As this European Parliament term began, Fridays for Future school strikes, inspired by Greta Thunberg, were sweeping Europe, with young people demanding that political leaders act decisively against climate change’s mortal threat. 

Five years on, as the parliament entered its final chapter, very different protests erupted in Brussels and across Europe – this time led by farmers, who clashed with police and brought the city to gridlock. The farmers’ grievances were many, from rising energy and fertiliser costs, to cheap imports and environmental rules.  

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Just as Fridays for Future signified growing pressure on politicians to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, the farmers’ protests have been seen as a stark warning of the rural backlash against doing so. 

In reality, the reasons for the farmers’ anger are more diffuse.     

Climate and forests centre-stage 

In the early days of the current parliament, the school strikers’ message appeared to be getting through. Tackling climate change was  “this generation’s defining task”, the European Commission declared. Within 100 days of taking office, the new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met her manifesto promise of launching the European Green Deal. 

The following few years saw climate and forests take centre-stage in EU policymaking to an unprecedented degree: from the Climate Law, which wrote into the statutes the EU’s goal to be climate neutral by 2050, to the Nature Restoration Law (NRL), setting binding targets to bring back nature across Europe, and the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), the first legislation of its kind in the world, which aims to stop EU consumption from devastating forests around the world. 

Then came the backlash. 

Despite exit, EU seeks to save green reforms to energy investment treaty

Over the past year, vested industry interests and EU member states have tried to sabotage key pieces of the European Green Deal, including the NRL and the EUDR. 

This pushback against laws to protect the natural world is now a battleground in EU parliamentary elections, with populist, far-right and centre-right parties seeing it as fertile vote-winning territory. 

The centre-right European People’s Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, has been campaigning against key planks of the Green Deal, including the NRL, while promoting itself as the defender of rural interests. 

But the views of the rural constituencies whose votes they covet are not as simplistic or polarised as widely depicted. 

Deep listening 

At Fern, we’ve increasingly worked with people who share the same forest policy goals but are bitterly opposed to one another.

This is why we commissioned the insight firm GlobeScan to run focus groups among rural communities in four highly forested countries: Czechia, France, Germany and Poland. We wanted to find out what those whose concerns have been used to justify the backlash against green laws really think. The results contradict the prevailing narrative. 

All participants – selected with a balance of genders, occupations, political views and socio-economic statuses – felt that forests should be protected by law, and unanimously rejected the idea that such protection measures are a threat to rural economic development or an assault on property rights.

They felt deeply attached to their forests, saw them as public goods, were concerned about the state of them, and had a strong sense of responsibility and ownership towards them. They also wanted to see action to improve industrial forest management practices and mitigate climate change. 

Climate, development and nature: three urgent priorities for next UK government

While there was some sympathy for concerns around too much bureaucracy, even those who expressed this view felt forests should be protected by laws. Moreover, they saw the EU as having a primary role in providing support and incentives, and developing initiatives to fight the climate and biodiversity crises.  

Given how much EU politicians have put rural concerns at the heart of their arguments for rolling back the Green Deal – and are now using them in their election campaigns – it’s telling that their narratives on this do not resonate widely. Even foresters with right-leaning political views saw most of them as extreme and oversimplified. 

The lesson here is that the simplistic, divisive arguments that dominate the public debate over rural people and laws to protect nature do not reflect the complex reality of peoples’ lives or their attitudes. Where a divide exists between those pushing for strong laws to protect nature and the rural communities supposedly resisting them, it’s far from irreconcilable. 

Bridging any such gaps by listening and understanding each other’s perspectives is vital for all our futures. Those elected to the next EU Parliament would be wise to heed this. 

For further information, see: Rural Perspectives on Forest Protection 

The post Right-wing pushback on EU’s green laws misjudges rural views  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. 

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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)

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It must be said: it is impossible to imagine Nigeria’s path to decarbonization without imagining it being fully lined with trees. There is a critical need to address deforestation, transform agricultural practices, and harness nature-based solutions like afforestation and reforestation if Nigeria were serious about reaching net zero by 2060 – a commitment the Nigerian government made at COP26 in Glasgow.

Nigeria is an oil giant in Africa, and unsurprisingly, most of its plans on decarbonization focus on the transition to renewable energy. Previously, Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan had not considered the country’s emissions from the agriculture, forests, and land-use (AFOLU) sector.

However, our new report, which looks at different pathways for Nigeria to reach its net-zero-by-2060 goal, found Nigeria’s AFOLU sector has contributed the largest sectoral emissions at 30%, compared to the oil and gas sector at 29%. So while it is good that Nigeria has set its eyes on transforming the energy sector, it is also true that only in a renewable energy scenario that also transforms the AFOLU sector can Nigeria achieve its commitment of net zero by 2060 which will allow Nigeria’s economy to grow alongside reaching its sustainability goals.

“Two steps forward, two steps back” – Governments off course for forest protection target

One of the main drivers of Nigeria’s AFOLU emissions is land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF). The last decade has seen relentless deforestation in Nigeria, with Global Forest Watch data revealing that from 2010 to 2019, Nigeria lost 86,700 hectares of tropical forest. Alarming as this may be, without immediate action, an additional 25% of our remaining forests could vanish by 2060. The cause of deforestation is a confluence of different factors, including the population’s lack of access to electricity and increasing poverty rates.

The stark reality is that nearly one in three people in the country lack access to electricity. This energy disparity leads many to rely on traditional, polluting methods for energy generation, such as burning wood. Additionally, less than a quarter of Nigerians have access to “clean cooking,” forcing the majority—primarily women—to rely on inefficient and polluting cookstoves, using wood for fuel.

This reliance on wood for energy generation and fuel is a significant driver of deforestation in Nigeria, and is also a major contributing factor to residential emissions. Improving access to clean cooking is not only pivotal in reducing emissions but also a crucial step towards mitigating deforestation.

According to the World Bank, four in ten Nigerians – or about 80 million people – were living in poverty in 2019. A report by Mongabay revealed that with lack of available jobs, Nigerian forests are being lost to farming and logging. Here, the message is clear: we can only save our forests and be truly on our way to net zero if we address poverty and social inequalities.

