the words of the UN’s Global Resource Outlook 2024, released in March with little fanfare by the UN Environment Programme: “the current model of natural resource extraction…is driving an unprecedented triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution”. 

Mining companies have been offered a path to sustainability. Few have started down that path.  

And they won’t unless global and national decision-makers take advantage of this key moment in history to demand change. Indigenous leaders need to be at the table too.

As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance

We are not willing to have our territories become the deserts that mining companies create, leaking toxins into our rivers and soils and poisoning our sources of water and food, and by extension our children. 

The playing field for Indigenous peoples is massively unjust. The authors of the Global Resources Outlook cite evidence of national governments that favor companies’ interests “by removing the judicial protection of Indigenous communities, expropriating land…or even using armed forces to protect mining facilities”.  

Why should this matter to people on the other side of the planet? 

Proven to outperform the public and private sectors, Indigenous peoples conserve some of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Negotiators at global climate events do cite our outsize conservation role, but treaty language allows our governments to decide when and whether to recognize or enforce our rights.  

Companies are advised to “engage” with our communities – not so they can avoid harming us, but to prevent costly conflicts that arise in response to outdated and destructive practices. 

These “externalities” that chase us from our ancestral homes and damage our health and the ecosystems we treasure are revealed only when they become “material”, of concern to investors and relevant to risk analysts. 

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

Our resistance is costly and material. Failure to properly obtain our consent before sending in the bulldozers can bring a project to a halt, with a price tag as high as $20 million a week. And communities are learning to use the tools of the commercial legal system to defend themselves. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School report that, over time, shareholders benefit most when companies heed the demands of their most influential stakeholders. Indigenous peoples are the stakeholders to please.  

Our communities disrupt supply chains, but when our rights are respected, we can also be the best indicators of a company’s intention to avoid harm to people and planet. 

Call for ban on mining in ‘no-go’ zones 

In the declaration we released in New York earlier this month, we called for laws to reduce the consumption of energy worldwide, and we laid out a path for ensuring that the green transition is a just one. 

We urged our governments to recognize and protect our rights as a priority; to end the killings, the violence and the criminalization of our peoples; and to require corporations to secure our free, prior and informed consent, and avoid harming our lands and resources. 

A growing body of evidence suggests that Indigenous peoples rooted to their ancestral lands can draw on traditional knowledge, stretching back over generations, to help nature evolve and adapt to the changing climate. We understand the sustainable use of wild species and hold in our gardens genetic resources that can protect crops of immeasurable economic and nutritional value. 

Current practices for extracting metals and minerals put our peoples at risk and endanger climate, biodiversity, water, global health and food security. Researchers warned earlier this year that the unprecedented scale of demand for “green” minerals will lay waste to more and more land and drive greater numbers of Indigenous and other local peoples from our homes. 

Q&A: What you need to know about critical minerals

So our declaration also calls on governments to impose a ban on the expansion of mining in “no-go” zones – those sites that our peoples identify as sacred and vital as sources of food and clean water. Indigenous communities, rooted in place by time and tradition, can help stop the green transition from destroying biomes that serve all humanity. 

The UN Secretary-General launches a panel on critical minerals today that seems to recognize the importance of avoiding harm to affected communities and the environment.  

This is a step in the right direction, but Indigenous peoples and our leaders – and recognition and enforcement of our rights – must be at the centre of every proposal for mining and renewable energy that affect us and our territories. This is the only way to keep climate “response measures”, made possible by the Paris Agreement, from harming solutions that exist already. 

The post Indigenous lands feel cruel bite of green energy transition  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Now frustrated Indigenous rights groups are trying a new tactic to speed up change: creating their own funds in a push to boost the flow of money to frontline communities and shift away from what some see as an outdated colonial-style model driven by donors in the Global North. 

Since 2020 – and especially last year – more than half a dozen new Indigenous-led funds have sprung up, largely in forest-rich Brazil but also in developing countries from Indonesia to Mexico.  

Many are still in a start-up phase, but a few have already begun pushing money to frontline communities. They include the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (MTF), which invested $1.3 million in 32 projects – from chocolate production to tourism and protecting traditional knowledge – in communities from Mexico to Panama last year. 

“We are aiming not only to make the funds reach the real guardians of the forest and the real guardians of mitigating and adapting to climate change, but also to support sustainability, democracy and good governance of all these territories,” said María Pía Hernández, a lawyer and regional manager for the MTF. 

World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink

Multilateral funds can take years to approve projects and often struggle to funnel big pots of nature and climate finance into the smaller-scale projects communities need, Indigenous leaders said.  

The new funds aim to fill the gap by gathering large amounts of money, distributing it nimbly and leap-frogging the barriers faced by forest communities in dealing with traditional funds, such as onerous paperwork. 

“We aim to improve not just the condition of the territories and people who live there but also promote global climatic justice,” Hernández said on the sidelines of last week’s Skoll World Forum, a gathering of social innovators.  

Bypassing the giants 

As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hold their Spring Meetings in Washington this week, focused in part on reshaping lending for climate action, Indigenous communities are already rethinking how to better access the resources they need to protect nature and the climate – and to ensure those on the frontline benefit from changes such as new clean energy infrastructure. 

Along the way, they are setting up new rules and structures in line with their own traditions and beliefs, after years of chafing against constraints imposed by big donors, some of them former colonial powers. 

Fossil fuel debts are illegitimate and must be cancelled

In Canada, for instance, many Indigenous governing bodies now run their own renewable energy utilities, providing a fifth of Canada’s renewables, said Joan Carling, executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International. 

“If we transform the business-as-usual and create the enabling environment and conditions to put Indigenous people at the centre of this, then we can have a truly just, equitable renewable energy for all,” she said. 

A new dashboard released last week by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway shows climate finance for indigenous and local communities rose between 2020 and 2023 to about $517 million per year, a 36 percent increase over the previous four years. 

That increase comes after governments and charitable donors promised $1.7 billion back in 2021 to Indigenous and local communities by 2025 for their role in protecting land and forests, which are considered key to protecting both the climate and biodiversity. 

Yet with much new funding still moving through big international environment organisations and other intermediary agencies, rather than directly to communities, “there is no evidence yet indicating a systematic change in funding modalities,” the groups noted in a report.

Connecting communities with cash 

Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, said improving direct access to funding is the key issue. At least $10 billion in finance for Indigenous and local communities will be needed to meet a global pledge to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, she added. 

Indigenous-led funds believe they can be pivotal to achieving that ramp-up. 

Shandia, established by the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities uniting 35 million people from 24 countries, is still in a start-up phase but aims to serve as a conduit for much larger-scale finance to Indigenous and other frontline groups. 

“Millions of dollars are moving in the world. We want to connect claims on the ground to those millions,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, a Shuar indigenous leader from Ecuador and the alliance’s executive secretary, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on behalf of Indigenous communities. 

Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance similarly in 2023 helped establish the Nusantara Fund, while in Brazil a range of Indigenous-led vehicles, including the Podáali Indigenous Amazonian Fund, were launched last year.

Guardians of the forest – and finance?  

Anthony Bebbington, who runs the Ford Foundation’s international natural resources and change change programmes, said the last few years had seen the emergence of substantial new funds, with the potential to grow, that are challenging the traditional ways donors have worked.  

“Funds are saying to us, ‘If you trust us to be guardians of the forest – a role for which we are often harassed and sometimes killed – then there is no justification for you to also not trust us to be guardians of the finance’,” he told an event on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum. 

In projects backed by the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, for instance, indicators of success are changing from a simple focus on hectares of forest replanted to include things like whether more water is flowing through key rivers, said Hernández, whose fund so far gets 80 percent of its support from philanthropies. 

An Indigenous Ramas man lifts a crayfish trap in the Rio Indio river, San Juan de Nicaragua, Nicaragua on February 16, 2022.(Photo: Reuters/Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas)

The MTF also actively seeks out and helps prepare applications from Indigenous and local communities that could benefit from its support rather than just accepting grant proposals, as traditional donors often do.  

David Rothschild, senior director of partnerships for Nia Tero, a US non-profit that works with Indigenous groups, said avoiding heavy paperwork was key to enabling the new funds take off. 

“What they don’t want is to become another entity in the system operating in a colonial way. How do they not fall into the same patterns that have been destructive, while still reporting to donors?” he asked. 

Hernández said new ways of working are developing, if sometimes too slowly. “We are not asking for blank cheques,” she emphasised. “But we deserve a little bit of consideration.”

(Reporting by Laurie Goering; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance   appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last month, recently elected president Daniel Noboa said in an interview to a local media outlet that he believed that a “moratorium [to the referendum result regarding oil exploitation in the Yasuní] is a viable path”. 

While Noboa supported keeping oil in the ground during the refendum, he now argues that Ecuador is at war and that “we are not in the same situation as two years ago”.

Activists and indigenous people told Climate Home they were concerned about the president’s remarks, adding that democracy is under threat and that their “hope is being taken away”. 

Back in August, 59% of Ecuadorians voted to stop oil drilling in block 43. Environmentalists around the world celebrated the victory as an example of how to use democratic processes to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Since then though, the country has gone through a political and social crisis due to a rise in gang violence. The government declared a state of emergency earlier this year, following the escape of a powerful drug lord from a top security prison.

The new president Noboa suggested that the oil from the Yasuní could help fund the “war” against drug cartels. 

Taking away hope

Pedro Bermeo is a spokesperson for Yasunidos, a coalition of indigenous NGOs from the Amazon that led the call for the referendum. He said Noboa’s statement is “worrying, unwise, and undemocratic” as Noboa is saying he won’t abide by people’s votes. 

Belén Páez, president of climate and indigenous rights NGO Fundación Pachamama, said Noboa’s statement “is very dangerous in several ways because it attempts against the citizens’ decision and puts democracy at risk”. 

As someone who voted in favor to keep Yasuní’s oil underground, Bermeo said that people like him feel their “hope is being taken away”. 

Bermeo said that, when the refendum took place, Ecuador was already facing extreme violence and poverty. But nevertheless, people voted to keep the oil in the ground.

“There was a feeling of hope to protect life on the planet”, says the activist. So now Bermeo argues that voters feel defrauded and “have stopped believing in the State”. 

Belén Páez added “it makes us all feel bad and distrustful”. 

Páez, who has worked to protect indigenous rights in Ecuador, added that Noboa’s remarks could result in a set back of other environmental policies. 

Moi Guiquita of the indigenous Waorani people in the Ecuadorian Amazon pulls a boat over flooded jungle areas at the lagoon of the Yasuni National Park in the Bameno community, in the Pastaza province, in Ecuador, July 29, 2023. REUTERS/Karen Toro

Fighting back

On February 1, the indigenous Amazon Waorani Nationality declared themselves in a ‘territorial emergency’ and demanded that the government respects the referendum.

At a press conference, the indigenous group rejected Noboa’s proposal of a moratorium. They added that a moratorium would perpetuate the violation of indigenous peoples’ rights and territory, including those of the Tagaeri and Taromenane, the only two indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation in Ecuador. 

The Waorani Nationality announced that, if a moratorium is formally proposed, they will take legal action against the Ecuadorian State. Their decision to do so was supported by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

“We are not going to allow our rights to continue being violated,” said Waoranai Nationality president Juan Bay, “it is time for us to have social and environmental justice”. 

Second referendum

Mauricio Alarcón is a rule of law and democracy campaigner at Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo. He said this situation leaves voters with “an unpleasant feeling”.

Alarcón argues that Noboa’s statement is contradictory to his past stances, as he vowed to protect the Yasuní when he was a presidential candidate. 

He added that a moratorium on the referendum is technically possible, but it might not be as easy as the government is making it seem.

The results of a referendum can only be reversed through another referendum, he said, which would force the government to propose a new vote on whether to put in place a moratorium..

If what the government intends is a total reversal of what has been decided regarding the Yasuní, a referendum is also the way to go, “and it will be the citizens the ones to have the last word”, states Alarcón. 

Since his remarks in January, president Daniel Noboa hasn’t referred to the moratorium again. But government insiders say that it is still a possibility. 

The post Ecuador’s new president tries to wriggle out of oil drilling referendum appeared first on Climate Home News.

A spokesperson for the German government, the fund’s second-biggest donor, told Climate Home that support for such a project “is not possible” according to the rules of the fund, which was specifically set up to reduce forest destruction in the Amazon.

The United States is “confident” the fund will use its resources “consistent with its governing regulations”, a US State Department spokesperson told Climate Home.

Environmentalists fear the project would trigger an explosion in forest destruction by giving illegal loggers easier access to remote areas of the rainforest.

First ever Paris Agreement offsets face integrity questions

Investment in large-scale infrastructure projects is not listed among the target actions of the 2008 presidential decree that established how the fund should spend its money.

But officials in the Lula administration want to tap the green funds for the paving of the 900-kilometre long BR-319 highway, cutting through the rainforest and connecting Manaus and Porto Velho.

The lower house of the Brazilian Congress voted last December in favour of a bill that would allow for the use of conservation funds to finance public works aimed at “recovering, paving and increasing the capacity” of the road. The bill needs Senate approval before becoming law.

The German government said it “is observing the developments closely”. A spokesperson added that, if the bill was conclusively approved, the German government would affirm to the Amazon Fund’s managers that its resources cannot be used to pave the road.

‘Tremendous consequences’

Research shows every major highway project in the Amazon has set off a surge in land grabbing and illegal deforestation.

Philip Fearnside, a scientist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, told Climate Home “the consequences would be tremendous”.

He added that trees would not only be cleared on the roadside, but the project would create an interconnected network of major roads giving deforesters access to a much larger area.

Built in the 1970s by a military government, the BR-319 was abandoned a decade later due to a lack of maintenance.

Since disintegrated into a dirt road, much of the route is now impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles that attempt it during dry months crawl along the broken pavement.

A section of BR-319 in the Amazonas state of Brazil. Photo: Agencia CNT de Noticias

The Brazilian government has been sketching out plans to restore the highway on economic and social development grounds.

The transport minister, Renan Filho, announced last August that he was planning to pitch the Amazon Fund’s governing board a project to pave the road.

This would turn the road into the world’s “most sustainable highway” and would allow easier access for police patrols to monitor and prevent deforestation, the ministry argued.

But environmentalists argued that this is not the kind of project that the fund is meant to support. One of the fund’s creators, forest scientist Tasso Azevedo said the project “does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines”.

Amazon Fund revived

Created in 2008, the Amazon Fund has over $1.2 billion available for projects that prevent, monitor and combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The fund’s largest donors are Norway, Germany, the US, Switzerland and state-owned oil company Petrobras.

They have promised to inject an extra $800 million into the fund since President Lula revived the mechanism on his first day in office in 2023 after three years of inactivity.

“A la carte menu”: Saudi minister claims Cop28 fossil fuel agreement is only optional

Western donors had stopped money transfers in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) manages the fund and decides how to allocate its resources.

Last September it told Climate Home that any requests are processed “in accordance with the strategic vision, guidelines and focuses” outlined in the 2023-25 ​​Biennium, a new set of guidelines created by the Amazon Fund’s Guiding Committee. It has not replied to further requests for comment.

Donors sceptical over plans

A spokesperson for Germany’s Ministry for cooperation and development, said the use of Amazon Fund resources “is clearly defined and restricted” by the presidential decree underpinning the fund’s creation. “Based on these rules and regulations, the use of financial resources for paving a road through the rainforest is not possible”, they added.

A US State Department spokesperson said they “are confident” the BNDES will use the fund’s resources “consistent with its governing regulations and Brazil’s public commitment to cease all deforestation in the Legal Amazon by 2030”.

Brazil cracks down on illegal gold miners

A spokesperson for the Norwegian embassy in Brazil said it is for the Brazilian government through BNDES to decide on the specific use of the resources in the Amazon Fund. “The Norwegian Government has no say in the selection of projects”, it added.

The Brazilian government controls BNDES and appoints its head. “It is not an independent institution and the government has put pressure on its decisions in the past”, says Fearnside. “It just depends on how high a priority the project is for the government. The indication is that, except for the Ministry of Environment, the rest of the government is in favour of this highway”.

Fast-tracking process

Meanwhile, a group of parliamentarians from the Amazon regions brought a new bill to Congress aiming to fast-track the construction project. The text, approved under a special ‘urgency’ procedure, calls the highway “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security”. 

The bill would authorize the use of donations received by Brazil to help conservation of the Amazon for the repair works on BR-319.

“We want a road that gives us the right to go back and forth, to transport goods, to buy food. This is the only highway in Brazil that is not paved, we cannot treat people from the North as second-class citizens”, said Alberto Neto, the author of the bill, after its approval in the lower chamber.  

The article was updated on 11/01 to add a comment received after publication

The post Germany and US warn Brazil against using Amazon Fund to pave rainforest road appeared first on Climate Home News.

Blue Carbon plans to take over forested areas the size of the United Kingdom and sell carbon credits from their conservation under a mechanism established by the UN. The UAE firm, chaired by a member of Dubai’s royal family, has been on a deal-making spree with African governments to make that happen.

The 58-year-old Italian is no forestry expert, but – he says – he was tapped by the company right after its launch a year ago because of his decades-long technology experience. In Dubai, Landi is known as the owner of a cybersecurity firm devising fully encrypted phones.