Reversing deforestation is not an impossible feat, but it demands a commitment to reforestation efforts – a 2.3% annual reforestation rate – and addressing other root causes of the problem including access to electricity, job creation, and a reduction in poverty.  With reforestation efforts, Nigeria can not only halt the degradation but also bolster its carbon sink capacity, a crucial element in achieving the net-zero goal by 2060.

The commitment to net zero is not just an environmental pledge but a blueprint for economic growth and prosperity that aligns with our broader sustainability goals. It is time for Nigeria to seize the opportunity and lead the charge towards a greener, more resilient future.

The post Nigeria’s path to net zero should be fully lined with trees – and fairness appeared first on Climate Home News.

Both governments announced several carbon offsetting deals at Cop28 in Dubai under the umbrella of the Paris Agreement’s bilateral carbon trading principles.

But the rules for how to implement them have yet to be agreed, as negotiations at Cop28 collapsed over discussions on how to ensure the integrity of carbon credits. Still, that hasn’t stopped deals such as Paraguay’s moving forward without clear guidelines.

Climate experts and organisations fear the lax rules approved by the Paraguayan government – as well as its proximity to industry players – risk the new UN mechanism repeating problems that have beset the voluntary carbon market, where companies have frequently ended up buying junk offsets.

Fossil fuel firms seek UN carbon market cash for old gas plants

Despite such concerns, Paraguay has made carbon markets a top priority, even rushing to pass a new law in less than one month – between September and October 2023. The law created a national registry and a set of rules for every carbon project in the country.

It “will contribute enormously to the growth and development of the country”, said Minister of Environment Rolando de Barros Barreto, in an official statement the day the law was signed by President Peña.

De Barros Barreto was heavily involved in lobbying for the legislation to pass through Congress without modifications. “We are one of the few countries that have a tool like this,” he added in the statement.

A man fishes near chimneys giving off emissions in an industrial area of Singapore, January 5, 2016. (Photo/Reuters/Tim Wimborne

Carbon shopping

Pressed by a hike in Singapore’s domestic carbon tax – which will rise from about $3 per tonne to $18 in 2024 – its government went shopping for carbon offsets at Cop28 to offer big emitters back home. It held talks with Bhutan, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay as potential suppliers.

Paraguay – which, according to industry minister Javier Giménez García de Zúñiga, was seeking to position itself as the “lung market” of the world – landed an ideal customer.

Both countries agreed to create a bilateral commission to pick carbon-cutting projects in Paraguay. Companies based in Singapore could purchase credits from these projects in exchange for a discount on the new carbon tax rates. No official document on the deal has yet been disclosed.

“What was agreed is to create a road connecting the two countries to manage the transfer of carbon credits,” Giménez García de Zúñiga said in a statement published jointly by the two countries to mark the deal.

On the same day, President Peña also signed a memorandum of understanding with Cop28 host United Arab Emirates, which had embarked on its own controversial spending spree for carbon offsets, mainly in the form of agreements with African countries.

At COP28 in Dubai, Paraguay’s Minister Rolando de Barros Barreto and the UAE’s Mariam Almheiri sign a Memorandum of Understanding on carbon credits. (Photo: Paraguayan Presidency)

Rushed rules

In order to arrive at Cop28 as a reliable supplier of carbon offsets, the Paraguayan government rushed its law regulating carbon markets through both chambers of Congress in less than a month.

The initiative was marketed abroad by President Peña as “one of the most advanced laws in the world” and as a way to attract foreign investment. But it also has been heavily criticised by opposition lawmakers, academics, Indigenous peoples and environmental groups.

The new law passed without including safeguards to guarantee environmental and human rights based on an international standard that seeks “to mitigate the negative impacts of projects and, above all, to defend the rights of the people”, explained Mirta Pereira, a Paraguayan lawyer and advisor for the Federation for the Self-determination of Indigenous Peoples (FAPI).

Alberto Núñez, an activist from the Youth Network for Climate Action Paraguay, said in a public hearing prior to the bill’s approval that “without explicit human rights safeguards, this (law) will have a climate-friendly name but will be destructive”.

Opposition senators said it had been influenced by peddling to favour law firms that advise on carbon projects.

A proposal to create mechanisms for handling complaints, information requests and potential land conflicts was also rejected by Peña’s ruling bloc of lawmakers.

Protected forests

Another issue is that the new law allows for carbon projects to be set up within national parks and forest reserves, in an effort to finance the country’s protected areas, experts said.

But the forests in the concession areas would have already been protected without funding from the offsetting projects, which means their credits lack “additionality” in terms of emissions reductions, according to the standards recommended by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), an independent body that seeks to raise the quality of carbon credits for trading.

Junk offset sellers push to enter new UN carbon market

Inigo Wyburd, a researcher at non-profit organisation Carbon Market Watch, said “additionality is necessary” for Paraguay’s market to be credible. “It is important that it is reflected in the text of the law. Areas that are not at risk of being deforested should not be eligible to receive carbon credits,” he added.

Without such safeguards, carbon schemes – including the country’s bilateral offsetting deals – risk repeating the errors of the voluntary market, according to Carbon Market Watch policy analyst Jonathan Crook.

Forest projects whose offsets are traded in the voluntary market have been widely criticised for over-crediting emissions reductions, as well as struggling to monitor forest loss. In some cases, projects have also led to human rights violations, especially against Indigenous peoples.

Industry brokers in the room

In September, a few months before Singapore and Paraguay announced their deal, the two governments held a meeting in New York, attended by big carbon brokers likely to benefit from the agreement.

They included Singaporean commodities giant Trafigura Group, which is one of the world’s largest carbon traders and Paraguay’s biggest fossil fuel supplier.

Peña also met in New York with Per Olofsson, CEO of Paracel, a forestry company seeking to sell carbon credits from eucalyptus tree plantations in Paraguay, where Olofsson had joined meetings lobbying in favour of the new carbon markets bill.

Photograph of Paraguayan President Santiago Peña at a meeting in New York on September 20, 2023. The photograph shows Per Oloffson, CEO of Paracel, and Benjamin Chia, Singapore’s main carbon markets negotiator (second and second to last on the right, respectively). Chia’s attendance was not announced. (Photo: Paraguay Presidency)

Both Paracel and Trafigura have faced questions over the integrity of their carbon credits and had projects suspended by carbon credit verification agency Verra.