In his native country, Landi is a wanted man. He was convicted in two separate trials for a bankruptcy fraud that sank one of Italy’s largest telecommunications companies and left over 2,200 people without a job nearly 15 years ago.

Landi’s advisory role in Blue Carbon is likely to fuel concerns over the integrity of a company bidding to become a large player in a sector already plagued by environmental and social risks.

Blue Carbon did not respond to emailed questions. After Climate Home contacted the company, Landi emailed the reporter in a personal capacity and agreed to a video call. He rejected the legitimacy of the court judgments against him, alleging that Italian judges ruling over his case were corrupt.

Bankruptcy fraud

Samuele Landi was the founder and chief executive of Eutelia, an Italian company providing landline and internet services to millions of users across the country in the early 2000s.

The firm, which had ballooned in size through acquisitions, seemed set on a meteoric rise. But in 2008 cracks started to appear. Drowning in debt, Eutelia asked the government to place most of its workers in a state-funded job retention scheme while trying to restructure its activities.

But at the same time, according to court records, Samuele Landi and other senior executives illicitly moved funds worth dozens of millions of euros outside of Eutelia and into shell companies mainly based outside of Italy.

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Eutelia went bankrupt. By the time Italian police moved in to arrest Landi in mid-2010, he had relocated to Dubai. At the time Italy had no extradition treaty with the UAE. Landi told Climate Home News he did not move to Dubai out of fear of being arrested but because he was looking for more freedom.

Landi never returned to Italy. Two separate trials against him and other executives went ahead in his absence. In one Samuele Landi was handed an 8-year prison sentence on bankruptcy fraud charges in 2020. In a second one, stemming from the bankruptcy of a company linked to Eutelia, the court of appeal in Rome sentenced him to 6 years and six months in prison at the end of October.

Landi said he had referred the first case to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming it was an unfair trial. He said he is going to appeal against the second sentence to the Italian Supreme Court. “There is no evidence. I did not steal one single euro”, he told Climate Home.

Liberian diplomat

While his legal troubles rumbled on in Italy, Landi started a new life in Dubai. He set up a cybersecurity company and became a diplomat, after being appointed as consul general in the UAE for the African state of Liberia.

Landi told Climate Home he “developed the diplomatic relations between the Liberian and the UAE governments”, which resulted in the construction of roads, hospitals and sports centers in the African nation over the last few years.

It is through this role that he first came in contact with people from Blue Carbon. Landi said he accompanied a delegation from Liberia to a meeting with Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the Dubai royal family and chairman of Blue Carbon. “When they formed the company a year ago they asked me to be their advisor”, Landi said. “I help them with information technology. Sometimes they call me to make evaluations on IT solutions.”

A screenshot from the Blue Carbon website

Liberia is one of the African countries that have signed a raft of memorandums of understanding with Blue Carbon in the run-up to Cop28, alongside the governments of Kenya, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania. Landi said he was not directly involved in the negotiations between Blue Carbon and Liberia.

Blue Carbon’s African scramble

The deals, which are not yet definitive, could see the UAE firm gain control over more than 30 million hectares of forests across the countries. In Zimbabwe alone, it is set to secure rights over a fifth of its total landmass.

Blue Carbon plans to set up forestry protection schemes, produce carbon offsets on a never-seen-before scale and sell them to polluting governments and companies.

The firm is looking to operate under a new mechanism established by Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which is set to transform carbon markets. Blue Carbon wants to trade a specific type of credit, internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs), that can be used by governments to achieve emission reduction goals set out in their nationally determined contributions.

 

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A post shared by Blue Carbon LLC (@bluecarbondxb)

Blue Carbon’s foray into Africa has prompted numerous concerns.

Alexandra Benjamin, forest governance campaigner at Fern, calls Blue Carbon’s plans “a new scramble for Africa”.  “These deals, mostly struck under a veil of secrecy, aren’t just bad news for the climate, but for the lives and livelihoods of rural African communities, whose rights are threatened by them”, she added.

Civil society and indigenous groups fear communities will be forced to make way for the projects, losing control over land that constitutes their primary livelihoods. A number of forest protection offsetting projects – unrelated to Blue Carbon – have been suspended recently following allegations of abuse and forced evictions.

Exposed: carbon offsets linked to high forest loss still on sale

The second concern is that little money would actually end up in the hands of African governments and local communities, contrary to what the mechanism is set up to achieve.

Finally, there are worries that the unprecedented volume of credits created could end up greenwashing oil and gas operations without providing any meaningful emission reductions. Forestry offsetting programs have been hotly debated after a series of articles and scientific studies cast doubts over their climate integrity.

COP28 plans

Blue Carbon has said the deals will bring “vital environmental impacts” and “a transformative wave of economic opportunities” for the African countries signing on. Sheik Dalmook Al Maktoum told the Zimbabwean government the programme could bring $1.5 billion of climate finance into the country.

“Beyond the immediate goal of carbon emissions reduction, the heart of these carbon projects pulsates with the intent to bring about tangible improvements at the grassroots level,” the company added when announcing the agreement in Harare.

The company has indicated that more details about its carbon credit plans will be revealed at Cop28 in Dubai. It told CNN that it would present its deals at the climate summit as a “blueprint” for carbon trading.

Landi said he has no intention to take part in Cop28. Nearly a year ago he moved to a barge moored in the international waters off the Arabian coast with the goal to set up a so-called decentralized autonomous organisation.

“The idea is to create a place where people can stay without being subjected to the matrix,” he told Climate Home. “No one can say which kind of insects or fake meat you have to eat, which kind of injections you have to get. A libertarian state is very important.”

The post Meet the Italian fugitive advising Emirati start-up Blue Carbon appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a first-of-its-kind poll, 59% of voters decided to keep oil in the ground in the Yasuní National Park, one of the largest biodiversity hotspots on the planet and home to indigenous people in voluntary isolation.

Following Sunday’s result, Ecuador’s state-0wned oil company, Petroecuador, has roughly a year to halt its operations in an area that currently produces more than 55,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

Yasunidos, the environmental group behind the referendum, has described the result as “a historic victory for Ecuador and for the planet” in a tweet.

¡Hoy hicimos historia!

Esta consulta, nacida desde la ciudadanía, demuestra el mayor consenso nacional en Ecuador. Es la primera vez que un país decide defender la vida y dejar el petróleo bajo tierra.

¡Es una victoria histórica para Ecuador y para el planeta!#SÍalYasuní pic.twitter.com/RBvHzkozxp

— YASunidos (@Yasunidos) August 21, 2023

Their success marks the end of a decade-long battle with the government which argued such an outcome would have “catastrophic” effects on the economy.

Crude oil remains Ecuador’s biggest export, but its contribution to the country’s gross domestic product declined by nearly a third between 2011 and 2021.

The referendum was held during the first round of the country’s presidential election, in which leftist candidate Luisa González took the lead and headed to a second round against centrist Daniel Noboa.

Residents of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, also voted on whether to keep mining activities in the Chocó Andino reserve, another biodiversity hotspot located 40km from the city. 69% of voters rejected mining in this area, which is rich in gold and copper.

A long fight

For decades, Yasuní has been threatened by extractive industries. According to reports from the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project, at least 689 hectares have been deforested in the Yasuní, most of it, by the oil industry. Experts warn that tree loss, alongside frequent oil spills, threatens the unique biodiversity of the Amazon.

On Sunday voters were asked specifically about the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project, also known as Block 43, located on the eastern edge of the park.

Efforts to keep Yasuní oil in the ground date back to 2007 when then-president Rafael Correa appealed to wealthy countries for $3.6 billion in exchange for not going ahead with drilling in the area.

But six years later, as international donors failed to deliver the money required to offset lost revenue, Correa scrapped the initiative and gave the green light to oil operations in the Amazon rainforest.

Economic argument

In the same year, activists from Yasunidos began campaigning for a public vote. They quickly collected over 750,000 signatures – many more than the number required to trigger a referendum – but the Correa administration voided half of them. Following an extensive legal process, Ecuador’s top court ruled last May to include the vote in the upcoming presidential election.

While the battle raged on, drilling in the Yasuní went underway. In 2016 Petroecuador began extracting crude from Block 43, which now contributes to around 12% of the country’s oil output.

Satellite images show the development of oil production facilities in the Yasuní National Park since drilling began in 2016

During the referendum campaign Ecuador’s outgoing administration argued that an oil drilling ban would have catastrophic consequences for the country’s economy. Fernando Santos, the then-energy minister, said Ecuador would lose $1.2 billion in income per year if the proposal was successful.

Impact on indigenous communities

But the indigenous populations in the area have been raising severe concerns over how the industry has changed their way of life.

Speaking to Climate Home News ahead of the vote, Norma Nenquimo, an indigenous leader from the Amazon, equated oil drilling in Yasuní to “an invasion”.

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“They don’t talk about the environmental impact, only about the profit,” she added. “We depend on this land. We don’t depend on anyone else to help us. A place with biodiversity is like a human heart. A person cannot live without a heart.”

Experts also saw the referendum as an opportunity to redefine Ecuador’s economic model, less dependent on dwindling oil reserves. A 2019 study by the Geological and Energetic Research Institute, a public research institution in Ecuador, estimated that by 2029, “oil could no longer be the main source of income” in the country.

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Luis Suárez, Executive Director at Conservation International Ecuador, told Climate Home News last month that the country could move towards tourism and developing a “bioeconomy”.

The post Ecuadorians reject Amazon oil drilling in historic referendum appeared first on Climate Home News.

An investigation by the fund’s independent complaint mechanism found a series of failures that could “cause or exacerbate” violent conflict between indigenous people and settlers.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) will not provide any money to the project managed by Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime until it fully complies with the fund’s rules, its board ruled at an annual meeting in July.

This marks the first time the GCF board puts on hold an approved project over human rights concerns. The decision comes at the end of a process that took more than two years since a coalition of local and international NGOs filed a complaint.

But the fund stopped short of entirely scrapping the project, as local activists requested. The Nicaraguan government now has the chance to make it compliant with the GCF rules.

A GCF spokesperson told Climate Home that the matter “has received, and continues to receive, its highest attention”. They added that the fund reserves the right to exercise its legal rights in case the issues are not addressed to its satisfaction.

Human rights abuses

The project, which was approved in 2020, aims to reduce deforestation in the Unesco-designated Bosawás and Rio San Juan biosphere reserves in the Caribbean Region of Nicaragua.

The region is gripped by an increasingly violent conflict between indigenous communities and settlers, who are grabbing land to exploit the forest’s resources and farm cattle.

Independent legal observers have documented repeated attacks against indigenous people in the area with dozens of people murdered, kidnapped or raped over the last few years.

A report by the internal redress body said the complainants’ concerns that the project may fuel further violence were justified.

It also found the project had been approved even though it did not comply with a series of GCF’s policies and procedures. Investigators highlighted the failure to carry out due diligence on conflict risks and human rights violations and to conduct free and informed consultations with indigenous communities before the project’s approval.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

These failures “may adversely impact the complainant(s) and other indigenous communities in the project areas”, the report said.

A GCF spokesperson said the fund was not aware that the development of the funding proposal was not in compliance with its policies at the time of the project’s approval. New evidence brought to light subsequently through the independent investigation showed that some of the information presented by the project proponent, as part of its due diligence, was not accurate or correct, the GCF added.

Bittersweet ruling

Nearly a year after the investigation was concluded, the board has now requested the GCF Secretariat, its administrative arm, to put the project on hold until it respects the fund’s policies and procedures.

The ruling’s summary does not specify if all of the issues raised through the complaint mechanism will need to be addressed.

Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas

The result is bittersweet for the groups behind the complaint.

Florencia Ortuzar, a lawyer at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), says that, even if the outcome may ultimately be positive, the decision gives no clarity as to what process the Secretariat will follow. “We do not know which specific issues of non-compliance will be looked into nor how they will aim to fix them”, she added.

Calls for cancellation

Amaru Ruiz, director of the Nicaraguan organisation Fundación del Río, says the ruling validates indigenous populations’ concerns, but he believes the programme should be axed rather than simply improved.

“A project that violates human rights, consultation processes and a series of procedures should be cancelled”, he told Climate Home News. “The problems are substantive, not just formalities”.

The GCF Secretariat will now need to work with the Nicaraguan state apparatus and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, its funding partner on the project, to resolve the issues.

The government of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has been accused of widespread human rights abuses. Photo: Presidencia El Salvador

The government led since 2007 by president Daniel Ortega has been responsible for “widespread and systematic human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity”, according to the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua.

Ruiz claims the Nicaraguan regime does not have the political goodwill to play within the rules. “It is only after the financial resources, so I believe it will try to show on paper that the project is now compliant even if that is not the case”, he added. “We will see if the Secretariat acknowledges its previous mistake and will make sure regulations are properly applied now”.

Lack of transparency

The complainants’ worries are compounded by what they described as a lack of transparency during the lengthy redress mechanism.

Investigators concluded the reviews in August 2022 but their findings have only been made public now following the completion of the complaint process. The GCF’s board members discussed the report during three separate meetings before making a final decision nearly two weeks ago.

The discussions happened behind closed doors and public updates on the case were limited. This prompted some complainants to criticise the process as “unfair, non-transparent and deficient”.

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Aida’s Ortuzar told Climate Home News “this is especially concerning as it is the first time a complaint reached the board and it sets a worrisome precedent”.

The report by the redress mechanism also raised concerns over the way the GCF relies heavily on information submitted by project proponents to make decisions on whether to fund them.

“This leaves the GCF extremely vulnerable to policy and safeguards non-compliance that can result in huge reputational risks to the fund”, the investigators wrote.

The article was updated on 27/07 to include comments from the Green Climate Fund received after publication

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Leaders will be meeting next month at the Amazon Summit in Belém, a city also due to host the Cop30 climate talks in 2025, to discuss the 45-year-old Amazon Cooperation Treaty for the first time in several years.

The final guest list is not yet clear, but nations across Latin America are expected to be represented as well as some from Europe.

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rebooted the summit in the hope of using it to build support for his commitment to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, but curbing fossil fuel extraction does not appear to be on the agenda.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

However, a grassroots campaign led by Indigenous groups and civil society argues such a move is essential to combat climate change, and to protect biodiversity and the Indigenous people that live there.

The campaign builds on an existing effort to get a global pact for the permanent protection of four-fifths of Amazonia by 2025. Focusing specifically on oil and gas, it calls for an Amazon exclusion zone where no fossil fuels can be exploited, in line with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to stay under a 1.5°C warming threshold.

Domestic exploitation

A number of South American countries in which the Amazon rainforest lies have been trying to boost domestic oil and gas exploration and extraction in recent years. 

Peru is proposing to place 31 oil blocks over 435 indigenous communities, while Bolivia recently finalised an ‘Upstream Reactivation Plan’.

Meanwhile, the result of a forthcoming Ecuadorian referendum about oil exploitation in the Yasuní rainforest will be hugely significant for that part of the Amazon but will also send a wider message about the region’s priorities.

In Brazil, a far-right Congress is proposing to gut the powers of both the ministries of the environment and Indigenous peoples, throwing Lula’s deforestation pledge into doubt. 

The Brazilian president’s own ambitions of positioning himself as climate leader have also been called into question over his stance on an oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazon river. He recently said he found it “difficult” to believe that oil exploration in the Amazon basin would damage the region’s rainforest.

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Ahead of the Amazon Summit, Indigenous groups will be meeting in Brazil to share fossil fuel resistance strategies, with the support of campaign group 350.org. 

“From this we hope will come a very powerful document that will inform the discussions of the presidents in Belém,” said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America managing director. “Hopefully it will have some very strong messages saying no new fossil fuel projects in the Amazon.”

Petro’s lead

Zugman said Colombian president Gustavo Petro had been a “very loud voice” in support of this idea. In January, Petro announced a halt in all new oil and gas exploration contracts, keeping 380 currently active contracts. 

In a recent opinion piece for the Miami Herald, Petro called on Amazon countries and their partners in the Global North to follow him on ending all new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.

He said that, while ending deforestation was “fundamental”, it had to be accompanied by “an ambitious transnational policy to phase out fossil fuels”. Oil, gas and coal accounts for about half of all Colombian exports.

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Petro said some countries, like Colombia, could allocate a “substantial amount of resources” to protect the Amazon. 

But he stressed that curbing oil and gas exploitation would have a big economic impact on poorer South American nations and called on countries like the US to help with financial mechanisms such as debt-for-climate swaps, a multilateral fund that funds environmental protection services by inhabitants of these territories, or the kind of financial reforms being progressed by the Bridgetown initiative. 

At a recent meeting, the Colombian and Brazilian presidents pledged to cooperate to protect the Amazon but the latter did not appear to make any concessions on oil and gas.

“We need to convince other presidents like Lula.. to step up as well and really play this leadership role,” said Zugman, “to not allow fossil fuel exploration in one of the most important places of the world.” 

Banking spotlight

Campaigners are also stepping up pressure on financial institutions to stop financing oil and gas projects in the region.

A report, published today by NGO Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), shows that US$20 billion has been provided to explore and exploit reserves in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador over the past 15 years.

More than half of this (US$11 billion) came from just eight banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Itaú Unibanco, HSBC, Santander, Bank of America, Banco Bradesco and Goldman Sachs.

Six of these banks are either headquartered in the US or act through their US subsidiary and operate in deals across the region, while the two Brazilian companies – Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco – are highly connected to specific oil and gas projects in that country. 

The report is accompanied by a database of all the banks involved in Amazon oil and gas through directly traceable and indirect financing, for example by providing loans or underwriting bond deals for upstream and midstream development and transport of oil and gas in Amazonia. 

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

JPMorgan Chase tops the list, having directly provided US$1.9 billion in direct financing to oil and gas in the region over the past decade and a half.

Together with HSBC, it was a major backer of Petroperú’s Talara refinery expansion project, which is driving the exploitation of oil on Indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon.

JPMorgan Chase has ruled out support for the highly controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline project, but made no such commitment on oil and gas activity in the Amazon or wider fossil fuel expansion. 

The Stand.earth report says an Amazon exclusion for financial institutions is an “essential strategy” to protect the region from oil, gas, and other extractive industries.

Although no banks have completely ruled out funding fossil fuels in Amazonia – the geographic region around the Amazon basin – the report does praise some companies for starting to recognise the risks involved. 

Exclusion policies

 In May 2022, BNP Paribas pledged to no longer finance or invest in companies producing from oil and gas reserves in the Amazon or developing related infrastructure, becoming the first major bank to adopt a geographical exclusion of oil and gas in this area.

And in December 2022, HSBC amended its policies to exclude all new finance and advisory services for any client for oil and gas project exploration, appraisal, development, and production in the Amazon Biome.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

Stand.earth says these two companies, along with some others, are “sending important signals” that banks should be willing to review their relationship to Amazon destruction and take steps to manage that risk.

These also go some way towards the Exit Amazon Oil and Gas principles devised by international advocacy groups including Stand.earth and Amazon Indigenous leaders.

Clear boundaries

Angeline Robertson, lead researcher of Stand Research Group, said efforts to restrict fossil fuels should cover the wider Amazonia area “to avoid confusion or allow banks to define the exclusion zone themselves.

This was an issue with Arctic exclusions, where banks used different boundaries in their policies.”  Standard Chartered’s and BNP Paribas’ exclusions, for example, cover the ‘Amazon’ or ‘Amazon Basin’, while Société Générale and Intesa Sanpaolo’s policies include only the Amazon regions of Ecuador and Peru.

Zugman said both governments and financial institutions had a big role to play in protecting the region. “Governments need to step up first. And banks… should be there by their side to support these bold decisions and to help accelerate the just energy transition.”

He added that banks could play an important role in the Amazon by supporting a just energy transition. “Energy access is still a big deal in the Amazon and banks could, in consultation with communities, be helping them have clean access to energy instead of investing in businesses that are going to destroy their lands.”

Zugman said the Belém summit was vital because it would inform about protection of the Amazon at Cop28 in December as well as the next G20 meeting which Brazil is due to host. “We’re really pushing together for this moment.” 

The post Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas  appeared first on Climate Home News.

The journey is equal parts dramatic and harrowing—with canyon-like views of the Atlas Mountains via treacherous switchbacks, and a vast landscape of desert beyond Ouarzazate.

Along the way—some 330 kilometers from Marrakech—the commune of Imider sits nestled on Morocco’s National Route 10 (N10). Hardly registering to passing tourists, Imider is one of the poorest and most-water stressed communities in Morocco. The climate is semi-arid—it rains only a few times a year—and poverty levels are nearly triple the national average.

Indigenous adaptation

Despite general disregard from passersby and neglect from Morocco’s central government in the northwest, Imider’s residents are proud members of the indigenous Amazigh Ait-Atta tribal confederation (otherwise known as “Berber” to western audiences).

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For centuries, Amazigh communities have populated much of the country’s southeast, adapting to the harsh and semi-arid climate that comes with being east of the mountains and isolated from the seaside. Despite the unforgiving landscape, these groups are agropastoral—herding sheep and goats and farming a variety of crops like olives, almonds dates, and vegetables. In Imider, most people live on less than a dollar a day.

In a region where annual precipitation can range from a few inches to less than an inch, water is life—or “aman iman,” as residents say.

Drought-affected fields in the Tinghir province. Photo: Rachel Santarsiero

To adapt to such low rainfall levels, Amazigh groups have long depended on a traditional system of water storage and distribution, known as ‘khettara’. This system relies on a series of underground canals to source water for farming fields and is incredibly efficient in arid and semi-arid climates. To the Amazigh, the khettara is sacred.

But as higher temperatures and drought conditions become the norm in Morocco, and as privatized companies continue to mine the south and southeast for phosphate and silver—as has been done in Imider—the centuries-old irrigation system is under threat.

The khettara irrigation

Among those affected is Mohammed Boumnir, a farmer in Imider who maintains his family’s plot of land, and harvests olives, dates, figs, grass, buckthorn, pomegranates, and radishes. The hand-dug canals of the khettara separate each set of crops like a lattice, but today they are bone dry. “This drought, the mining, it’s all affecting the farm. It’s cut off more than 80% of our water”, he told me.

In place of the dried-out khettara system, Boumnir has had to install irrigation pipes to help source water. Other farmers on adjacent plots have installed solar panels and mechanized wells to pump water from deeper beneath the ground. Those are costly endeavors that not all farmers in the area can afford.

Even with these advancements, the results of these new technologies are mixed. “The figs, almonds, olives—they’re all getting smaller, and they taste different than they used to”, Boumnir said.

With the onslaught of climate change, the Kingdom of Morocco has sought to position itself as a leader in the green technology economy—both within Africa and on the world stage with its western partners.

Mining dependence

Despite its sustainable agenda, phosphate and silver mining contributes to over 10% of the country’s GDP – just behind agriculture and tourism. But Morocco’s dependence on mining gets overshadowed by its flashy renewable energy projects, most notably the Noor Solar Power Station in Ouarzazate.

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Extractive capitalist projects in the southeast, like the Noor Solar Plant, or the deleterious silver mining in Imider, only exacerbate the harsh conditions that vulnerable Amazigh communities are struggling with. And while the Kingdom of Morocco continues to uphold its “green” façade to the international community, Amazigh locals in the southeast—battling land grabs, groundwater depletion, and resource extraction—are being left behind.

Hope for the future is hard to come by in Imider. Many locals are unemployed, and others are moving away. But there is one phrase that’s continually shared amongst residents, in native Tamazight: “You can pluck all the flowers, but you can’t stop the march of spring.”

Rachel Santarsiero is a climate researcher at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The post Morocco’s centuries-old irrigation system under threat from climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

Medco had initially planted a vast timber plantation to produce wood chips for exports. Then, in 2017, Indonesia injected Medco with $4.5 million to build a biomass plant in the area and committed the state-owned electricity company to buy the energy it generated. In 2021, the government gave the plant an extra $9 million. 

The company said it needs to almost double the size of its plantation to meet the demands of the power plant, and that it would continue to use wood harvested from the forest as it is cleared. 

Ultimately, the most affected were local villagers depending on the forest. The project has made it harder for Marind people, hunter-gatherers indigenous people to the lowlands of Papua, to find food to eat. 

This story is the result of a new Climate Home News investigation in collaboration with The Gecko Project and Project Multatuli, both publications based in Indonesia. 

This week’s news:

• “Green” finance bankrolls forest destruction in Indonesia
• FSC’s rehab scheme for forest destroyers under fire after fresh allegations
• Amazon gateway city Belém will host Cop30 climate talks
• Comment: Climate movement must switch on to UAE threat

Our reporter Joe Lo is in Paris covering key UN plastics treaty negotiations. Check out our coverage:

• Row over veto powers holds up Paris plastic treaty talks
• Comment: How a local victory against petrochemicals can spur global action on plastics

Forest protection has been on our radar recently, as allegations surged that forest logging companies were using a sustainability certification scheme called the FSC to brand themselves as sustainable while continuing to clear forests. 

At its assembly last year, the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) agreed to give their stamp of approval to companies that have cut down trees between 1994 and 2020 if they restore part of the forests and compensate communities.  

These companies include two Indonesian pulp and paper giants, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (April) and Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), which had cleared vast areas of the tropical rainforest for decades. 

But environmental groups accused both companies of sourcing wood from suppliers which continue to cut down intact forests. One of the suppliers, they found, cut down an area equivalent to 20,000 football pitches. 

FSC told Climate Home News it “will not engage with any organisation that continues to be part of destructive activities”. “The FSC should prepare itself not to be fooled,” one campaigner responded. 

The post “Green” funds destroy Indonesia’s forests – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sixty million Indigenous Peoples almost wholly depend on forests for our livelihoods. In the Amazon basin, Indigenous People manage more than 30% of forested territories. Likewise, in Mesoamerica, Indigenous People and local communities steward half of the region’s forests.

Satellite imagery shows that deforestation rates in our territories are roughly half of rates found in surrounding lands.

Despite centuries of history and clear evidence that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the most knowledgeable and experienced stewards of our rainforests, we are not consulted in key decisions about how to conserve them.

Governments battle over carbon removal and renewables in IPCC report

When it comes to using carbon credits as a tool to halt deforestation and stop climate change, it is critical that we are included in decision-making and consultation processes. This is especially true with regards to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (IC-VCM), which will soon release new criteria for high-quality carbon credits called the Core Carbon Principles (CCP). However, their process to define carbon credit “integrity” was developed without input from Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

The Integrity Council is nearing the end of their process to develop this guidance, and has not adequately consulted us on important issues that directly impact our communities, our livelihoods, and our ability to conserve our rainforests. Consultation with Indigenous Peoples and local communities has been limited to one disappointing webinar plagued by technical problems, and one lunch at Cop27 in Egypt—which, despite featuring a promising and robust discussion, has seen no follow-up.

One urgent issue for our communities that we have not been able to weigh in on is the treatment of high-integrity jurisdictional REDD+ crediting in the Integrity Council’s guidance. Jurisdictional REDD+ credits are designed to incentivise the conservation of large regions of forests that span Indigenous territories, states, and whole countries. For our communities, these credits can unlock the finance needed to support our work to safeguard forests.

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With jurisdictional approaches to forest conservation, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities can generate high-integrity credits based on improvements in emissions and removals across wide regions or territories of forests, preventing deforestation from simply shifting to nearby plots of land.

Because of our efforts, Indigenous territories are often home to High Forest, Low Deforestation (HFLD) regions—meaning that we have high forest cover, yet low rates of deforestation. However, HFLD territories face increasing threats of deforestation. It is Indigenous Peoples who can best defend these territories in circumstances of high vulnerability. However, our only pathway to leverage carbon markets is through HFLD approaches.

It is critical that the Integrity Council does not exclude jurisdictional REDD+ credits, HFLD territories, or Indigenous wisdom from carbon markets. The Integrity Council can get this right by creating guidance for high-quality carbon credits that includes jurisdictional REDD+ programs, including those in HFLD territories, and that reflects Indigenous and local communities’ perspectives and priorities.

I’m a COP veteran. Here are 3 suggestions for the new Loss and Damage fund

The Council should look closely at the Tropical Forest Credit Integrity (TFCI) guide, published by Indigenous Peoples organizations and environmental groups last month. Working together, these groups created guidance to distinguish high-integrity credits that have the greatest forest conservation impact and respect the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples. The guide shows that jurisdictional REDD+ crediting can be done with high integrity, with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities at the decision-making table, and with great impact for forests and climate.

Without the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in the development process, the Council’s Core Carbon Principles will not be effective in the long term. We need to be represented in governing bodies and spaces like the IC-VCM board with a real, legitime representation to contribute to the design and oversight of both the market and individual projects, and have effective channels to address grievances.

The Integrity Council has an opportunity to embody ‘integrity’ by including Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities as partners and honoring our power in the voluntary carbon market. Working together, we can enable finance to flow to one of the most impactful climate solutions—our forests—and Indigenous Peoples and local communities who can best safeguard them.

Levi Sucre is the general coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and Fermin Chimatani is the presidente of the Asociación Nacional de Ejecutores de Contrato de Administración de Reservas Comunales del Perú 

The ICVM responded that it is “deeply commited to working in partnership with indigenous people and local communities to ensure the voluntary carbon market protects and promote their rights and livelihoods”.

It said it has three seats on its board for indigenous people and local communities, one member of its “distinguished advisory group” is from the Shuar people and two members of its expert panel have “significant expertise of working with indigenous people and local communities”.

The ICVM said it is recruiting two experts on indigenous people and local communities and has “engaged extensively” with them during its standards development process and offered them an extended deadline to submit responses “in consideration of technical issues on one of the webinars”.

The post Carbon credit rule-makers must engage Indigenous People appeared first on Climate Home News.

They can make a significant contribution to global efforts to address the climate crisis – if their rights are protected.

The Green Climate Fund – the UN’s flagship climate fund – is being put to the test to heed this call.

Indigenous representatives have complained that one of the fund’s projects in Nicaragua risks fuelling escalating violence from settlers invading their land to farm cattle and exploit the forest’s resources. They say the GCF approved the project without their consent or due diligence.

Last week, armed settlers reportedly attacked two communities and killed at least five people. The Nicaraguan government has turned a blind eye.

This is the first complaint case to reach the GCF board and a test of the fund’s ability to enforce its own safeguards.

Because of its sensitivity, board members discussed the case behind closed doors at a meeting this week. But the meeting drew to a close Thursday without a public outcome to the growing frustration of civil society groups. Meanwhile, the violence continues.

Also this week, Mafalda Duarte was selected to take the reins of the GCF’s secretariat from French UN veteran Yannick Glemarec. As CEO of the Climate Investment Funds, Duarte has launched programmes that provide direct financing for indigenous communities to protect natural resources.

Perhaps, these are some of the skills she can bring to the GCF.

This week’s stories

• Green Climate Fund credibility hangs over response to violence in Nicaragua project
• Loss and damage committee ready to start talks following Asian nominations
• Argentina secures funding boost to kickstart gas exports from ‘carbon bomb’
• IMF approves first batch of climate resilience loans
• Lawyers and activists build pressure on Korean court to rule on climate
• Chinese coal boom a ‘direct threat’ to 1.5C goal, analysts warn
• Mafalda Duarte named as next chief of UN climate fund
• Vietnam’s energy transition deal is a ‘black box’, partner warns

The expansion of fossil fuel production continues to cause significant harm to indigenous peoples around the world.

In Argentina, campaigners say president Alberto Fernández’s plans to export record amounts of gas from the Vaca Muerta fields will further trample the rights of indigenous Mapuche people.

The Latin American Development Bank recently agreed to support the Néstor Kirchner pipeline, which will channel gas to Argentina’s northern Santa Fé province for export to neighbouring countries. Fernández is also eyeing exports to Europe amid plans to build an LNG terminal in Buenos Aires.

This fossil fuel buildout and a renewed coal boom in China risks pushing the world towards more violent climate disasters. As Malawi reels from what could be the longest-lasting tropical storm on record, we are once again reminded that the most vulnerable will suffer first.

The post Nature’s stewards under attack – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

In June 2021, a coalition of local groups and international NGOs complained to the fund about a $117 million project to reduce deforestation in the Unesco-designated Bosawás and Rio San Juan biosphere reserves in the Caribbean Region of Nicaragua.  

The project, which was approved in 2020, aims to reduce extensive grazing and introduce agroforestry systems such as cocoa. 

The region is home to 80% of Nicaragua’s forests and most of its indigenous populations. But it is gripped by increasingly violent conflict between indigenous communities and settlers, who are grabbing land to exploit the forest’s resources and farm cattle. 

Over the past week, the Center for Legal Assistance to Indigenous Peoples reported two attacks against communities in the project area that led to the death of at least five people.

The complainants claimed the project would exacerbate the violence. They argue it was approved without proper due diligence or their free, prior and informed consent. 

Mafalda Duarte named as next chief of UN climate fund

This is the first time a complaint case reaches the board of the UN’s flagship climate fund. Civil society observers argue the board’s handling of the case will set a precedent for future complaints.

Behind closed doors

The findings of the investigation have not been made public because of the sensitive nature of the case and complainants have remained anonymous because of the risk of retaliation.

However, excerpts from a draft report, seen by Climate Home News, shows that the redress body found the project clearly violated several GCF safeguards and procedures, including the lack of consultation with indigenous groups. It agreed that the project may exacerbate conflict.

Board members discussed the report behind closed doors this week during a meeting in Songdo, South Korea. The meeting closed on Thursday without a public update on the case.

Liane Schalatek, a civil society observer at the GCF, told Climate Home the closed door discussion was meant to protect the complainants and the integrity of the process. “It is now used to divert the latter and harm the former…and that is a tragedy,” she said.

Escalating violence

Florencia Ortúzar, a Chilean lawyer at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (Aida), a regional NGO, supported the complainants to bring their case to the GCF. 

Ortúzar said it was “unfortunate and infuriating” that the issue had not be given priority during the four-day long meeting. A delayed outcome means affected communities may have to wait until the next meeting in July for a decision – nearly a year after the investigation’s findings were finalised.