Trafigura faced problems in June 2023, when Verra launched an investigation into its Southern Cardamom project in Cambodia, after human rights groups raised concerns about land conflicts with Indigenous people.

Trafigura, which had already committed the credits to corporate buyers, had to suspend them. The results of the investigation have not yet been revealed.

Meanwhile, Paracel was also questioned last year by Verra, which suspended one of its projects aiming to generate carbon credits from a wood-pulp mill and eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay.

The project took a $200-million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank, which according to Verra, shows that the project had no additionality, since it would have accessed finance anyway and continued without selling carbon credits.

Excerpt from Verra’s letter denying registration of Paracel’s project

According to Verra, Paracel had until December 19, 2023, to present improvements and thus avoid a final rejection of the project. But as of March 1 this year, neither the company nor Verra had published updates regarding its status.

Paracel is also facing a dispute with a local community called Sargento José Félix López, in Paraguay’s northwest, which denounced the siting of some eucalyptus plantations on public land.

Asked about Verra’s concerns, a Paracel spokeperson said the company was gathering documentation to submit to Verra, noting that additionality was fundamental for its biggest international buyers.

Paraguay’s new carbon market law is a positive step towards regulating the local market, the spokesperson added.

Asked if that same law would be useful for international agreements, Rodrigo Maluff, vice minister of investment, said the door is still open to modify the legislation and adapt it to the standards demanded by Singapore.

The legal director of the Ministry of Environment, Víctor González, said much of the work could be done through the regulatory process under the law that will begin this year.

Transparency concerns

Experts told Climate Home that agreements like the Singapore-Paraguay deal could be negatively affected by the failure of governments at Cop28 to reach a consensus on rules for the new bilateral carbon markets being discussed under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2.

One key element of discord at Cop28 was how robust the process to verify the quality of the credits should be.

Carbon credits talks collapse at Cop28 over integrity concerns

“More and more countries [like Paraguay] and companies are negotiating bilateral agreements, in the absence of comprehensive regulation,” said Crook from Carbon Market Watch.

“This risks undermining transparency and may make negotiations [at Cop29] even more difficult, given the absence of clear direction,” he added.

A longer version of this story was first published in Spanish by El Surtidor as part of the Opaque Carbon project led by the Latin American Centre for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) and bringing together 14 media outlets from Latin America.

The post Paraguay’s carbon deal with Singapore beset by lobbying, lax rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Societe Conservation Forestiere (SCF) was set up in December 2022 and is co-owned by two adult children of the DRC’s defence minister Jean-Pierre Bemba, who was accused of war crimes and found guilty of bribing witnesses. This is according to previously unreported company documents seen by Climate Home.

The documents show its stated goal is to sell carbon credits and it has applied to the provincial government for a “forest conservation concession” in the DRC province of Sud-Ubangi but it has not made progress on the ground and little else is known about it.

Anti-corruption activists raised concerns that Bemba could use his political power over the environment minister Eve Bazaiba, as her party leader, to benefit the company. Human rights activists criticised the war crimes committed by Bemba’s forces across Central Africa.

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Carbon Market Watch researcher Jonathan Crook said the revelations raised “red flags” over whether the company is free from conflicts of interest and has the experience to conduct forest conservation projects that get informed consent from local peoples.

He added: “It is very concerning to hear of potentially significant conflicts of interest and serious allegations of human and land right abuses reported about individuals linked to this company”.

Bemba was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity but, after a 10-year trial at the International Criminal Court, he was eventually acquitted on appeal. He was found guilty of bribing witnesses in the case.

Ban on business

The documents show SCF’s shares are owned equally by Bemba’s 30-year old son Jean-Emmanuel Teixera and 29-year old daughter Magalie Tema Teixera. They are listed under their mother’s last name and as Portugese citizens.

The SCF’s constiution

Article 97 of the DRC’s constitution bans government ministers from carrying out “any professional activity”.

Jimmy Kande is an anti-corruption activist from the DRC. He told Climate Home that the country’s politicians often put projects in the names of their children.

Kande told Climate Home that this company may find it easy to get the support of the environment minister because she “depends on Jean-Pierre Bemba”.

Neither child has any track record of forest conservation and both remain close to their father. Magalie goes by Magalie Bemba on social media and re-posts her father’s messages praising his militia turned political party – the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC).

Jean-Emmanuel’s recent wedding was attended by his father, the president of the DRC Felix Tshisekedi and Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of the Ivory Coast who Jean-Pierre Bemba met whilst they were both on trial for alleged war crimes in The Hague.

A power player

Jean-Pierre Bemba was born into extreme wealth and power. His father was a minister under the DRC’s long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

When the DRC descended into wars which would end Mobutu’s rule, Bemba set up the MLC as a rebel militia and took control of almost a third of the country.

South African ministry uses opaque modelling to argue for weakening climate ambition

Human rights groups have accused them of raping and massacring and indigenous pygmy people during these wars.

In 2003, the warring factions signed a peace agreement which made Bemba one of five vice-presidents in the transitional government.

Three years later, Bemba was the main challenger to Joseph Kabila in presidential elections. The electoral commission declared Kabila the winner.

War crimes

The next year, on a trip to Belgium, Bemba was arrested on the orders of the International Criminal Court.

Their arrest warrant says he was suspected of perpetrating crimes against humanity and war crimes, particularly allowing his MLC troops to rape, murder and pillage during a conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR). In 2002, MLC fighters interceded to suppress a coup attempt against CAR president Ange-Félix Patassé.

Witnesseses told the court that civilians were murdered when they tried to stop their property being stolen. The thefts were “not justified by military necessity”, the ICC ruled.

In 2016, three different ICC judges found Bemba guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, namely the murder, rape and pillage committed by MLC fighters.

The three judges which declared Bemba guilty in 2016 (Photos: International Criminal Court)

While human rights groups celebrated the decision, then-MLC legislator Bazaiba called it “selective justice”. Bemba immeditately appealed. Two years later, a panel of five brand new judges narrowly reversed the decision, arguing the previous judges failed to properly prove that Bemba had the power to stop the war crimes.

The ruling was enough to free Bemba from prison in time for him to return to the DRC and try to run for president in the 2018 elections.

But the electoral authorities banned him from running because, while the ICC failed to convict him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, it did find him guilty of bribing witnesses in the trial.

The elections were won by Felix Tshisekedi, who sought to bring rivals from the MLC into his coalition.

He appointed the MLC’s secretary general Eve Baziaba as environment minister in April 2021 and Bemba as defence minister in March 2023.

The MLC’s support helped Tshisekedi win a second term in office last month and he is likely to keep both Bemba and Bazaiba as ministers.

Carbon offsets supporter

Since her appointment as environment minister, Bazaiba has been a vocal supporter of carbon offsets at Cop climate talks.

At Cop28, UN records show she was accompanied by her own daughter Nono Manganza and by Jean-Pierre Bemba’s eldest daughter Cynthia Bemba-Gombo.

At the conference, she stood alongside indigenous people from around the world and argued: “The world asks us – Amazonia, Congo Basin, Mekong basin – to preserve our forests. But to do this means adaptation of our lives, our agriculture, of everything”.

“And this adaptation needs funds,” she added, “so, we say OK, and we entered the carbon markets.

But back home, Greenpeace Africa have accused her of encouraging land-grabbing after she signed a mission order telling a team to “arracher” (which translates as “wrest”) consent from local communities for a carbon offset programme.

At the time, Greenpeace campaigner Irene Wabiwa accused her of “demonstrat[ing] contempt for Congolese law, civil society and the rights of local communities”.

Human Rights Watch researcher Thomas Fessy said “it’s easy to suspect that Bemba’s family – particularly at a time when a close political ally is at the helm of the environment ministry – has seen a business opportunity in a field that relatively new to Congo”.

The DRC is home to a twentieth of the world’s forest and polluting companies are expected be buying $10-40 billion a year of carbon offsets by 2030.

Magalie Bemba, Eve Bazaiba and the government of the DRC did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Witness bribing minister’s family own Congolese carbon credit company appeared first on Climate Home News.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil’s environmental standing, had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030 – one he has already adopted.

Instead, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday in the Brazilian city of Belem created an alliance for combating forest destruction, with countries left to pursue their own individual deforestation goals.

The document also leaves out any mentions to halting fossil fuel contracts in the Amazon rainforest, a proposal that was championed by the Colombian President Gustavo Petro but ultimately failed to make it into the final text.

The Brazilian coalition of climate NGOs, Climate Observatory, said the declaration fell short of expectations, adding the agreement “fails the rainforest and the planet”.

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

Slow action

The failure of the eight Amazon countries to agree on a pact to protect their own forests points to the larger, global difficulties at forging an agreement to combat climate change. Many scientists say policymakers are acting too slowly to head off catastrophic global warming.

Lula and other national leaders left Tuesday’s meeting without commenting on the declaration. Presidents from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru attended the summit, while Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela sent other top officials.

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said in a press briefing that the issue of deforestation “in no way whatsoever will divide the region” and cited “an understanding about deforestation” in the declaration, without elaborating.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

This week’s summit brought together the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) for the first time in 14 years, with plans to reach a broad agreement on issues from fighting deforestation to financing sustainable development.

Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO coalition Climate Observatory, said the summit’s declaration is a “first step” but added it still lacks “concrete responses to the situation we’re dealing with”.

“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries cannot put in a statement, in bold letters, that deforestation needs to be zero and that exploring for oil in the middle of the forest is not a good idea,” said Astrini.

Oil in the Amazon?

Tensions emerged in the lead up to the summit around diverging positions on deforestation and oil development.

Fellow Amazon countries also rebuffed Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro’s ongoing campaign to end new oil development in the Amazon. In his speech on Tuesday, Petro likened the left’s desire to keep drilling for oil to the right-wing denial of climate science.

He said the idea of making a gradual “energy transition” away from fossil fuels was a way to delay the work needed to stop climate change.

G20 climate talks fail to deliver emission cuts despite leadership pleas

Civil society organisations accused the Brazilian government of opposing a mention to fossil fuels in the final text, adding the country wanted to “bury” any mentions of a fossil fuel phase out in the region.

Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River and the country’s northern coast, which is dominated by rainforest.

“What we are discussing in Brazil today is of an extensive and large area – in my vision perhaps the last frontier of oil and gas before … the energy transition,” Brazil’s Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira told reporters after Petro’s speech.

Silveira said they should conduct research into what oil is there in order to make a decision on the issue.

Illegal mining

Beyond deforestation, the summit also did not fix a deadline on ending illegal gold mining, although leaders agreed to cooperate on the issue and to better combat cross-border environmental crime.

The final joint statement, called the Belem Declaration, strongly asserted indigenous rights and protections, while also agreeing to cooperate on water management, health, common negotiating positions at climate summits, and sustainable development.

As Reuters previously reported, the declaration additionally established a science body to meet annually and produce authoritative reports on science related to the Amazon rainforest, akin to the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.

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Verra says the new methodology will ensure that the programmes are actually protecting as many trees as those buying and selling the carbon credits they produce claim.

But experts told Climate Home that the new rules will not fix the conflicts of interest which undermine these programmes and that the way Verra is carrying out its review of the rules is flawed.

Forest offsets

Carbon credits are when companies, governments and people pay for someone else to cut greenhouse gas emissions on their behalf, so they can take credit for this climate action.

Organisations like Verra are supposed to check whether projects actually reduce the amount of emissions that they claim.

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Projects which aim to reduce emissions by saving forests, allowing them to keep sucking in planet-destroying carbon dioxide, make up much of Verra’s credits portfolio.

Project developers estimate what would have happened if the conservation project had not existed. The ‘avoided’ emissions are then turned into credits to be sold to polluters. Verra approves the projects and advertises them for sale on its website, receiving a fee for each transaction.

Under fire

But in January, a Guardian investigation alleged in January that more than 90% of its rainforest offset credits are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

It found that most projects overstated the threats to forests which calculations are based on and did not show real evidence that they had saved the forest.

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Verra disputed the investigation’s findings and said it was already working to transition all forest projects to one updated methodology.

More than three years in the works, Verra finally unveiled its draft rules in mid-April. They are expected to be finalised by the end of the year, before coming into force in 2025.

Controversial pick

After drawing up the rules, Verra sent them to an independent auditor called Aster Global Environmental Solutions to review.

Aster is a family firm from rural Ohio which makes its money auditing carbon offset projects and consulting for the industry.