“And in the meantime violence escalates,” Ortúzar told Climate Home.

In a letter to the GCF board, and writing on behalf of 15 indigenous communities, the Center for Justice and International Law said the recent attacks were carried out by a group of 60 armed settlers who burnt down 50 homes. It urged the GCF to publish the final report on the case.

Argentina secures funding boost to kickstart gas exports from ‘carbon bomb’

In its draft recommendations, the redress body urged the board to implement robust due diligence on human rights and independent monitoring as a condition for the project to go ahead.

While the body hasn’t got the power to advise the cancellation of the project, board members could decide to scrap it – the complainants’ preferred outcome.

Credibility test

Amaru Ruiz, director of Nicaraguan organisation Fundación del Río, who supports the affected communities, said the GCF’s credibility was on the line. 

He said the fund should “completely reassess the approval of the project” or risks “legitimising environmental destruction and the process of forest invasion”.

“What is at stake is not the credibility of the [Nicaragua] regime, but the credibility of the fund,” he said.

“This not just the first major grievance case, it is a test case – for the solidity and fairness of the fund’s complaints procedures, but also for the board’s compliance with guidelines it adopted for its own conduct in such cases,” said Schalatek.

“Unfortunately, it appears that the board is falling short in this first test,” she said, adding that indigenous groups still haven’t been able to see the final findings.

IMF approves first batch of climate resilience loans

Human rights abuses

Ortúzar, of Aida, said indigenous people have no confidence in the ability of the Nicaragua government and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (Cabei), which is providing co-funding, to deliver the project under strict monitoring conditions.

She said the government had expelled UN staff and dissolved close to 200 NGOs to escape scrutiny and it was unlikely to accept monitoring from any third party.

Earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Council found that widespread human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity are being committed against civilians by the Nicaragua government for political reasons. 

Human rights experts said this was a product of the deliberate dismantling of democratic institutions and the destruction of civic space.  

A report by the Heinrich Böll Foundation found that Cabei’s operations lacked transparency and that it was funding president Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime. 

A Green Climate Fund spokesman told Climate Home: “The GCF has robust procedures to address any complaints made in relation to projects, including safeguards to protect complainants. We cannot comment on this case since the matter remains confidential.”

The post Green Climate Fund credibility hangs over response to violence in Nicaragua project appeared first on Climate Home News.

Mafalda Duarte, a Portuguese national, joins the Green Climate Fund from the Washington-based Climate Investment Funds (CIF), where she served as CEO since 2014.

She previously held senior positions at the African Development Bank and the World Bank, working on climate finance.

Duarte is replacing French UN veteran Yannick Glemarec, who served a four-year term at the helm of the GCF and is due to step down on 2 April. In 2019, Duarte was among the contenders to head the GCF but lost out to a shortlist of three white men.

The appointment comes as the board is faced with its first complaint case after indigenous peoples in Nicaragua alleged that a project to reduce deforestation is exacerbating violence with settlers invading their land.

Vietnam’s energy transition deal is a ‘black box’, partner warns

The Green Climate Fund was established in 2010 as the main investment arm to support developing countries deliver on the Paris Agreement goals.

Countries have pledged $20.3 billion to the fund since its creation. Duarte will manage a portfolio of over 200 projects and oversee the next replenishment phase which will culminate in a pledging conference later this year.

Victoria Gunderson, co-chair of the GCF board, said the board was “impressed with her vision and drive” and that her experience in managing climate funds will be crucial in helping the GCF catalyse more funding.

Gunderson added that the recruitment process had been “highly competitive”.

The shortlist of candidates was not made public. But Climate Home News understands that Duarte beat Woochong Um, a Korean national and the managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, and Anthony Nyong, a senior director at the Global Center on Adaptation on secondment from the African Development Bank.

Vulnerable nations set up alliance to prepare loss and damage action plans

In a statement following the announcement, Duarte said she was “honoured” to have been selected and looked forward to “accelerate the delivery of critically needed climate investments”.

“Developing countries are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. They can count on my resolve to support their climate aspirations in pursuit of a better climate future for all,” she said.

Henry Gonzalez, the fund’s deputy executive director, will serve as interim director until Duarte takes over.

Liane Schalatek, a civil society observer on the GCF board, welcomed having “an experienced climate finance leader” heading the fund.

But she told Climate Home that Duarte will need to adjust “to the very special role and accountability of the GCF as the core of the UN Climate Change financial mechanisms”, which she said is “very different” from the modus operandi of multilateral development banks.

EU agrees diplomatic push for fossil fuel phase out ahead of Cop28

At the fund’s board meeting in Songdo, South Korea, this week, the fund’s redress mechanism is facing its first test.

Violence and human rights abuses

For the first time, board members will discuss a complaint brought by a coalition of local groups and international NGOs about a $117m project to reduce deforestation in the Unesco-designated Bosawás and Rio San Juan biosphere reserves, located in the Caribbean Region of Nicaragua.

The region is home to 80% of Nicaragua’s forests and the majority of its indigenous populations. Approved in 2020, the project aims to reduce extensive grazing and introduce agroforestry systems such as cocoa.

However, the region is gripped by increasingly violent conflict between indigenous communities and settlers, who are grabbing land to exploit the forest’s resources and farm cattle.

This week, the Center for Legal Assistance to Indigenous Peoples reported that a group of armed settlers attacked a community and killed up to seven people. Five people, including two children, from a separate community were allegedly kidnapped.

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Complainants, which remain anonymous because of the risk of retaliation, allege that the project will exacerbate the violence. They say it was approved without their free, prior and informed consent or proper due diligence.

The conclusions of an investigation by the GCF’s Independent Redress Mechanism (IRM) have not been made public. But excerpts from a draft report, seen by Climate Home, give right to the complainants.

It finds that the project clearly violates several GCF safeguards and procedures, including the lack of consultation with indigenous groups, and that the project may exacerbate conflict.

The draft report cited ongoing human rights violations in the project area, including the massacre of indigenous peoples.

Setting a precedent

Florencia Ortúzar, a Chilean lawyer at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (Aida), a regional NGO, supported the complainants bring their case to the GCF.

How the board deals with the case “is going to set a very important precedent” for future complaint cases, she told Climate Home.

Because of the sensitivity of the case, the board’s discussions will be held behind closed doors. The IRM  is expected to recommend robust due diligence on human rights and independent monitoring is carried out before the project is implemented.

But Ortúzar said complainants would prefer the project to be scrapped. They have “no confidence” in the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (Cabei), which is co-financing the project, nor the Nicaraguan government, she said.

Earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Council found that widespread human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity are being committed against civilians by the Nicaragua government for political reasons.

Human rights experts said this was a product of the deliberate dismantling of democratic institutions and the destruction of civic space.

The post Mafalda Duarte named as next chief of UN climate fund appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cindy has a background in law and indigenous peoples’ rights. She is a recent law graduate from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and was a 2020 participant at the Global Leadership School for Indigenous Women by International Indigenous Women’s Forum ( FIMI). She is currently pursuing a postgraduate in Law at Kenya School of Law to become an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya. She is also the Chair of the Tirap Youth Trust (Tirap means “safe haven”) formally known as Ogiek Youth Council where she has been actively promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, youth and girls in Kenya.

Cindy takes us through her experience as an indigenous person growing up in Mau Forest: what it was like and what has changed now in the wake of land rights issues and the climate crisis. She speaks about her work at the Tirap Youth Trust, which focuses on capacity building, advocacy and empowerment of indigenous communities in Kenya. And she shares with our audience a beautiful song written by young people from the Ogiek community that speaks to the protection of the forests and which acts as an educational tool within the community.

Cindy signs off the show by sharing what she wants the upcoming Cop27 climate conference in Egypt to deliver for indigenous communities and countries across the African continent. Enjoy the show!

To support Tirap Youth Trust find their contacts on their website. Find the song by the Ogiek Youth on protections of the forest on YouTube, Twitter @ogiekyouths or Facebook @OgiekYouthCouncil

Find all episodes of the Hali Hewa podcast here.

The post Hali Hewa episode 3: The indigenous experience appeared first on Climate Home News.

The latest Supreme Court ruling, which curtails the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate power plants, has dealt another blow to president Joe Biden’s efforts to rebuild the US’ climate credibility.

The court ruled that, while the EPA can regulate emissions from individual power plants, it cannot set standards to shift power from fossil fuel plants to cleaner sources.

It could have been worse. Environmentalists were worried the ruling could weaken the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases – which it didn’t do. But the ruling does take off the table one of the most effective regulatory tools to reduce the country’s emissions in the power system.

“It means that the agency is going to have a more difficult time establishing nationwide limits on carbon pollution [from power plants],” said Andres Restrepo, senior attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Programme.

That poses a direct challenge to Biden’s commitment to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035.

Around the world, climate negotiators and observers have told Climate Home News the decision further undermines confidence in the White House’s ability to deliver on its climate goal.

“It will no doubt be noticed by Beijing and feed into its long-standing perception that significant US federal action is not possible,” China-watcher Li Shuo said.

Rachel Cleetus, of the Union of Concerned Scientist, had this message for the rest of the world: “This is the moment to put pressure on the US to deliver. This is not a moment to walk away and give up on the US because there’s some real important opportunities that we need to lean into here and policymakers need to feel the pressure from the international arena for the US to live up to its responsibilities.”

This week’s news…

• ‘The world is getting tired of this’: Supreme Court deals blow to US climate credibility
• The Arctic community that chose conservation over Big Oil
• Germany, Italy moot support for gas export facility in Argentina
• Germany, Italy push G7 into watering down pledge to end overseas gas finance
• Dutch government issues world-first cap on flights from European hub
• Campaigners call on António Guterres to rescue ‘imperilled’ biodiversity deal

… and comment

• My people have lived in the Amazon for 6,000 years: You need to listen to us – Txai Suruí
• Europe must set robust clean hydrogen standards to mobilise MENA investment – Olivia Azadegan, Magnolia Tovar, Clean Air Task Force

Humanity’s efforts to address the biodiversity crisis are in no better shape.

A fourth round of negotiations to agree on a global deal to protect nature this decade ended in Nairobi last Sunday with virtually no progress being made. With five months to the Cop15 biodiversity summit, which has relocated to Montreal, leading conservation groups and campaigners said “a crisis point” had been reached. They urged political leaders to inject momentum in the process.

From the climate frontline, reporter Edward Struzik travelled to the Dehcho region in the Northwest Territories where Canada’s first indigenous protected reserve is bringing together scientific methods and traditional knowledge.

The Dene people have largely resisted the fossil fuel companies eyeing the resources under their feet. Instead, they are collaborating with a team of scientists keen to understand how climate change and thawing permafrost is impacting the region’s ecosystems. In return, the Dene community wants to find out how future warming will further impact their food, water and infrastructure. There is hope this could provide a model for other indigenous communities facing climate threats.

From sub-Arctic Canada to the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous Peoples are pointing to what a growing body of scientific studies has shown: their knowledge and traditions are critical to protect nature and address the climate crisis.

Writing in Climate Home this week, Txai Suruí, an Indigenous leader and activist, says her people have officially requested the International Criminal Court to investigate environmental destruction in Brazil. They demand that those responsible are held accountable for crimes against humanity.

The post An uncertain climate partner – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

The sobering effect of drunken forests: Why this Arctic community chose conservation over Big Oil

By Edward Struzik

Angus Sanguez is 67-years-old and whippet-thin. His face has been weathered by years of living in the Dehcho region in Canada’s Northwest Territories, a sub-Arctic wilderness that is on the frontlines of climate change.

Sanguez was born and raised in the Dene community in Tthets’ek’ehdeli (also known as Jean Marie River), one of six indigenous communities in the Dehcho region. Covering 215,615 sq km, the Dehcho is twice the size of England, inhabited by only 3,000 people, as well as countless moose, bears and bison that roam over a massive storehouse of carbon trapped in permafrost.

Sanguez was visiting the Scotty Creek Research station in Canada’s sub-Arctic when he had a eureka moment while gazing upon all the dying trees that could no longer root themselves in the thawing peat. “So that’s why they call this a ‘drunken forest,’” he said. “I heard that term many times. But I never knew what it meant. Now I see these how these trees that have fallen down everywhere are likes drunks coming out of a bar, falling down and leaning up against each other. We are seeing a lot of this.”

Climate change is the latest threat to the lives and livelihoods of the Dene people and other indigenous communities throughout Canada. For decades, they have successfully fended off Big Oil and resisted wit one notable exception, offers to partner with fossil fuel companies, opting instead to collaborate with scientists and the national government to create Canada’s first indigenous protected area in 2018 and appoint indigenous guardians to monitor environmental changes. Scientists say their approach could serve as a conservation and climate adaptation model for other indigenous communities.

Climate threats

Climate change is transforming the Dehcho. It is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth.

In recent years, Sanquez and the Dene have experienced catastrophic flooding, massive landslides that have drained and browned lakes, and runaway wildfires like the ones in 2014 that burned 570,000 hectares of forest in the southern territories. Those 380 fires released roughly 94.5 megatonnes of carbon, half of the carbon sequestered annually in all of Canada, as well as a potentially toxic form of mercury that has been locked in permafrost.

William Quinton, a Laurier University scientist who has been monitoring the impact of climate change on permafrost in the Dehcho for 23 years, runs the Scotty Creek Research Station 50 km south of Fort Simpson, a remote village, 500km west of the capital Yellowknife.

Permafrost is like a cement that holds carbon rich peat, rocks and mineral-richly soils together. In addition to warmer temperatures, drilling for oil, and mining for metals and minerals can hasten its thaw and complicate the maintenance and cleanup of mines such as the abandoned Cantung mine located along one of the headwaters of the Nahanni River system.

The thawing permafrost can also be seen in the seismic lines around Scotty Creek that were bulldozed to identify sources of oil and gas, The lines, the single largest human disturbance in the Dehcho region, were streaming with water that had percolated up from the thawing permafrost.

In the 1950s, permafrost covered nearly 75% of the 152 square km drainage area of Scotty Creek. It’s down to a third of that. Where there still is permafrost, it is often covered by a layer of talik, unfrozen ground that does not refreeze in winter when snow acts like a blanket, trapping some of the heat.

Thick, long lasting snow cover followed by a quick spring meltdown helps spread the thaw downwards and outwards. Trees literally drown as the ground surface collapses into depressions, and as melting snow and rain fills those depressions with water. Quinton has had to move his research camp twice to avoid being flooded out.

“What we’re seeing perhaps more clearly than any other place in the world is ecosystem change occurring in fast motion,” said Quinton. “The involvement of the Dene is important to our understanding of what is happening because the elders here have a longer record of what was there in the past and how it is affecting fish and wildlife.”

From Fort Simpson, a small single-engine float plane flew us across a wilderness that spread out as far as the eye could see towards the Mackenzie Mountains where the last icefields in the mainland of the Northwest Territories are wasting away as fast as sea ice is melting.

The lessons learned at Scotty Creek have been sobering, said Quinton at Goose Lake. It was so hot and buggy that on shore, the typically gregarious ravens (datsą́) and trickers whisky jacks, (ohk’aa), were lying low. The Mackenzie Valley can be the hottest place in Canada in summer and the coldest in winter.

“It’s tough to be a tree in this landscape,” Quinton said. “The thawing that we are seeing is turning forests into bogs and other wetlands that may not be able to support the fish and animals that the Dene rely on for food and clothing.”

“The implications for water quality, vegetation changes, biodiversity and for the people living in this part of the world are profound,” he said.

The best way of visualising what Quinton is talking about is to describe what occurred 300km to the northeast in the Mackenzie bison sanctuary. Warming temperatures and the 2014 wildfires thawed permafrost so intensely that incoming water from groundwater channels drove most of the 700 wood bison out of the protected area.

The exodus was so complete, according to Terry Armstrong, a biologist working for the government of the Northwest Territories. He told Climate Home that he had a difficult time finding animals when he flew in to do a count the following year.

No one can say with certainty whether it was swamping that drove the animals out. But York University scientist Jennifer Korosi who was there at Scotty Creek says it’s hard not to make the connection considering the amount of water in the sanctuary doubled between 1986 and 2014 and Falaise Lake, the largest in the sanctuary, grew by 824%.

The tree ring and sediment coring Korosi did indicates that flooding has occurred in the past, but not nearly on this scale, for the past 300 years. Indigenous elders say nothing like it has happened in their lifetime.

Fusing science with indigenous knowledge

The message from indigenous elders and leaders at Fort Simpson was unambiguous. “Climate change is not going to wait for us to find a way of adapting and mitigating,” said Gladys Norwegian who was once chief of Jean Marie River and grand chief of the Dehcho.

“It’s happening now. We need to work as partners with scientists at Scotty Creek to see what is coming. We also need to get our own act together,” Norwegian said.

What the Dene community would like to know from the Canadian scientists they are collaborating with is how future warming will further impact their food, water and infrastructure, which is built on rapidly thawing permafrost. They are working with scientists at Scotty Creek as equal partners, to learn and better evaluate resource developments and climate impacts on their land.

Quinton believes the “unique fusion of science and indigenous knowledge” provides a model for other indigenous communities in Canada facing climate threats.

“It is a clear departure from how science and land management was conducted in the north in the past,” he said. “Because the livelihoods of the people here are so closely dependent on what is happening on the land, a management approach that puts them in leadership positions is critical.”

Not only does thawing lead to erosion and flooding, it dissolves carbon in water and enhances microbial activity that can transform harmless elemental mercury securely stored in permafrost into toxic methylmercury. This brownification of streams, rivers and lakes is how University of Waterloo scientist Heidi Swanson and University of Alberta ecologist Dave Olefeldt got involved.

With Sanguez’s assistance, Swanson is testing fish for mercury and at their request, advising people what fish they can eat. Olefeldt and his team are tracking the movement of mercury through these catchments.

There is no discernable sign yet that the contaminated fish are affecting human health. But George Low, who coordinates the aquatic resources and oceans management programme for the Dehcho First Nations, says it’s important to keep track of what’s going on, given how many fish are consumed by indigenous people.

It’s not just a matter of monitoring the situation. Community members like Sanguez are also assisting Swanson in an experiment to remove some of the older, bigger fish from lakes. This leaves the younger fish with more food and the opportunity to grow fast without accumulating so much mercury.

The merging of science and indigenous knowledge has been a long time in the making largely because of prejudices that persisted since the days when Simpson, the governor of the Hudson Bay Company, was in charge and described the Dene women he bedded as his “bits of brown.”

A more constructive meeting of minds began to slowly gel in the mid -1970s when a consortium of energy companies proposed building a 3,860 km long natural gas pipeline through the Mackenzie Valley. No one in the indigenous communities knew how a pipeline as big as that might affect caribou migration, or whether it could stand up to thaw. Neither did the energy companies. In spite of many other knowledge gaps, the Canadian government enthusiastically supported the project until public hearings overseen by Justice Thomas Berger came to a fiery head in Fort Simpson in December 1975.

Speaking for all the Dene people, Jim Antoine, a young leader from Fort Simpson, told Berger that he was willing to lay down his life to stop the $10 billion project.

Antoine’s speech made news all across Canada. Few people believed that it would end as badly as it did in Mexico when the Chontales Indians were violently cleared out as they tried to block access roads to oil and gas installations in 1976. But threats to blow up a pipeline in northern Canada rattled government and resources industry officials who were used to getting their way with indigenous people.

In the end, Berger was sympathetic. In a landmark report that got a reluctant nod from the Canadian government, the judge recommended a ten year moratorium on development in the region until land claims were resolved and wilderness protected for the benefit of the Dene.

Antoine went on to become premier of the Northwest Territories. At the request of the Dene, Nahanni National Park – a United Nations World Heritage site – was expanded to protect the headwaters of many of the rivers that drain into the Mackenzie watershed.

Indigenous guardians

The biggest development occurred this year when the Dehcho First Nations and the Canadian government finalised a deal to set aside 14,218 square km of land in the Horn Plateau, Hay River Lowlands and Great Slave Plain as a national wildlife area. Edéhzhíe became the first indigenous protected area in Canada in 2018 and the government provided a $10 million grant (£6.93m) to the Edéhzhíe Trust Fund to support the Dehcho K’éhodi Stewardship and Guardians Program.

The indigenous guardians work with scientists to monitor climate and environmental changes in the region. They also share scientists’ insights with community members.

William Alger, one of the guardians, is positive about the programme. “I learn from elders where the fish and animals are and the changes they see that are taking place,” he said.

Quinton sees the guardian programme as a way of “ground truthing” the science that he and his colleagues are doing. Once the Dene learn how do the science at Scotty Creek, they will be able to take control of the programme.

“Southern researchers like me have to come to terms with the fact that while the current system in which we operate is well-intentioned, it doesn’t necessarily address the needs of the local community,” Quinton said. “Too often, we fly in and fly out with the data without communicating what that data means.”

The Dene in the Dehcho are not the only indigenous people in northern Canada doing this. The Gwitchin of Old Crow in the Yukon have been moving in this direction for some time. The Dene and Metis people in Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories recently signed an agreement to establish an indigenous protected area – Ts’udé Nilįné Tuyeta – which will be just as big as Edéhzhíe.

Despite the progress, the Deh Cho claim to land ownership has not been resolved. And while oil flowed out of the territories from another pipeline for more than a half century, Deh Cho villages like Fort Simpson are still shipping dirty diesel in from the south to heat homes and to keep the lights on.

“It’s crazy,” said James Tsetso, a Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation councillor who was at Scotty Creek. “And look at all of the wood in the forests around us. Why are we still shipping wood products from the south to rebuild and fix up homes that were destroyed by last year’s floods?”

There is no doubt that the Dene need jobs. It’s why they are more open-minded about resource extraction. But some are leery of mining companies like those that operated Mactung and Cantung in the Mackenzie mountains. Neither offered meaningful employment to locals before filing for bankruptcy. Nor has there been an equitable amount of work for northerners to participate in the $2.2 billion cleanup of these and many other abandoned mine sites in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Gerry Antoine, the Dene National grand chief, was just 20 years old when he volunteered to rally the Dene during the Berger Inquiry. His brother’s speech still resonates. But getting angry, he says, will bear no fruit.

Antoine is confident that the Dene will adapt to climate change, just as they have with so many challenges they have faced over thousands of years. But he wonders whether southerners will fare as well, given their short history in North America, and their desire to take more than they need.

“It’s all about balance,” Antoine said, while preparing a moose hide for tanning. “You take only what you need from Mother Earth as we try to do here. That’s really the best way of dealing with climate change.”

The post The Arctic community that chose conservation over Big Oil appeared first on Climate Home News.

I am only 25 years old but my people have been living in the Amazon rainforest for at least 6,000 years. I follow our ancient traditions that allow us to live in harmony with nature and protect the rainforest in which we live.

When corporations look at my home in the Amazon rainforest, they don’t see the intricacies of the trees’ roots, the way they weave their way in and out of rich soil. They don’t pay attention to the sound of raindrops as they hit leaves, small and large. They do not see a land capable of sustaining life on Earth, a land that needs protection, a land that is sacred. Instead, they see commodities. 

Today, my peoples’ mission to protect nature is becoming impossible. The climate is warming rapidly, the animals are disappearing and the flowers are not blooming like they did before. 

And when we try to protect our environment from the powers that be, we are bullied, harassed, and sometimes even murdered.

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My childhood friend, Ari Uru-eu-wau-wau, was murdered for protecting the forests from illegal loggers, farmers and miners. His story is shared in a documentary I helped produce called The Territory. It was co-produced by the Indigenous Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people and chronicles their struggle to defend the land on which Ari and his ancestors have lived for millennia. 

The murder of British journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the Amazon is not an isolated case. It’s a tragedy that there are so many other cases like this..

My husband is also a journalist based in the Amazon and he has received death threats for reporting on illegal activities. My father, my mother and so many of my friends also face regular intimidation and threats for defending their ancestral land. 

The justice we are calling for extends beyond those holding the guns that are killing Earth defenders. We want Brazil’s leaders whose actions or lack thereof, are allowing this violence to go rampant, to be held to account too. 

Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil three years ago, his administration has made it a priority to weaken environmental protections. The government agency supposed to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, was turned against us. This has resulted in grim records for deforestation in Brazil. 

Campaigners call on António Guterres to rescue ‘imperilled’ biodiversity deal

Despite the  government’s pledges at  Cop26 to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, the Brazilian Amazon saw a 64% jump in deforestation in the first three months of 2022 compared to the previous year – which was already up from the year before that. 

Although international  pressure from companies and countries which buy agricultural products from Brazil has increased, we cannot ignore the fact that several multinational corporations are still profiting from the anti-environment and anti-indigenous legislation being pushed in Brazil.

That’s why my father, the great Chief Almir Suruí, together with Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapo people, presented a formal request to the International Criminal Court in The Hague last year to investigate what is happening in Brazil. They are demanding that those responsible are held accountable for crimes against humanity. 

As we wait for a decision, we wonder: will our  evidence be taken seriously? Will the countries that promised to uphold human rights and protect the Earth keep their word? How many more will be killed in a senseless war on the environment and those who protect it before things change?

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And much like we must protect  peoples’ rights, we need to defend the ecosystems that support us. This is why I am calling on the international community to request the International Criminal Court to recognise the crime of ecocide. Courts around the world have long claimed that they want to fight environmental crime. Now they have the chance to turn their words into actions and recognise the attacks against my home in the Amazon for what they are: ecocide.

I ask world leaders, especially from the Global North: Have you given up living on Earth? Why do indigenous peoples have to protect more than 80% of the world’s biodiversity with so little support while the rich dream of  colonising other planets? 

The mistakes that have brought us to this climate crisis are a heavy burden. But you cannot run away from it. We can still fight! Join us and support indigenous land defenders. 

I have been raised with the understanding that in order to live harmoniously on this planet we must listen to the stars, the moon, the wind, the animals and the trees. We must listen to the Earth. She is speaking and her message is clear: we have no time to waste. 

Txai Suruí is an Indigenous leader and activist from the Brazilian Amazon. She leads the Rondônia Indigenous Youth Movement and the Kanindé Association and is the executive producer of the award-winning documentary The Territory.

The post My people have lived in the Amazon for 6,000 years: You need to listen to us appeared first on Climate Home News.

Some rainforests are already emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb, further destabilising the global climate. At current trends, all primary rainforest in the Congo basin – the world’s second largest rainforest – could be cleared by the end of the century.

Given the grim state of the world’s forests, we need to seize every opportunity to do right with nature.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit, or Cop15, relocated to Montreal, Canada, in December this year could be the “Paris moment” for biodiversity, as the 2015 Paris Agreement was for climate.

In Montreal, countries are expected to agree on a global framework to halt biodiversity loss this decade.

As biodiversity negotiators convene this week in Nairobi, Kenya, to prepare the meeting, they must wake up to another crucial truth: Indigenous Peoples and local communities are better at managing their lands than anyone else.

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Data gathered across countries and continents consistently shows that when people living in forests are left to run them, the result is better-protected ecosystems and biodiversity than any other conservation model.

Deforestation industries – whether loggers or agribusiness – are well aware of this. While they clear forests, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are being displaced, abused, and murdered.

Delegations attending the biodiversity Cop15 summit are expected to discuss safeguards for recognising the rights and roles of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in conserving nature. So far, discussions haven’t included any concrete commitments.

To protect biodiversity effectively, and ethically, Cop15 must recognise tangible protections for the rights of Indigenous Peoples. That should include creating a new and separate category for Indigenous land, one that puts them as the centre of decision-making and funding.

Currently, there exists two types of conservation designation: protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures when conservation is supposedly achieved even though it isn’t the formal objective of land management.

In Nairobi, countries should agree to create a third category for land which is fully governed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

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In all protected areas where Indigenous Peoples and local communities live, they must be fully involved in the decision-making processes and management of the area.

The threats are not just the chainsaws and bulldozers of multinational companies seeking to extract natural resources, but “fortress conservation”, which closes off land and forests to human activities.

There is a difficult history not only between forest dwelling Indigenous Peoples and local communities and industries but also with traditional conservationists. Unlike traditional conservation NGOs or government-run parks’ administrators, Indigenous Peoples and local communities consider the forest their home.

Fortress conservation is the result of the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples’ rights from conservation frameworks. This has often led to chronic human right abuses in the form of rape, torture, and killing of forest communities by so-called eco-guards, which has been well-documented in Central Africa.

The latest confrontation took place shortly before the start of the Nairobi talks, when Tanzanian authorities were seen opening fire on Maasai communities opposing the demarcation of a game reserve, which would ban all human settlements and grazing in the area.

Creating a game reserve for tourism by violently evicting the land’s inhabitants isn’t “conserving nature.” It’s a renewed form of colonialism.  

Tanzanian authorities seen opening fire on Maasai people in game reserve dispute

The global deal for nature due to be agreed in Montreal later this year is an opportunity to shun this type of fortress conservation and embrace change.

That means formally recognising the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their ancestral lands and natural resources.

In recent years, some progress has been made. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is now possible for forest communities to formally receive rights over a forest concession.

But the Congolese government and donor countries need to do more to make this option accessible to communities.

And across the world, there are still many billions of dollars invested in sustaining this problematic “fortress conservation” model.

Being serious about forest community rights means investing far more in the formal process of recognising Indigenous Peoples’ land rights, management, and decision making, and protecting Indigenous knowledge.

Negotiations taking place in Nairobi this week must be a turning point for Indigenous People’s rights in biodiversity conservation. Allowing NGOs and government agencies to remain the primary beneficiaries of conservation funds would be a huge failure of the UN Biodiversity talks.

The Cop15 biodiversity summit is the moment to lay the groundwork for a new system that protects forests, wildlife and people, which is both effective and just.

Irene Wabiwa Betoko is the international project leader for the Congo Basin forest at Greenpeace Africa. 

The post It’s time to put Indigenous Peoples first at the UN biodiversity talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Footage shared on social media shows people running from gun shots in the Loliondo area. Further images shared with Climate Home News showed people with small bullet wounds on their leg, feet, top of their back and even on someone’s head.

“It started with tear gas and it turned to live bullets,” Joseph Oleshangay, a Maasai lawyer, activist and resident of Ngorongoro, who witnessed the scene, told Climate Home.

“At least 10 people have been wounded. Eight of them are women and two are men, including one who is 70 years old. These are not people who were there to fight,” he said. Climate Home could not independently verify these numbers.

Tanzanian police and game wardens arrived in the area on Tuesday to demarcate a 1,500 square kilometres of “village land” as a game reserve for trophy hunting, he said.

The move would ban all human settlements and grazing in the area, effectively evicting semi-pastoralist Maasai communities.

Shocking violence happening now in Loliondo, Tanzania – military firing on Maasai, who are being evicted from the area for conservation zones & trophy hunters.
If you’re thinking of going on safari to Kenya/ Tanzania – this is the reality behind the tourist photos.
Sound on pic.twitter.com/WD0yvGBsf2

— Survival International (@Survival) June 10, 2022

Loliondo is an important area for grazing in the dry season because it contains the only permanent water point in the area.

Climate change is forecast to lead to more erratic rainfall and longer drought periods in northern Tanzania, making access to a water source crucial to the survival of the Maasai pastoralist tradition.

“By attacking pastoralism, you are attacking the Maasai cultural and spirituality,” said Oleshangay.

In recent days, Maasai people gathered to protest the plans and defend their land.

The highest level of torture and intimidation in grabbing the community land in loliondo. The community of loliondo protested against placing of beacons 1500Km which is the community land. @Oleshangay @AnethStanley @SusannaN2 @SuluhuSamia @ThabitSenior pic.twitter.com/SBoY5wVWLm

— Alakara Ole lemoloo (@alakara_shayo) June 9, 2022

Earlier on Friday, prime minister Kassim Majaliwa told parliament that despite police presence, the situation in Loliondo wasn’t dangerous.

But on Saturday, Arusha regional commissioner John Mongella said that a police officer had died in the confrontation with a Maasai community after being shot by an arrow. He claimed that there had been no other casualties from the incident and that footage shared on social media showing authorities opening fire on Maasai people was several years old.

Opposition leader Tundu Antiphas Lissu, of the Chadema party, accused the Tanzanian government of “waging a violent war” against the Maasai people.

“The international community has a responsibility to intervene & end these human rights abuses & hold the govt accountable!” he tweeted.

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“Despite earlier pauses, the Tanzanian government is blindly moving ahead with plans to remove Maasai pastoralists out of their land to clear the way for trophy hunting,” said Anuradha Mittal, of the environmental think tank Oakland Institute. “International mobilisation on these developments is imperative to help stop this disastrous and illegal move.”

Mittal argued that the forced evictions in the area would violate a 2018 East African Court of Justice injunction, which prohibited the Tanzanian government from evicting Maasai people or engaging in harassment against those living on the contested land.

Yet, the Tanzania government is seeking to relocate more than 73,000 pastoralists out of an estimated 93,000 living in the Ngorongoro conservation area.

This goes against a rapidly growing body of evidence which shows that indigenous people have a vital role to play in protecting biodiversity.

Human rights organisations such as Survival International have warned against the rise of “fortress” conservation, which closes off land and forests to human activities, at the expense of communities with roots there.

Fiore Longo, campaigner with the NGO, told Climate Home: “I think that what is happening to the Maasai today should be put in the wider context of human rights abuses in the name of conservation. This violence that we see in Tanzania is the reality of conservation in Africa and Asia: daily violations of the human rights of indigenous peoples and local communities so that the rich can hunt and do safari in peace.

“These abuses are systemic and are explained by a dominant model based on racism and colonialism. We can no longer turn a blind eye to human rights abuses committed in the name of ‘conservation’. This model of conservation is deeply inhumane and ineffective and must be changed now.”

The Tanzanian government has been approached for comment.

The story was updated on 13 June to reflect Arusha regional commissioner John Mongella’s comments. 

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Two weeks of slow and tedious negotiations on agreeing on a global framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss came to a close in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. Little progress has been made in advancing a deal due to be adopted at a biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, later this year.

Many countries supported the inclusion of language on the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and of the role they have traditionally played as stewards of nature.