As an auditor, its job is to asses whether projects follow Verra’s rules and are likely to achieve the emissions reductions they claim. After they’ve marked the project developer’s homework, Verra gives the final seal of approval.

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Simon Counsell, who has been assessing offsets for 15 years, says auditors are hugely influential. “In many respects, the quality of the carbon credits depends on the rigour of their work,” he said.

But Aster has come under fire for a series of projects recently. It’s accused of approving a grassland conservation project which harms indigenous cattle herders in Kenya and forest protection projects which over-count emissions reductions in Zimbabwe and Peru.

Indigenous herders disrupted

Aster approved the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project, which claims to increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil of savanna grasslands by managing the grazing patterns of livestock.

The carbon credits from the project were sold to the likes of Netflix, Facebook owner Meta and the Natwest bank.

Indigenous cattle herders in Kenya’s countryside. Photo: Ninara/Flickr

But the Survival International campaign group claim the project is breaking down long-standing Indigenous herding systems without their informed consent and cannot accurately account for how much carbon it is removing from the atmosphere.

The group also took issue with the work of Aster Global as a validator and verifier. “Far from having undergone ‘rigorous’ assessment, numerous fundamental problems with the project were not properly addressed during its validation and the subsequent verification,” it said.

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Counsell carried out Survival International’s analysis of the project. He said Aster was “clearly troubled” by what they saw as it raised a large number of concerns with the developers during the assessment.

“The troubling part is that they never received convincing responses and yet still approved the validation”, Counsell added. “This raises questions about their rigour.”

Aster has not responded to a request for comments.

Mixed messages

In March, Verra suspended the Northern Kenya project while it carries out a review to “investigate claims” that the project does not comply with the rules.

If it identifies any irregularities – Verra says – it will require Aster to explain the cause for any quality control issues.

Verra will review the response and “reserves the right to take action” against the body, a spokesperson told Climate Home.

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But Verra, who appointed Aster to review their methodology shortly after they suspended the Kenyan project, said it would be premature to blame Aster for the project’s review.

Counsell commented: “You’d think [Verra] would at least wait until they conclude their analysis of what went wrong with the Kenyan project before putting [Aster] in charge of this really important work”.

Verra says Aster is a very experienced auditor and its proposal for the methodology review “demonstrated the best quality”.

Over-counting

Aster has also approved projects which stand accused of over-counting. When offset seller South Pole claimed to have saved an area of forest in Zimbabwe the size of Puerto Rico, Aster verified that claim for the Verra registry.

Elephants on the edge of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. This area comprises a forest protection project that has been accused of exaggerating its climate benefits. Photo: Vince O’Sullivan

But separate reports by Bloomberg and carbon rating firms found that the Kariba project had wildly overstated the risk of mass deforestation its calculations were based on.

South Pole denied this but voluntarily suspended the sale of some of the offsets. Verra said the baseline validated by Aster Global for the Kariba project was “in conformance with VCS Standard and reflected the data available at that time”.

Aster also verified forest protection credits in the Peruvian Andes which were later questioned by an Associated Press investigation. An Aster review found nothing wrong with the project.

Baselines are key

The baseline is a key component of carbon credits as it describes what would happen if the project did not exist and therefore how much difference the project makes.

It is one of the most contested elements of Verra’s forest offsets.

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Carbon rating firm Calyx Global estimated almost two-thirds of forest offset projects have a high risk of an overestimated baseline, leading to tens of millions of worthless credits and more pollution.

Elias Ayrey, chief scientist at carbon ratings firm Renoster, puts this down to many project developers’ “manipulating” data and maps showing where deforestation has occurred and is likely to occur in the future.

Verra’s remedy

Under its new rules, Verra proposes to fix this by guessing how much of the forests could be destroyed in every region and setting a cap on the total amount of emission reductions that developers can claim.

Then they split that cap up among individual projects in that region based on risk maps.

Ayrey believes the new methodology brings some welcome changes, but ultimately “is not going to significantly improve the market”.

The problem – he says – remains that the maps can continue to be made by “biased” parties, including project developers. The only difference is that, in future, they would need a sign-off from a state official.

Several analysts believe the only way to ensure the integrity of the system is to have baselines set by truly independent third parties.

“As long as these maps are not made by peer-reviewed scientists at academic institutions, like Nasa, we are going to keep having this problem”, says Ayrey.

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In a joint statement, the countries said they “intend to engage collaboratively in support of eliminating global illegal logging and deforestation through effectively enforcing their respective laws on banning illegal imports and exports”.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during a visit to China, in a bid to strengthen ties. China is Brazil’s largest trading partner and a major importer of commodities such as soy and crude petroleum.

Both countries added they will cooperate with satellite information, “which will enable enhanced monitoring”. China and Brazil share the CBERS satellite program, which made its first launch back in 2001.

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Cyntia Feitosa, international relations advisor at the Brazilian think tank Instituto Clima e Sociedade, said the joint statement was “a very good signal”, but warned there’s still questions about how it would be put into practice.

“It would be very good to see some joint traceability strategy, for example, to avoid the export of any product that has deforestation in its supply chain,” Feitosa said.

A 2019 report by the Brazilian NGO Amazon Watch showed that companies charged with environmental crimes in the Amazon were still able to export their products to the international market, in particular to Brazil’s three main trading partners — China, the EU and the US.

Climate leadership

With the arrival of Lula da Silva to Brazil’s presidency, the country resumed its efforts to influence global climate action. Da Silva also retook a closer relation with China, which at times was tense under the last government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Both countries now agreed to establish a Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change and support Brazil’s bid for Cop30. Back in January, Da Silva expressed his desire to host the UN climate talks in Belem, the second-biggest city in the Amazon region.

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“China welcomes the Brazilian candidacy to host COP30, as the 2025 summit will be key to the very future of the global response to climate change,” the statement said.

Feitosa welcomed the countries’ collaboration with climate action at the center. “I hope this is reflected in a collaborative posture in the negotiations and the search for effective solutions at a crucial moment for the next steps in the implementation of the Paris Agreement,” she said.

Li Shuo, policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia, said Brazil and China hold a big sway among develpoping countries, putting them in a unique position to lead initiatives coming from the Global South.

“A Brazil that is back to international scene and a China that seeks to enhance developing country solidarity should not just imply a fortress position, but rather a stance that champions global south concerns while at the same time advances their own action,” Shuo said.