But not everyone agreed on how this should be reflected in the text.  Russia and China have pushed back against wording on “human rights” and references to a resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

Others, including South Korea, have argued for rights-based language to be relegated to a separate section of the deal on cross-cutting issues designed to guide its implementation.

“If we don’t have a framework to protect nature that truly recognises and respects the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities — those who are actually conserving biodiversity — we are all going to be in danger,” said Ramiro Batzin, co-chair of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

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Draft targets include references to indigenous and local communities throughout, in recognition of their rights to land tenure, resources, traditional knowledge and free, prior and informed consent.

But most of the text, including key conservation targets such as a proposal to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030, remain in brackets, indicating that it is still subject to negotiations.

“[Negotiators] don’t seem to feel the urgency and the need to act to address biodiversity loss, “ said Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, a lawyer and a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people from northern Philippines.  Attending the meeting, she described the process as “frustrating”.

Indigenous groups have repeatedly warned that adopting a rights-based approach to conservation is critical to the success of the agreement. In recent years, a ballooning body of studies has shown that indigenous territories have lower or similar levels of deforestation to other protected areas.

Yet, in some parts of the world, indigenous communities have been abused, pushed off their land and sometimes killed in the name of conservation.

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Corpuz is cautiously optimistic about the inclusion of a reference to “the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities” in the conservation target to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and seas. It is outside of brackets, suggesting no country raised direct opposition.

But “the fight is not over,” she said, fearing that more specific language could still be deleted from the text.

A proposal by the negotiations’ co-chairs to “avoid overburdening the text” and to ensure it remains “clear, concise and communicable” could relegate detailed references to rights to a section on cross-cutting issues designed to guide the agreement’s implementation.

Australia and New Zealand have argued that references to indigenous people’s “free, prior and informed consent” should be stripped out of the main text and included in this new section, one source told Climate Home.

In a letter to the meetings co-chairs, campaigners argued the proposal risked “downgrading” important principles that should be strengthened rather than removed and that countries will be less likely to implement these principles if they aren’t mentioned in the operative section of the deal.

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Meanwhile, a proposal pushed by China to include language for upholding rights “in accordance with national legislation” would provide a loophole for countries which do not recognise indigenous rights to wiggle out of any commitment.

An analysis of the draft deal, released last week by the Forest Peoples Programme NGO, argued that without further progress on rights-based language, the agreement “risks falling short of its ambition to achieve transformative change”.

Indigenous groups have called for an increase in direct funding to help them continue their role as guardians of nature. So far, they receive less than 1% of climate funding despite protecting 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

Funding is also needed for indigenous groups to continue to participating in the talks.

Countries agreed to meeting again in Nairobi, Kenya, from 21-26 June to make progress on key elements of the agreement.

The International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity is scrambling to secure funding to attend this additional session. Corpuz said indigenous people must be “at the table”.

At the Cop26 climate talks, a coalition of donors pledged $1.7bn to help indigenous people protect forests

The post Russia, China oppose ‘human rights’ in nature talks, amid slow progress to a deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

A flurry of corporate net zero announcements is triggering a boom in demand for carbon offsets from businesses seeking a cheap way to meet their climate goals.

UN special envoy for climate action and finance Mark Carney set up a private sector taskforce in late 2020 to scale up the market but was accused of ducking questions of environmental integrity.

The issue flared up during the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK last November. Indigenous peoples’ groups and teen activist Greta Thunberg protested against offsetting, arguing it undermines and delays real climate action.

Germany’s newly appointed climate envoy Jennifer Morgan, who at the time was head of Greenpeace International, risked being kicked out of the talks to denounce Carney’s taskforce as “a scam”.

In the face of that criticism, the taskforce shifted its attention from scaling up the market to improving the quality of carbon credit projects.

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The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market emerged from Carney’s taskforce as an independent governance body. On Wednesday, it announced the launch of a public consultation in May to inform “a definitive set of global threshold standards” for carbon credits, expected to be published in the third quarter of 2022.

“We need to address the factors that undermine confidence and transparency and that opened the door to widespread concerns about greenwashing,” said Hugh Sealy, the council’s co-chair. “If we build high integrity, scale will follow.”

The council is one of two main initiatives working to establish environmentally robust carbon trading rules. The other is the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity initiative (VCMI), co-chaired by former UN clean energy envoy Rachel Kyte.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Kyte argued that done well, offsetting can provide much-needed finance for projects that reduce and remove carbon dioxide and help the world limit warming to 1.5C.

But voluntary carbon markets “come with a health warning,” she said. “They are only going to have that kind of impact if they are truly high-integrity and inclusive. And therein lies the rub.”

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Both initiatives are in “close contact” in an effort “to make sure that our separate work is headed in the same direction and can together be useful to the private sector and governments,” Kyte told Climate Home News.

Four carbon market experts serve as advisors and board members on both initiatives, which can “close the gaps” and ensure that any integrity benchmark can be recognised by both groups, said Annette Nazareth, the integrity council’s other co-chair.

The two groups are concerned with different aspects of the problem. The integrity council is focused on developing “core carbon principles” on what makes a high quality credit. This will include enforcement powers to “name and shame” and suspend bad actors from the market.

Kyte’s initiative is zooming in on the demand side and what claims companies can legitimately make when buying emissions reductions.

That covers the role of offsetting in corporate net zero plans and claims that specific products are “carbon-neutral”, with practical guidelines due to be issued by early summer.

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Kyte is further concerned with how indigenous peoples and local communities can participate, not just to design carbon-cutting projects on the ground, but shape regulations for the market as a whole – a demand from indigenous groups she said became “vociferous” in the run-up to Cop26.

This is an issue the integrity council says it wants to address, but it has struggled to fill three roles on its board of directors earmarked for representatives from underrepresented local communities.

“We hope to fill those spots as soon as possible. It is an imperative for us,” said Sealy. “We want to raise the bar. Every project should have a net benefit for the community in which that project is installed. That’s what we have to try and drive towards.”

These initiatives are unlikely to win over offsetting’s staunchest critics. Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia Yeb Saño wrote in Climate Home that pitching carbon offsets as a win for indigenous peoples and local communities in developing countries was “greenwashing at its most patronising”.

Teresa Anderson, climate justice lead for ActionAid International, told Climate Home that carbon offset schemes “can wreak harm on indigenous and local communities through land grabs and ecosystem destruction”.

“Initiatives that try to make carbon offsetting more palatable often amount to little more than greenwashing the greenwashers. While involving indigenous representatives might be a step forward, this does not automatically ensure the outcomes will be legitimate or sufficient. Far from it.”

The story was updated on 17/03/22 to clarify that Mark Carney is not directly involved in drawing up the integrity council’s standards. 

The post Carney, Kyte oversee carbon offset rules to address greenwashing concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Q’eqchi’ community of Agua Caliente is demanding the Inter-American Court of Human Rights voids the permits of an open-pit nickel mine, in the town of El Estor, for which it says it was never consulted.

Under international human rights standards, states have the obligation to consult indigenous communities and obtain their free, prior and informed consent over projects affecting their lands and resources.

But indigenous communities in Latin America have denounced constant violations of this right.

The case is one of a growing number of lawsuits brought by indigenous peoples to compel governments in the region to respect their right to veto extractive projects affecting them.

Lawyers in this suit, which opened last week, are going a step further. They argue that the court should recognise the rights of indigenous people to permanent sovereignty over their natural resources as a principle of public international law.

“We believe consultation is not enough, consent is not enough. But the court has never said anything about the rights of communities to their natural resources,” Leonardo Crippa, an attorney with the Indian Law Resource Center representing the community, told Climate Home News.

If successful, the lawyers argue it could set a “historical” legal precedent for other communities in Latin America and become “fundamental” to advance climate action in the region.

The case comes amid a growing recognition of indigenous peoples’ critical role in addressing the dual climate and biodiversity crisis.

Indigenous people are estimated to protect 80% of global biodiversity. In recent years, a ballooning body of studies has shown that indigenous territories have lower or similar levels of deforestation to other protected areas.

At the Cop26 climate talks, governments recognised “the important role” of indigenous peoples “in addressing and responding to climate change” and agreed “to respect, promote and consider” their rights.

Rodrigo Tot is an indigenous leader in Guatemala’s Agua Caliente, who was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his efforts to protect his community against mining. He told Climate Home he hoped the case will bring peace to his community, which has lived in fear of intimidation and violence for opposing the mine.

“When it comes to protecting forests, it will not be up to the government who has failed, but to us — this is what we have been fighting for, for the right to continue to protect our lands,” he said.

For Crippa, guaranteeing indigenous people’s sovereignty will further “alleviate extreme poverty” and help meet sustainable development goals by allowing communities to reap the benefits of projects they have agree to.

Rodrigo Tot speaking to households in Agua Caliente, Guatemala, about their rights to land (Photo: Goldman Enviornmental Prize)

The case comes hot on the heels of a ruling by the Constitutional Court in Ecuador, the country’s most powerful judiciary body, which called for stronger protection to guarantee the right of indigenous communities to consent to any oil and mining activities affecting their land.

Legal observers say it gives Ecuador one of the most powerful legal precedents in the world on the rights of indigenous peoples right to consent.

They say this deals a blow to Ecuador’s president Guillermo Lasso’s ambition to double the country’s oil production to one millions barrels per day and expand mining activities. Indigenous land covers 70% of the oil and mineral-rich Ecuadorian Amazon.

The court ruled that if an indigenous community refuses a project, the government can still move forward in “exceptional cases” but that “under no circumstances can a project be carried out that generates excessive sacrifices to the collective rights of communities and nature”.

The indigenous rights movement in Ecuador maintains that any oil or project in their ancestral territories taking place against their will implies unreasonable sacrifices, according to NGO Amazon Frontlines.

Last month, a ruptured oil pipeline contaminated water that supplies indigenous communities in a protected area of the Amazon’s rainforest.

“This ruling is monumental. It’s a game-changer in the balance of power between the extractive interests that the state represents and indigenous peoples,” said Brian Parker, of Amazon Frontlines.

The Coca River, which is a source of water for indigenous communites, was contaminated following an oil spill in eastern Ecuador (Photo: Alianza Ceibo/Emilio Bermeo )

Kevin Currey is programme officer at the Ford Foundation, a member of the alliance of governments and private funders that committed to provide $1.7bn to support indigenous advance their land rights by 2025 during the Cop26 talks.

The alliance has committed to fund activities that strengthen and protect indigenous peoples’ land resources rights and “strategic litigation may be one important avenue for securing and defending their rights,” he said.

“These recent cases should be a wake-up call, not just in Ecuador and Guatemala, but around the world that ignoring indigenous rights generates enormous reputational, financial, and legal risks.”

Lawyers in the Guatemala case hope the court decision will push international financiers and investors not to support projects where indigenous peoples’ rights have been violated.

A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that conflict with local communities was costing large-scale mining projects $20 million per week in delayed production.

The post Indigenous peoples in Guatemala demand sovereignty over oil and mining resources appeared first on Climate Home News.

A draft decision published on Wednesday emphasised “the critical importance of nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based approaches, including protecting and restoring forests, to reducing emissions, enhancing removals and protecting biodiversity”.

While the importance of nature featured in the negotiated outcome of Cop25 in Madrid, if adopted it would be the first time “nature-based solutions” made it into a UN climate pact.

On Friday, the term nature-based solutions was replaced with the phrase “protecting, conserving and restoring nature” in an updated version of the text.

Supporters see nature-based solutions as a way to connect the climate and biodiversity agendas, setting the scene for an effective biodiversity deal in Kunming, China next year. Critics object to the implied commodification of the natural world and say the term is misused by big business to justify continued pollution.

Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and an architect of the Paris Agreement, said at a press conference on Thursday that she hoped nature-based solutions would make it into the final pact. “It’s good that we are going away from the vision of nature being offsets – and more towards the idea of restoration, of nature being an important element of the climate package,” she said. 

“More and more we will see that it is impossible to distinguish between biodiversity and climate. They’re two parts of the same problem,” she said.

A space is opening up to discuss oil and gas exit at Cop26. Lobbyists are pushing back. 

An observer of the talks told Climate Home News that the UK, Colombia, France, the EU, US, Singapore, Fiji, DRC, Mexico, Norway, Australia, Canada and Liberia are all pushing for nature-based solutions to be included in the final Cop26 text.

At a meeting of heads of delegation on Wednesday, Bolivian negotiator Diego Pacheco Balanza objected to the phrase on behalf of the like-minded development countries (LMDCs).

“This text assumes that nature is only in service of people’s needs, but nature has an intrinsic value. It is sacred. That must be reflected. ‘Nature-based solutions’ were never negotiated here,” Bolivia’s negotiator said, as reported by an observer who attended the meeting. 

China, the host country for biodiversity talks in April, is a member of the LMDCs. The Chinese delegation did not make anyone available to comment.

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Gavin Edwards, WWF’s nature lead at Cop26, told Climate Home News that the inclusion highlights that “nature has truly arrived in the climate discourse” and helps “bridge the silo between the nature and climate community”.

He said that if the final Cop26 text references nature-based solutions, it will “strengthen the hand for it to be included in the CBD [Kunming biodiversity agreement]”. It was removed from an early draft of the biodiversity convention following opposition by some African governments, Brazil and Argentina.

“It will be very hard for [nature-based solutions] not to be an outcome in the CBD if it is agreed at Cop[26],” said Edwards. “More governments are keen to link these two agendas, of biodiversity and climate. Nature-based solutions [provide] that linkage.”

Indigenous delegates at Cop26 (Photo: UNFCCC/Flickr)

Indigenous leaders from forest regions have mixed feelings about the concept, stressing that it must come with safeguards for their rights.

“Our position is that indigenous governance is the quintessential nature-based solution. Therefore, indigenous peoples’ governance should be recognised and supported as a nature-based solution. For other nature-based solutions projects, there should be safeguards and full respect for indigenous peoples’ rights,” Jing Corpuz, an Igorot leader from the Philippines and policy lead at the non-profit Nia Tero, told Climate Home News.

Genilda Maria Rodrigues, an indigenous observer from the Kaingang community in southern Brazil, said she welcomes nature-based solutions as restoration of forests is urgently needed in her region. “We are approaching the point of no return,” she said. “We want someone to help our community reforest the area…

“But it’s very important that it is done in a transparent way. We don’t want it [done in] any way, but in the right way, with the consultation of the indigenous community,” she added.

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There are also concerns that polluters could use nature-based projects to offset rather than reduce their own emissions.

Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International, told Climate Home News, that nature-based solutions often “become synonymous with carbon offsets”.

“When they do, they end up compounding the injustice of climate change,” she said, adding that there is currently no official definition, criteria or safeguarding mechanism for nature-based solutions. 

“We’d rather see language that recognises the critical importance of biodiversity and ecosystems to addressing the climate crisis, that doesn’t set up nature for being a solution to corporations’ pollution,” she said.

This article was updated on 12 November 2021 to reflect new language in the Cop26 cover text. 

The post ‘Nature-based solutions’ prove divisive at Glasgow climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is one of a handful of funding initiatives for forest protection announced at Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Twelve donor countries pledged a total of $12 billion in public funds, with private co-financing worth $7.2bn.

The funding supports a pact signed by more than 100 countries to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

The UK, Norway, Germany, US, and the Netherlands, along with 17 private and philanthropic organisations earmarked a $1.7bn pot for indigenous and local communities to help them preserve forests. This came with a promise to include them in the decision-making and design of climate programmes and finance instruments.

In a statement, the group committed to “recognise and advance  the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities as guardians of forests and nature” in the face of “rising cases of threats, harassment and violence against [them]”.

That approach confronts attempts to roll back indigenous land rights in countries like Brazil, where president Jair Bolsonaro has instead sought to open the Amazon rainforest to business interests.

Forest experts have cautiously welcomed the move, while saying how the money is disbursed will be critical.

“It’s a good step forward that the role indigenous peoples and local community play is protecting nature and forests is recognised,” Josefina Brana-Varela, vice president and deputy lead on forests at WWF, told Climate Home News.

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But indigenous people are wary of hailing another promise to protect the world’s tropical forests and deforestation – a pledge that many countries already made in 2014 and then did little to enact.

Dinamam Tuxá, of the Brazilian state of Bahia and the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil network (Abip), told Climate Home: “Every Cop global leaders make huge announcements committing themselves to do something about climate change. But they never live up to their promises.”

Dinamam Tuxá is the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil network (Abip)

In recent years, a ballooning body of studies has shown that indigenous territories have lower or similar levels of deforestation to other protected areas. While indigenous communities manage half of the world’s land, a recent study found that they receive less than 1% of the climate funding earmarked to reduce deforestation.

Tuxá said that needed to change. “What we need is direct funding for the people who are actually doing the work of preventing deforestation. In Brazil, the funds that are designed for indigenous peoples are not making it to the communities,” he said.

The initiative is an attempt to plug some of that gap.

The money could be used to strength indigenous brigades that tackle forest fires and to use new technologies for monitoring and accounting for forests’ carbon stocks and biodiversity levels, for example.

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Kevin Currey, programme officer at the Ford Foundation which is part of the initiative, told Climate Home that each donor will decide how to allocate their contributions by engaging with indigenous peoples. Funders will be expected to report to the UK government every year on how and how much has been disbursed.