“What we need is a more forward looking position from them that says developed countries need to act and so do we. Let’s hope the joint statement is a starting point to get us there,” he added.

This story was updated to include comments from Li Shuo.

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Between 1990 and 2020, an area larger than the EU was lost to deforestation, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. EU consumption is a big driver of this, causing around 10% of the losses, according to the FAO.

“The EU is a large consumer and trader of commodities that play a substantial part in deforestation – like beef, cocoa, soy and timber,” said Marian Jurečka the environment minister from the Czech Republic, which negotiated on behalf of the 27 EU countries.

“Protecting the environment around the world, including forests and rainforests, is a common goal for all countries and the EU is ready to take its responsibility,” he added.

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The new EU deforestation law will require all companies to issue a due diligence statement in order to sell products like coffee, cocoa and wood on the EU market. Those linked to deforestation will be banned from import and export into the EU.

“It is a text that has a real impact on our daily lives. We’re talking about very concrete items – your morning coffee or your morning chocolate,” said Pascal Canfin, the chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee.

“The great specificity of this law – and this is a world first for palm oil, cocoa, coffee, beef, and rubber – is the obligation to have a certificate based on satellite images and GPS coordinates to know exactly where the commodity comes from,” Canfin explained.

“When you arrive on the EU’s internal market – at the port of Amsterdam or Le Havre – you must show this certificate. And if you don’t have it, you can’t go in”.

‘Groundbreaking’

The amount of inspections carried out will depend on the country of production, with the most high-risk countries seeing 9% of operators and traders trading products checked.

The new EU deforestation law was hailed as “groundbreaking” by green campaigners.

“We have made history with this world-first law against deforestation,” said Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, Senior Forest Policy Officer at WWF European Policy Office.

“The EU will not only change the rules of the game for consumption within its borders, but will also create a big incentive for other countries fueling deforestation to change their policies,” she said in a statement.

Greenpeace hailed “a major breakthrough for forests,” adding that the new EU law “will make some chainsaws fall silent and stop companies profiting from deforestation.” It regretted, however, that the regulation offers only “flimsy protection for the rights of Indigenous People who pay with their blood to defend nature”.

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The third round of negotiations between the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council started at 18:30 on Monday evening

After just over nine hours, the negotiators agreed that the law will cover a range of commodities, including cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm-oil, soya and wood as well as products that contain, have been fed with or are made using these commodities, such as leather, chocolate and furniture.

The European Parliament successfully widened the scope from the initial proposal, adding rubber, charcoal, printed paper products and certain palm oil derivatives to the list of commodities that require due diligence.

While biodiesel and maize are not included, the European Commission will review whether to add them in the future.

Redefining degradation

Another win for the European Parliament was to secure a wider definition of forest degradation, which now covers the conversion of primary forests or naturally generating ones to plantation forests.

This definition could also impact EU countries and was a “very bitter pill for the EU Council to swallow,” a parliamentary source told Euractiv following the agreement.

Alongside this, no later than one year after the law comes into force, the European Commission will need to evaluate whether to extend the scope to other wooded land.

And, no later than two years after the directive comes into force, the EU executive will need to look at extending the law to land with high carbon storage and biodiversity value, as well as other commodities.

The European Parliament had been pushing for areas, such as scrublands and savannahs to be covered, but the Council “vehemently opposed” this, said Delara Burkhardt, a German MEP who was in the Parliament’s negotiating team.

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“There is thus a danger that agricultural activities will simply switch from now protected forests to still unprotected savannah landscapes, as can already be observed in the South American Cerrado savannah,” warned Burkhardt, who is from the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) political group.

MEPs also succeeded in adding human rights protections. Companies will have to verify compliance with the country of production’s laws, including human rights and the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

However, this relies on the law of the country of production, which can vary in stringency.

Role of finance

One concession from the European Parliament was over the inclusion of financial institutions, which will not be directly obliged to analyse their investments for deforestation risks.

Instead, the European Commission will have to present an assessment two years after the law comes into force, looking at whether existing EU legislation is sufficient to tackle the role of financial institutions, like banks, insurance companies and pension funds, in global deforestation, explained Burkhardt.

Despite the concessions, she told Euractiv that the law sets “a global gold standard for due diligence requirements for deforestation-free supply chains”.

“Against the will of the Council of Ministers and the European forestry lobby, we managed to cover larger forest areas by improving the definition of forest damage. Against the tyre manufacturers’ lobby, we were able to include rubber, a major driver of deforestation, in the regulation. And we were able to strengthen the role of indigenous communities,” she added.

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The lead negotiator for the European Parliament, Christophe Hansen from the European People’s Party, also praised the deal.

“This important new tool will protect forests globally and cover more commodities and products such as rubber, printed paper and charcoal. Moreover, we ensured that the rights of indigenous people, our first allies in fighting deforestation, are effectively protected,” he said.

The law will enter into force 20 days after its formal adoption by the European Parliament and EU countries, expected next year, but will not apply to big and medium sized companies until 18 months and micro and small companies for 24 months.

This article was produced by Euractiv and republished under a content sharing agreement.

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In 2014, more than 200 governments, companies, civil society and indigenous organisations signed up to the New York Declaration on Forests, promising to halve tropical deforestation by 2020 and end it by 2030.

A progress report on the declaration found that a majority of forest nations have not embedded those goals in their latest climate pledges to the UN.

The report analysed the climate plans of the 32 countries with the greatest potential to reduce carbon emissions through three activities: curbing deforestation, improving forest management and restoring or planting new forests. Twelve of the 32 had signed up to the NY declaration. Just 10, including Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, set explicit targets for forest protection.

“We found that they cover approximately half of the [combined mitigation] potential with their ambition. If we take out India, which has a very ambitious target for tree planting, it’s only 16%,” Franziska Haupt, lead author of the report and managing partner at Climate Focus, told Climate Home News. India has pledged to increase its forest cover by 95 million hectares by 2030. 

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There have been some successful policies, such as moratoria on timber exports and palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Laos, but much bolder reforms are needed to prevent further forest loss, the report says.

“It is clear that all these positive steps have not been able to curb the powerful drivers of unsustainable land use,” said Haupt. In several countries, such as Brazil and Peru, the government has rolled back environmental safeguards and monitoring in recent years, leading to an increase in deforestation, she added.