Not all funds will reach communities directly. Logistical and political barriers mean that NGOs and funds such as the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility will also play an intermediary role, Currey explained.

“The money is on the table, and we will continue to work with indigenous peoples and local communities to make sure it is spent effectively, in ways that make a tangible difference on the ground,” he said.

Brana-Varela, of WWF, said that to be effective on the ground, the process for communities to access the funds must be simplified. “Most of these rules are extremely complicated, very technical, and there’s very little capacity or support for communities to meet the requirements,” she said.

While there has been progress in designing initiatives to halt deforestation in recent years, Brana-Varela said there were no guarantees of avoiding a repeat of previous broken promises.

I welcome the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests & Land Use as an important step to halt & reverse deforestation.

Signing the declaration is the easy part.

It is essential that it is implemented now for people & planet. #COP26

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) November 2, 2021

That is particularly true in Brazil, where president Bolsonaro has been pushing through a series of laws to roll back indigenous rights and environmental protection, while legitimising land grabbers.

Between August 2020 and July 2021, deforestation in Brazil hit its highest annual level in a decade.

Yet Bolsonaro signed the Glasgow forest declaration, under which he committed to halt deforestation this decade and to strengthen efforts to “recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, as well as local communities, in accordance with relevant national legislation and international instruments, as appropriate”.

In a speech on Monday, environment minister Joaquim Pereira Leite announced Brazil would bring forward its commitment to end deforestation by two years to 2028 as part of an updated 2030 climate plan. But the pledge only makes up for a regression in ambition by Bolsonaro in 2020.

For Tuxá, Brazil’s promises have been made “in bad faith, without a doubt”. “They do not intend to live up to a single term of that agreement,” especially those related to indigenous peoples’ rights, he said.

Ana Toni, executive director of Brazilian institute Clima e Sociedade, told Climate Home the Bolsonaro government would be unable to block the support from reaching communities at a time when it is seeking additional financial commitment from the US to protect the Amazon forest.

“They are on their knees and are having to make these kinds of announcements,” she said. “That does not mean they have changed their position, but they have changed their narrative because they have lost the argument.”

The Brazilian government did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

The post Donor nations commit $1.7bn to help indigenous people protect forests appeared first on Climate Home News.

We danced, sang, prayed and chanted. We anxiously watched proceedings unfold inside the court on a large outdoor screen, as we waited for a decision by Brazil’s 11 supreme court judges which will shape the future of indigenous land demarcations and our own destinies.

Our vigil was part of a global action led by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the country’s largest indigenous organisation where I act as member of the coordination board – and has coincided with similar, smaller events in London, Berlin, the Hague, San Francisco and other cities around the world.

At stake is our right to peacefully occupy the areas of our customary lands – and the fate of some of the world’s most important forests and wildlife.

For now, though, our tents and banners have been packed away, and we wait. The judges have postponed their decision, but for how long, we do not know. According to internal supreme court guidelines, it should be no more than 60 days, but this is rarely complied with.

What is clear is that the outcome of their decision will reverberate far beyond Brazil.

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The issue they are deliberating is whether Brazil’s indigenous peoples only have the right to territory that we were physically occupying on 5 October, 1988 – when the current constitution came into force after years of military dictatorship.

If upheld, at a stroke this so-called “marco temporal” or “time limit” would endanger indigenous territories already recognised by the state, set a precedent for hundreds of other indigenous land claims and represent an open invitation for farming and mining interests to destroy precious ecosystems in the name of commerce.

Agriculture, cattle raising and mining are the biggest causes of deforestation in Brazil, responsible for rampant destruction in the Amazon, the Cerrado and elsewhere. Meanwhile, overwhelming evidence shows that we indigenous people have been a bulwark against deforestation and protector of our lands.

Relentless assault

This “marco temporal” case is just the latest assault on the rights of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. We are more than 300 peoples, living in all regions of the country.

Since Jair Bolsonaro became president in January 2019, there has been a sharp rise in armed invasions of our lands, environmental safeguards have been shredded, while deforestation and attacks against indigenous people have soared.

This is why APIB has asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Bolsonaro for genocide and ecocide for his explicit, systematic and intentional anti-indigenous policy and public statements.

Awareness of these crimes is widespread.

So is the knowledge that responsibility for them rests not simply with Bolsonaro, the agribusiness sector and the land grabbers themselves, but those trading in and consuming goods which have led to human rights violations, or been produced on land stolen from indigenous communities.

For this reason, while Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court decides on our right to our own land, laws which could also have a profound influence on our future and that of Brazil’s precious biomes, are under development in legislative bodies on the other side of the Atlantic.

Both the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom are planning laws to eradicate deforestation from their supply chains (both are big importers of goods, including soy and beef, which drive deforestation in Brazil).

But the due diligence laws that the EU and the UK are proposing are fundamentally flawed.

As they stand, both the EU and UK proposals fail to adequately address the human rights violations which often go hand in hand with deforestation. They both rely solely on laws in producer countries to determine whether community land rights are protected.

Leaving the protection of indigenous rights in Bolsonaro’s hands is like leaving a fox in charge of a chicken coop.

If, for instance, our Federal Supreme Court judges uphold the time limit and more of our land is seized from us, then any goods grown or produced on that land would be deemed legal under the current UK and EU proposals.

Our ancestors were driven from their land when European invaders arrived here 521 years ago, and the theft has continued ever since.

Brazil’s supreme court judges and EU and UK lawmakers must not abet it.

The post UK and EU must not abet the theft of indigenous territory in Brazil appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature overwhelmingly voted for a global pact to protect the world’s largest tropical forest — putting conservationists on a collision course with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

The proposal was submitted by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (Coica), whose members erupted in joy when the vote results were announced. The motion was formally supported by 17 civil society groups from across the world.

José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, general director of Coica, described the proposal as “a plan for the salvation of indigenous peoples and the planet”.

“We have achieved a first step. For the first time in the history of the IUCN, a motion by indigenous peoples has been approved; a proposal that was not born in Europe but in our territories,” he told Climate Home News. 

Coica members erupt in joy as IUCN approves their motion (Photo: Coica)

In total, 61 countries members of IUCN backed the motion, which is not legally binding, and 42 abstained. None voted against.

Brazil, which is not an IUCN member, could not participate in the vote. But Brazilian experts say president Jair Bolsonaro is highly unlikely to take notice of the verdict, which clashes with his agenda to open up the Amazon to business interests.

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The motion urges governments to promote efforts to restore at least half of the Amazon’s degraded forests by 2025 and to work with indigenous peoples’ to fully recognise and delimit all their ancestral land and territories.

Coica said Amazon countries must enable indigenous peoples and local communities to govern protected areas that overlap with their territories. They further called on states to ban industrial activities in primary forests and mobilise more funding to restore ecosystems.

But in Brazil, the opposite is taking place. The Bolsonaro administration is pushing through a series of laws to roll back indigenous rights, environmental licensing standards, and land grabbing legislation, all of which prevent forest clearance, campaigners say.

Deforestation in the Amazon rose 17% in 2020 compared with the previous year. The world’s largest rainforest is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs. Humid primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon increased 15% during that time.

The UN backed Science Panel for the Amazon, which is composed of 200 scientists, found that 17% of the Amazon basin’s forests have been felled. It warned that if combined deforestation and degradation surged to 20-25%, the forest could reach a tipping point. Rainfall would dry up and large swaths of the forests could turn into savannah, resulting in massive carbon emissions.

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Paulo Moutinho, senior researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), told Climate Home he didn’t expect any reaction from Bolsonaro’s administration.

Global efforts and initiative to protect the Amazon have usually been met with claims about foreign interference and breach of sovereignty, Moutinho said.

However, outside of Brazil, the vote “certainly could reinforce the view that to protect the Amazon forest, we urgently need to protect indigenous rights to their lands,” he said.

Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former environment minister and co-chair of the International Resource Panel, told Climate Home the motion could be used by civil society groups in Brazil to call for environmental protection ahead of next year’s presidential election – an issue she said will be “critical”.

Mirabal, of Coica, said he hoped the motion could be translated into an action plan and implemented. He said Coica would take it to governments in South America and beyond to Europe, the US and China to drum up support.

“We want this motion to generate projects and political support for our territories, but also conserve and protect our home,” he said. “Trust us, we are going to do everything possible. But we need financial and technical support, the political will of governments, and of all the allies who today voted for us,” he said.

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The 2020 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress, which was delayed because of the pandemic, opened on Friday in a hybrid online and in-person format.

The Congress, which is held once every four years, brings together thousands of representatives from governments, civil society, business and academia. It will set the scene for critical biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, in May, when countries are due to agree on global goals to protect nature to 2030.

For the first time, indigenous organisations representing people from Latin America, Africa and Asia will be attending the IUCN Congress as full-time members. This reflects a rapidly growing recognition of their critical role in addressing the dual biodiversity and climate crisis.

In recent years, a ballooning body of studies has shown that indigenous territories have lower or similar levels of deforestation to other protected areas.

At the same time, research has linked the rise of “fortress” conservation, which closes off land and forests to human activities, with chronic patterns of abuse and human rights violations.

This has led indigenous peoples and human rights groups to call for a different approach to conservation that puts indigenous rights to land and natural resources at the heart of solutions to halt the destruction of the planet’s biodiversity.

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A day ahead of the Congress’ opening, a group of human rights NGOs, including Survival International and Minority Rights Group, held a countersummit presenting an alternative vision for conservation.

They denounced calls for governments to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land by 2030 – up from a previous target of around 17%  – as a “false solution” which risks pushing local communities off their land and diverts attention away from the over-consumption and exploitation of natural resources, which they say is the root cause of the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Fiore Longo, of Survival International, told Climate Home News that expanding protected areas was “terrible from a human rights perspective” and could lead to one of the biggest land grabs in history.

“Indigenous people are showing that other models are working to address the biodiversity and climate crisis. There needs to be a recognition of their land rights,” she said.

Longo explained that part of the problem lies with the definition of protected areas adopted by IUCN and widely used around the world. Out of six levels of conservation measures, four exclude most human activities with exceptions for scientific research and tourism. Indigenous territories are not recognised as a category.

Longo said national parks and reserves in much of Africa and South East Asia have prevented indigenous people from carrying out their traditional hunting and fishing activities.

Baka people, pictured here in Cameroon, have been attacked by national park guards in the Republic of Congo. (Photo: Greenpeace/Kate Davison)

In Africa, protected areas have become militarised and defended by armed rangers, which at times have been accused of violence and physical abuse against local people.

Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan conservationist, told Climate Home that expanding protected areas in Africa would lead to more violence.

“National parks are wonderful places but the product of violence and disfranchisement of non-white people,” he said.

“Our conservation thinking is based on Tarzan: a white man in the jungle with animals and no people. But it’s actually possible to protect species without kicking people off the land. There is no way we can claim to protect biodiversity if we can’t protect human diversity.”

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Among the conservation community, there is widespread and growing recognition that human rights abuses have been carried out in the name of protecting wildlife.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, wrote that human rights abuses in the world’s protected areas was part of “the disturbing uptick of criminalisation and even extrajudicial killings”.

Writing in a policy brief this month, UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment David Boyd argued that achieving environmental goals “demands a dramatic departure from ‘conservation as usual’,” and called for a rights-based approach.

But for Trevor Sandwith, director of IUCN’s Global Protected Areas Programme, Survival International is wrong to say that mainstream conservation organisations are not putting communities’ rights at the heart of their approach.

“Most of the world’s remaining biodiversity is directly the result of indigenous peoples and local communities’ custodianship of the natural world,” he told Climate Home. “The idea of conserving more of the planet isn’t to take resources away from people but to recognise their right to conserve nature.”

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Sandwith said IUCN has embraced the concept of conserved areas, where nature is being protected even if that isn’t the prime objective, such as in indigenous territories.

Conserved areas should be counted towards the 30% target without being turned into stricter protected areas, he said, adding that this had become a key issue at the UN biodiversity talks.

Central to this idea is to protect indigenous people and communities’ decision-making power on their land.

On this basis, Coica, a Pan-Amazonian indigenous group, submitted a motion to IUCN members calling for protecting 80% of the Amazon basin by 2025.

The group urged governments to ensure that indigenous peoples and local communities govern and manage new protected areas that overlap with their traditional territories.

José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, lead coordinator of Coica, which represents 511 indigenous peoples and protects 66 uncontacted and voluntarily isolated tribes, said: “Our proposal comes at a time of desperation in the quest for solutions to stop the destruction of the natural world.

“What we are proposing is a new model, and it is a model that will work,” he said.

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Known until recently as “bunos” or jungle-clearers, the Munda people came to the country from Bihar state in India to help reclaim land for agriculture for zamindars (landowners) and dig lakes and ponds. They number around 5,000 in the coastal districts of Khulna and Satkhira.

In a region suffering from climate change impacts, the Munda are doubly disadvantaged by their minority status, lacking access to microfinance, benefits and employment opportunities available to others. An initiative to help them find alternative livelihoods has been shelved due to lack of funds.

Cyclone Amphan made landfall in western Bangladesh in May, triggering a tidal surge that overtopped the embankments and left fields flooded with saltwater for months. Over recent years, sea level rise and reduced river flow had made the soil increasingly salty, so rice could only be grown during monsoon season. After the storm, even that one annual crop became unviable across much of the region.

31-year-old Doyal Kumar Munda has fallen back on gathering resources from the forest, mainly crabs and fish.

“It is not enough for a balanced livelihood,” he told Climate Home. “Thirty years ago, my family had 20 acres of arable land. Now, we have only a homestead of 0.3 acres. Everything went as my parents sold land to meet the family’s needs.”

Doyal Kumar Munda catching fish in the shrimp land close to his house (Credit: Abu Siddique)

According to a 2015 study published by the Department of Environment, sea levels have been rising 6-20mm a year along the country’s coastline.

Between 1973 and 2009, 223,000 hectares of land has been affected by the intrusion of saline water, the Bangladesh Soil Resource Development Institute reports, a trend that continues today.

The impact can be seen in rice production data. There are three different growing seasons for rice in Bangladesh: Boro, Aman and Aush.

Between 2000-01 and 2014-15, Boro paddy cultivation in Khulna district fell from 210,000 acres to 121,000, a 42% drop, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Aush acreage fell nearly three quarters from 31,000 to 8,000. Aman, the most important crop, went from 851,000 to 247,000 acres, a 71% decrease over the same period.

As the sea encroaches on farmland, many are turning to fish, shrimp and crab farming, or rearing goats. Others migrate in search of seasonal work. But the Munda face extra barriers to these adaptation strategies.

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Varoti Munda and her husband Robindro Munda tried to lease some land to cultivate shrimp a few years ago, but were refused a loan by local micro-credit organisations.

Like Doyal, they are dependent on the mangroves, venturing into the forest two or three times a week for resources they can sell to support their three children.

Seeking anonymity, a manager of a local micro-credit lender said the Munda people often had no assets to guarantee repayment of a loan. “Creating opportunities for the poor and developing their living standard are our objectives,” the manager said. “At the same time, we need to get back our money from the borrowers.”

Munda have no representation in local or national government bodies. They often lack awareness of social security entitlements and are not selected by local administrators to benefit from government-run work programmes such as road maintenance.

As a 75-year-old widow, Razu Bala Munda is eligible for a widow allowance of 500 taka ($6) a month and an old age allowance of 800 taka ($9), but receives neither. “When there is an emergency like a cyclone, we receive some relief,” she tells Climate Home. “But I have no idea about widow or old age allowance.”

Doyal Kumar said: “We only receive such benefits after the mainstream people, who are part of the vote banks of the authority.”

Nurul Islam, chairman of Uttar Bedkashi Union, the local authority, acknowledged the community sometimes missed out, “which should not be”, he said.

Moving to the cities for work is not easy either. Samaresh Munda, 25, found a job three years ago at a factory making plastic items in Dhaka. He says he is paid 2,000 taka ($24) less than others for the same work and was initially refused accommodation in shared houses. “I struggled to make people understand that I am not different.”

Local campaign group Initiative for Right View (IRV) launched a project a few years ago to boost the Munda’s prospects, but it has been put on hold because the funding from Swiss donor Heks/Eper ran out.

“We tried to provide some alternative livelihood options like goat rearing and training on how to make compost fertilizer from household waste,” said Marina Juthi, programme coordinator of  Initiative for Right View (IRV). “However, we have lost the funding.”

This article is part of a climate justice reporting programme supported by the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

The post In Bangladesh, the marginalised Munda face extra barriers to climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

Monica Evans

In 1915, Mike Gibbs’ Māori ancestors made their way from the flat, agricultural plains of Southland to the wild, steep, forested edge of Eastern Fiordland. They were excited – after losing their own ancestral lands to white settlers, the New Zealand Government was now offering them new plots to call their own, under the just-passed South Island Landless Natives Act (SILNA).

“So they’re on their way out there, and they meet people coming back the other way,” says Gibbs, recounting the familiar family legend that he’s heard so many times before. “And those people just said, “There’s nothing there. We can’t farm it; we can’t do anything with it.”