Land use change, including deforestation and degradation, accounts for around 10-12% of global emissions, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Around 12.2 million hectares of tropical forests were lost in 2020, an increase of 12% compared to the previous year, according to data from the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch.

“Forests have not been recognised for their potential. They offer an essential climate solution, we cannot miss them. That has not really arrived in mainstream policymaking,” said Haupt. 

Between 2001-2020, forests removed up to 7.35 gigatonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere, according to the report. Forests managed by indigenous communities in Peru, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are net carbon sinks and can play a key role in helping these countries meet their climate goals, it says.

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One major obstacle to ramping up global forest protection is the lack of finance, said Haupt. 

Since 2010, countries have spent an average of $2.4 billion a year on national and international forest and climate goals. That is between 0.5%-5% of what is needed to protect and restore forests, estimated to be as high as $460 billion per year. Around a quarter of the 32 countries analysed say that their forest targets can only be met if they have access to international finance. 

“Forests offer the third highest mitigation potential, after the industry and energy sectors, yet they receive only a fraction of climate finance,” Haupt told Climate Home. “In 2017 and 2018 the land use sector – including forests and agriculture – received only 21 billion annually in public and private climate finance. The energy sector received 16 times as much.”

“When it comes to protecting forests, there is a yawning gap between where governments are and where they need to be. We won’t tackle climate change without looking after forests and the people who depend on them,” said Allison Hoare, senior research fellow on forest governance at Chatham House.

“We have the solutions to tackle deforestation, but they are still not being implemented at scale. Land use decisions are often made by the elite who prioritise short-term economic interests,” said Hoare, adding that forest-dependent communities must be included in consultation processes.

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Through Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (Nicfi), the country has committed to spend up to NOK 3 billion ($366m) each year rewarding rainforest countries that meet agreed targets.

But after a decade of Norway’s ‘Rainforest Billions’ programme, the headlines remain grim. Data released last week showed 29.4m hectares of tree cover was lost globally in 2017, only slightly less than 2016’s record.

UN environment programme chief Erik Solheim started the programme in 2007 when he was Norway’s environment minister.

“I think the programme has been immensely successful,” he told CHN on the sidelines of the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum last week. Overall, forests were still being lost, he said, but Norway had seen results where its cash had been spent.

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“In [the Brazilian Amazon], the deforestation rate has been reduced between 70 and 80%, which is an amazing success. Unprecedented in global history,” said Solheim.

But he said there was no way Norway could hold back the stripping of global forests without help from other wealthy nations.

“Obviously, Norway wants to engage with any other partners,” he said. “There is no desire to do it alone.”

When it comes to forest protection, everything orbits around planet Norway. Over the past decade, the Norway provided 40% of global finance to fight tropical deforestation, according to Rainforest Foundation Norway. This mainly comes in the form of direct payments to countries, which incentivise forest protection.

“Norway alone can never stop deforestation. I mean, we are one actor,” Norway’s current environment minster Ola Elvestuen told CHN.

“If we look at the programmes we have country by country, I have no problem defending what we are doing and saying that it was the right thing to go into this and try to be in front. No matter how odd that it may have seemed that Norway would try to take this role, back ten years ago,” he said.

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Rainforest Foundation Norway, which first suggested the idea of paying countries for their deforestation efforts to Solheim, used the forum to publish a critique of the programme. It’s first recommendation was for more donor countries to step forward.

Privately, Norwegian diplomats express exasperation at their position in the vanguard. In 2014, the UK and Germany signed a joint declaration with Norway that committed to increasing support for the UN’s flagship REDD+ forest programme.

The UK’s development agency did not wish to comment, but its media department pointed to aid programmes that have committed hundreds of millions of pounds between 2011 and 2021 to fighting deforestation alongside Norway.

Despite that, Norway’s partners “could do more”, one official said. Some wondered whether Norway’s huge contribution has dissuaded others from coming forward with funds that could look stingy in comparison.

The Oslo Tropical Forest Forum has become one of the biggest events on the global forest calendar. Ministers and officials from the rainforest nations of the world arrived in the Norwegian capital for talks with current environment minster Ola Elvestuen.

Mostly the talks were conciliatory, said Elvestuen. Although he admitted to an ongoing “disagreement” with the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to which payments have been frozen.

One of the authors of the Rainforest Foundation Norway report, Nils Hermann Ranum, said Norway may need to “become harder” on countries that fail to meet their targets. In 2017, Norway slashed Brazil’s annual payment, which averages $114m, by almost two thirds.

“If there is no results the payments will not be there,” said Elvestuen, but “you cannot by being hard, get the government of the country to do something that they don’t want to do themselves. So we have to truly be a partner”.

Norway at loggerheads with DR Congo over forest protection payments

Norway rarely releases its full annual commitment under the Nicfi programme, meaning it is seeking to do “much more in the years ahead”, said Elvestuen.

Last week it signed a new $50m deal with Ecuador, in partnership with the German government.

Ecuador’s environment minister Tarcisio Granizo told CHN the payments were “compensation” for his country’s efforts to reduce losses across its 13.6m hectare rainforest territories.

Consumption patterns in the rich world drive deforestation in the poor. Similarly, the need to stop cutting down forests is more urgent because they soak up greenhouse gases emitted in industrialised countries.

Because of this, Granizo said, forest protection was a matter of “co-responsibility between developed and developing countries”.

Despite this, motivating rich countries to live up to their commitments has been difficult. In 2014, 14 developed country governments signed a major declaration that promised to scale up rewards programmes like the one Norway continues to fund.

“Raising awareness” of the forest issue among donors and forest nations alike is a key goal of Elvestuen’s government, he said. To this end, Norway has offered funding to the Global Climate Action Summit, to be held in California in September, in return for forests to be given a larger slice of the agenda.

The stability of Norway’s programme lies in political concord at home. Elvestuen’s government is considered centre right in Norwegian terms. But they maintained the policy of Solheim’s centre left coalition after they won government in 2013.

“Norway has a very positive national agreement where all political forces have bought into this, so it’s not really controversial in Norway itself,” said Solheim.

Rainforest Foundation Norway’s Ranum, said the programme should be celebrated for its success in raising forests up the agenda. But the current state of forests called for more action.