Today’s visitors to the Rarakau area would most likely disagree: the land is home to swathes of tall indigenous rainforest, perching on clifftops above vast, granite-bouldered Bluecliffs Beach in Te Waewae Bay, which is sloshed by the vast southern ocean and backed by the snow-dusted peaks of the Hump Ridge range. Scores of native birds live there, including tūī [Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae], kākā [Nestor meridionalis], kererū [Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae] and the endangered, endemic Kea [Nestor notabilis] parrot.

But farming was the perceived pathway to wealth at the time, and those early land claimants knew the area’s clay pan and boggy ground would never support highly productive agriculture. “And so it was named ‘the cruel joke’,” said Gibbs, “that this land was given to us.”

For decades, the land just sat there, with few visitors but the occasional timber poacher. Then, in the 1960s, the Government decided that if these families were to maintain ownership, they needed to amalgamate the land with neighbouring Māori blocks and form an incorporation – and then pay tax on it. Now needing to raise cash to keep the place in their hands, the incorporation cleared about a third of the 1330-hectare block and attempted to farm it. The effects were environmentally disastrous – and only marginally economically viable. “When I was a kid, I remember fire was a management tool,” said Gibbs. “So they’d log these beautiful forests and then they’d burn what was left. It was like the Wild West: there were wild cows and horses, and broken fences. It wasn’t really a functioning farm as such, but just no-one could see past that approach.”

To raise cash and keep the farm going, the landowners began selectively logging tall canopy trees from the remaining forest: silver beech [Nothofagus menziesii], miro [Prumnopitys ferruginea] and tōtara [Podocarpus totara], all of which produce high-value hardwood timber. Younger generations – Gibbs among them – were much less keen to log, but the problem of generating income remained. Then, in the early 2000s, Gibbs’ uncle Ken McAnergney met ecologist and carbon finance specialist Sean Weaver, and together they started exploring the possibility of selling carbon credits for protecting the Rarakau rainforest.

The group received some funding from Te Puni Kōkiri (the Ministry of Maori Affairs) to do a feasibility study, worked out that their 738 hectares of forest captures 2,458 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, and realised it was possible to make a sustainable income from carbon credits on the international voluntary carbon market. “So it was a real win-win situation,” said Gibbs. In 2008, the landowners began selling certified Plan Vivo Standard carbon credits through Weaver’s carbon offsetting consultancy Ekos, and they’ve proved popular: demand outstrips supply. Companies like QANTAS Airlines and the popular World of Music and Dance festival (WOMAD) buy credits from Rarakau in order to ‘offset’ their own carbon emissions.

The money the landowners receive largely goes into development projects such as fencing, regeneration, pest control and building infrastructure for tourism: the site is the jumping-off point for New Zealand’s newest Great Walk, the Hump Ridge Track, so there’s potential to develop accommodation and educational services there, too. “It’s an exciting project with potential for heaps of growth, and a real feel-good factor,” said Gibbs.

That ‘feel-good factor’ is often critiqued by opponents of the carbon market concept, who argue that humanity should be focussing on reducing, rather than offsetting, its carbon footprint. In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, there are also important questions to be raised around equity and scalability. The Rarakau project is currently the only one of its kind, and in a country where around 73% of indigenous forest has already been felled – and two thirds of that which still stands is set aside in protected areas – relatively few other Māori landowners have the opportunity to follow its example.

In Tairāwhiti on the North Island’s East Coast, some Māori landowners are trying a different route: earning carbon credits via the country’s national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), through native reforestation on land which has already been deforested. One group of landowners in particular, who own the ‘Nuhiti Q’ block between Tokomaru Bay and Anaura Bay, has found some success with the venture: they’re reforesting unprofitable, difficult-to-farm parts of the block, and selling carbon credits to buyers like Gull, a petrol company. The money they earn from those credits has allowed them to fund large-scale fencing projects and intensify production on the remaining farmland. Replanting with native mānuka [Leptospermum scoparium] also provides them with an opportunity for a new income stream – high-value mānuka honey.

However, other landowners interested in following that path have found it much less straightforward, as evidenced in a 2019 research project carried out by economic and public policy research institute Motu and local charitable company Hikurangi Enterprises. The researchers tracked 13 groups of landowners with aspirations to reforest and enter the ETS – and over the three years in which they worked with them, “none of them managed to get registered,” said Sophie Hale, a research analyst at Motu who collaborated on the project. “And that in itself is an interesting finding, and suggests that there really is room for policymakers and other institutions to provide support to landowners – not only financially, but also with communication and information; it’s a big, scary process.”

“[The ETS is] a very complicated, complex system,” said Pia Pohatu, a local researcher who was contracted to Hikurangi Enterprises to work on the project. “And Māori land ownership and governance and development, in itself, is complex. And so I think a lot of people don’t get into it because they can’t see if they’re eligible, early.” That eligibility depends on a number of factors, such as how long ago the land was deforested, the size of the replanting area and what else is being done on the land.

Many landowners are also reluctant to shoulder the risk associated with committing to the scheme, which is relatively new to the country and risks being ditched or becoming unprofitable in the future. For Māori, who own land collectively and intergenerationally, signing up to something now that will lock their descendants into the same land use – or face high de-registration fees – is particularly problematic. “I think that would be a huge risk for Māori,” said Pohatu, “if it means our future generation can’t have their own flexibility with the decisions.”

That intergenerational ownership has been important to navigate in the agreements negotiated at Rarakau, too. “We need intergenerational ability to make change,” said Gibbs. “So my grandkids need to be able to decide what’s best for that whenua [land] – especially because from an Indigenous worldview, it’s not ours! We’re only looking after it for the next generation. And if we train our kids right, then they’re making good decisions and looking after it for the next generation, too.”

For his part, Gibbs is keen to ensure that those younger generations feel connected to Rarakau – and that’s why having a healthy, well-preserved forest, a thriving farm and a sustainable business model is particularly important. “I think at some point, there’ll be people that have no other affiliations or ties to anyone else but that whenua [land], and they may not be lucky enough to have a whakapapa [genealogy] that goes past the person that was given that land in 1915,” he said. “So we need to make that space their space; I believe that those kids have a right to that. Because once they feel that connection, that gives them their own mana [prestige, status, honour] that they carry out into the world. And that’s what everybody needs – especially Māori youth.”

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Many activists held virtual protests, but in some of the hardest hit countries, such as the Philippines and Kenya, they took to the streets to demand climate action and justice from their governments.

The theme of this year’s global climate strike is supporting communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Climate Home News spoke to three activists from the global south about their personal fears and the change they are fighting for.

Mitzi Tan, the Philippines 

Mitzi Tan says a new anti-terror law could endanger environmental defenders in the Philippines (Photo: 350org)

Two years ago, Mitzi Tan’s world view “shattered” when she first spoke to an indigenous leader from the Lumad tribe about how his people faced constant harassment, attacks and arrests in their fight to protect their land, rivers and forests from environmental destruction. 

“In the Philippines, we are already experiencing the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We have no choice but to defend the planet,” 22-year-old Tan told Climate Home News. 

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

The Philippines is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, more intense typhoons and flooding.

“We would spend days in the dark with candles just listening to the battery powered radio for any updates on storms, always afraid that a tree would fall or that the flood would enter our house,” Tan said. 

On Friday, youth activists gathered in groups of ten to protest, bearing banners which read “protect climate protectors” and “there is no planet b”.

“Activists are being silenced here in the Philippines. I worry that people are starting to get desensitised to the number of deaths. We have names, we have lives, we are people, we’re not just statistics,” she said. 

The Philippines is the world’s deadliest country for environmental defenders, according to Global Witness. Last year 43 environmental defenders were killed and campaigners fear that a new anti-terror law could be used to validate their arrests and murders.

“A lot of people see this law as very dangerous. It could endanger all of us and our right to defend the planet,” said Tan.

The pandemic has fostered an even greater sense of solidarity among young people around the world, said Tan. “In a way the pandemic has brought everyone closer together.”

Kevin Mtai, Kenya

The climate crisis is constantly on 24-year-old Kevin Mtai’s mind. He is witnessing the impacts of climate change first-hand. 

“I personally have been affected mentally and physically… with floods destroying our home and crops and causing water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera [among] my family,” Mtai told Climate Home.

He gathered with other climate activists in Nairobi on Friday to protest a controversial deal which would expand the plastics industry in Kenya.

#AfricaIsNotADumpster @KevinKevinmtai giving a talk at Uhuru Park, Nairobi about how plastic waste is a problem in Kenya.

We say no to dumping of plastics in Africa by the US @USEmbassyKenya #FightClimateInjustice #FridaysForFuture @Fridays4future @GretaThunberg @disharavii pic.twitter.com/qkdnVdgpgJ

— Oneup Action Kenya (@KenyaOneup) September 25, 2020

The oil industry is lobbying the US government to use a trade deal with Kenya as an opportunity to export more plastic to the country, a move which campaigners warn would turn Kenya into a dumping site for plastic waste. Kenya has the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags. Anyone caught producing, selling or carrying plastic bags faces up to four years imprisonment or fines of $40,000.

“We don’t want the government to sign that deal. They want to force us to take that plastic but our country is not the one using [it], the USA is. Africa is not a dump site. This is an injustice for us as Kenyans and for us as climate activists,” Mtai said. 

It is a global injustice that countries in the global south emit the least carbon dioxide in the world, but are the worst affected by climate change, Mtai said. 

“People in the global south do not have anything to protect their lives… they are facing water [shortages] and diseases,” he said. 

Marina Guia, Brazil 

Marina Guia and other Brazilian climate activists take part in a virtual strike on 25 September 2020 (Photo: Marina Guia)

16-year-old Marina Guia has become accustomed to thick smoke from wildfires enveloping her city, Volta Redonda, in Brazil.  “The city is dark because of the smoke. It is something that I see day-to-day,” Guia told Climate Home. 

“The indigenous people in the forests are the ones really suffering because of the fires. The fires attack the environmental defenders directly,” she said, adding that the pandemic has made it more difficult to protect indigenous communities. “We are trying to take care to not contaminate them.”

Together with other Brazilian activists, Guia has launched the SOS Amazonia campaign to support indigenous communities protecting the Amazon rainforest. 

“We are giving a voice to indigenous people. They are on the frontlines [of climate change] and are really in danger. They are attacked by Covid-19, deforestation and murders,” said Guia. 

In a message to the UN on Tuesday, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro denied responsibility for the worst fires on record in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland.

The fires have led to respiratory problems for people living in the region, exacerbating coronavirus outcomes. 

“The climate crisis will affect the poorest first and those that don’t have capacity to deal with it. Climate justice is something that the whole world will need to fight for. If we don’t have the environmental defenders, we don’t have the Amazon,” Guia said.

The post Three youth activists explain why they are striking for climate justice  appeared first on Climate Home News.

A new online food exchange scheme led by indigenous women near the Carribean side of Costa Rica is strengthening traditional practices in the face of the pandemic.

The programme, which launched with its first money-free food exchange in June, aims to tackle the impacts of COVID-19 on local people’s food security. 

But it also hopes to build a longer term resilience against the threats of climate change and encroaching industrial farming.

“Our new generation are losing these practices and now is a good time to take them up again,” says Gina Haylen Sanchez, a member of the women’s association leading the project. “Now that we are faced with this situation, we have to bring out what we really are saying that we are as indigenous people.”

Exchange

The first local product swap, organised by the Kábata Könana Women’s Association from the mountainous Cabécar Talamanca indigenous territory, took place in late June.

The exchange revolves around “tejedoras”, or “knowledge weavers”,women from ten communities inside the territory who collect information about the food needed by families in their area, and what they have to spare.

This information is sent by WhatsApp to a central office of the association, which works out the exchange, or “estanco”. Produce is harvested and collected together in white plastic sacks outside people’s houses, where the women collect it, bring it to their central office, unload everything and sort it afresh into delivery packages.

The use of WhatsApp to collect the information fits in with a wider trend in Costa Rica – the social media platform has been used extensively during the pandemic by producers and small businesses to connect and deliver directly to customers.

But the initiative also aims to strengthen the traditional agroforestry farming techniques of the Cabécar, whereby crops are planted among native trees and plants – allowing farming without the need to raze whole forests.

“We saw that at some point this pandemic is going to affect us economically,” says Edith Villanueva Reyes, secretary of the board of directors of the Association for the Integral Development of the Talamanca Cabécar Indigenous Territory (Aditica). But instead of looking outside the territory for support, the woman decided to focus on working internally, she says.

Reinforcing tradition

The process is a modern, scaled-up version of the Cabécar’s traditional custom of exchanging food. “You always brought something to the person you were going to visit, and you have something back to the person who visited you,” says Levi Sucre Romero, an indigenous Costa Rican from the neighbouring Bribrí de Talamanca territory and a coordinator of the recovery plan in Talamanca Cabécar. ”This was common within the territory and was very strong before, but is less so now.”

However, the system is not a strict barter where “I have to give you and you have to give me”, says Villanueva Reyes.

The new exchange combines these traditional methods with the concept of “estancos” – local bartering systems organised by the Costa Rican government several decades ago to boost production in different areas of the country. 

Each part of Cabécar has a different balance of food production, Haylen Sanchez Rayes, another member of the Kábata Könana association, tells me as she takes a break from unpacking the white plastic sacks, each with the name of the family that contributed it. 

In the lower region, varieties of plantain and banana are grown along with cassava, cacao and avocado, she says, while higher up rice, different varieties of beans and maize are more common.

A “solidarity” economy

With a series of precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m able to visit the woman in their central office the day they are collecting the food. Costa Rica has seen a large number of cases over the past few months, despite its initial success in containing the virus, and the indigenous territories have implemented strong measures to try to prevent the spread of the virus. 

This forms part of a wider pandemic care and recovery plan for the Talamanca Cabécar territory, which has also included ensuring local people are informed about the pandemic in their own language and restricting access to the territory.

The second estanco taking place when I visit in late August is different from the first. The 5000 kilos of food –  collected from some 300 local families – is being distributed not among the indigenous community, but in San José, Costa Rica’s capital, via a network of young indigenous women who play for female football teams.

The women say they have arranged this in a sign of gratitude for support they have received from the capital during natural disasters such as floods. They also want to show solidarity with those struggling in the city during times of pandemic. “We can walk onto our patios for a banana, cassava, a hen or eggs,” says Marisela Fernández Fernández, president of the Kábata Könana Women’s Association. “But in the city people do not have that same luck.”

The two exchanges may appear different, but are both part of a “solidarity economy”, says Bernard Aguilar, executive director of environmental NGO Fundación Neotrópica – who argues they exemplify the important role played by elements not counted as economic growth. “Nothing that is going to be transacted in the estanco project is going to appear in the GDP,” he notes.

A third virtual exchange, which will again distribute food back among the community, will take place in a few weeks time. Ultimately, the women want to expand the exchange to include other indigenous territories, including poorer areas such as Alto Telire – an extremely remote Cabécar community in the neighbouring Telire territory where the growth of marijuana crops has led to the arrival of international drug traffickers – and cocaine along with them.

“We have thought of carrying out initiatives there, but we have to set goals to see how we can get in, how we can go and talk to these families,” says Sanchez Rayes. 

The women also hope to begin connecting online with people outside the territories to sell produce directly to them. This would be a change to how much of their produce is currently sold, to larger companies which have cut their orders since the pandemic began.

The estanco is also tied to a wider effort to increase resilience in the region. Another initiative aims to set up a “Living Museum for the Protection of the Seed” – whereby different families would preserve the seeds and informacion of a particular variety of indigenous plant in their homes.

Climate impacts

The Talamanca region is already seeing some impacts of climate change. Several people I speak to highlight a fall in the production of pejibaye – a dry, savoury fruit from the native peach palm trees (or “pejibaye”) popular throughout Costa Rica. 

“I remember that my mother had so many pejibayes that she threw them to the pigs,” Villanueva Reyes tells me. “But from around five years ago, the pejibaye harvests have not occurred. People say it’s because an insect eats them there before they bloom. We don’t know […], but the harvest of pejibayes is no longer the same as before.”

The Talamanca forest mountain range is highly vulnerable to climate change. Already high yearly rainfall could rise by 30% by the end of the century, while the minimum temperature rise is likely to be 3.5C, according to a 2016 report by Costa Rica’s Tropical Agronomic Research and Teaching Center (CATIE). The region’s biodiversity is especially vulnerable due to its high number of endemic species. Humid ecosystems such as that in Talamanca need everything to align, says Sucre Romero.

Fernández Fernández says the community has already been seeing changes in the local climate, with rain and sunny weather coming at unexpected times of year and impacting harvests.

Practices focussing on local varieties and farming methods, such as the estanco, could help to face these climate impacts, she says. “Our elders always say we must work, that we should not sow monoculture that it is only one product,” she adds, referring to the huge banana plantations in Costa Rica which use vast amounts of pesticides. “We have to plant varieties of products to guarantee food, because we do not know when the time of drought, the time of hunger, the time of crisis could occur.”

The pandemic has hit Costa Rica hard, but these women are seeing a way to use this experience to create more resilience in the long term. “By practicing our own culture, as our ancestors taught us, we can continue living and we can face the pandemic,” says Villanueva Reyes.

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