“Maybe we were all a bit naïve about what it would take. It was more challenging than we expected,” he said.

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Karl Mathiesen’s travel to the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum was paid by the Climate and Land Use Alliance

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This week, president Michel Temer’s administration said the 16% reduction from the previous period was a victory against illegal clearing. But environmental groups cautioned against such optimism and criticised the government for stripping protections from forests to aid farmers.

The figure, calculated by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been used for a range of environmental policies. It is also the base to calculate the level of Norwegian aid to fight deforestation in the Amazon – if the rate increases, the funding dwindles.

In a press conference held on Tuesday, environment minister José Sarney Filho said the reduction showed Brazil had regained control over deforestation in the Amazon as a result of more effective enforcement of the law.

“When people who do illegal deforestation know that the Brazilian state is present, they reduce their activities. This is what’s happening”, said Sarney Filho.

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The minister also defended the federal government’s record from heavy criticism by environmentalists. He said the government abandoned the idea of opening a 46,450 sq km area in the Amazon for mining and refused to grant an environmental license to build a big hydroelectric dam in the Tapajós river.

But in the long term, Sarney Filho warned the state could not combat deforestation only through enforcement measures. There are about 25 million people living in the Amazon under strict environmental laws. The best option, he argued, is to promote environmental forest services that bring profit through conservation, such as the UN’s REDD+ carbon credit programme.

The reduction in the deforestation rate came as a relief for Temer, who came to office last year after the controversial impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, faces several corruption charges and has an approval rate as low as 3%.

In order to avoid the same fate as his predecessor, Temer made an alliance in Congress with the powerful “beef caucus”, which according to investigative journalism website Agência Pública controls 207 out of 513 lawmakers in the lower chamber. Ultimately, it’s this alliance that keeps him in office. But it has come at a price.

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Among other measures, Temer signed a generous legislation to regularise more illegal claims, froze indigenous lands demarcations and has tried to reduce conservation units in order to legalize land-grabbers. As recently as this week, facing a new vote in Congress that could end Temer’s rule, the government relaxed the definition of slave labor, an old demand of the beef caucus.

Brazilian environmentalists showed little, if any, enthusiasm at the lower deforestation rate. They argued the reduction was not enough after a 29% increase in 2016 and said the negative effects of many Temer policy decisions were still to be felt.

NGO Observatorio do Clima published a list of ten reasons of why the announcement should not be celebrated. Besides the government’s embrace of the beef caucus agenda, it mentions this year’s long drought, with a record of 106,000 forest fires in September alone, as well as a lack of policies beyond enforcement, as the Sarney Filho himself admitted.

“The 2017 Brazilian Amazon deforestation rate released by the federal government is still alarming. We lost 6,624 sq km, despite the fact that there is already nearly 100,000 sq km of pastureland under-utilised in the Amazon,” said Paulo Barreto, a researcher with NGO Imazon, which has a parallel deforestation monitoring that had already forecast the slowdown of the deforestation. “The burning of this area released greenhouses gases equivalent to 2.3 times all the 49 million cars in Brazil during a year.”

“The drop is likely to be the result of some restoration of enforcement efforts by the government, but also due to the reduction of cattle prices associated with the Brazilian recession. Several studies have shown that the cattle price is a good predictor of the deforestation rate since pastureland occupies nearly 65% of the cleared areas,” said Barreto.

According to the researcher, the government’s July decision to pardon grileiros, or land-grabbers, “sends a clear signal to grileiros and environmental criminals: Keep deforesting illegally. Politicians will pardon you.”

Compounding the grim picture painted by environmentalists, on Wednesday, researchers at the University of Vermont released a study that found mining operations were an alarming new driver of deforestation in Brazil. Mostly illegal, mines were responsible for 10% of Amazon rainforest deforestation between 2005 and 2015.

A Climate Home News investigation in September showed how diamond miners, with the aid of the Catholic church, had devastated one indigenous reserve.

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Among his many concessions, he made one of their number the minister of justice, froze indigenous land demarcations, agreed to withdraw the environmental license requirement in large agricultural areas and even rubber-stamped land grabbed illegally inside protected areas.

But his pliability has been repaid with betrayal. This week, Temer’s government was brought to its knees by JBS, the world’s biggest meat producer.

On the evening of 7 March, in a meeting at the official residence in Brasília, Joesley Batista, chairman of JBS, secretly recorded Temer allegedly endorsing the executive’s payment of a bribe to silence the former Congress president Eduardo Cunha, who was jailed last year on corruption charges.

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On Wednesday, O Globo newspaper revealed the conversation, throwing Brazil into political chaos and uncertainty.

The move is part of a plea bargain that the Batista family, who owns JBS, is negotiating with federal prosecutors. The meatpacker giant and its sister companies are the subject of five separate federal police investigations, including an international scandal over the alleged bribing of inspectors to issue health certificates for poor-quality meat.

On Friday, the Supreme Court released explosive new information from the plea bargain that alleged Temer, along with former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, had received millions of dollars worth of bribes from JBS.

The revelations left Temer facing down calls to resign, including from several former allies. Raised to power after Rousseff’s controversial impeachment process, he has single-digit approval ratings and is trying to promote an unpopular austerity agenda in the middle of Brazil’s hardest economic crises in decades.

Brazilian meatpacker JBS exports beef, chicken and pork across the world (Photo: Fuera de Foco)

JBS is well-known for its political connections. During the terms of leftist presidents Lula da Silva and Rousseff, the company secured generous billionaire-subsidised loans from BNDES, the state development bank.

The meatpacker has generously rewarded the political world. In 2014, JBS was the largest donor in the general elections, handing out $108.6m to finance campaigns from across the political spectrum. Its money aided the election of 162 out of 513 members of congress in the lower chamber. The company has also admitted to off the books payments.

Many of these lawmakers belong to the 200-strong beef caucus, the most powerful pressure group in Congress. That includes Osmar Serraglio, named minister of justice by Temer in February. In his 2014 campaign, Serraglio received $59,000 from JBS – his single largest donor.

As a minister, Seraglio remained attached to the beef caucus agenda. Literally. In his first 55 days in office, 82 out of his 305 official meetings were held with members of the beef caucus, formally known as Agricultural Parliamentary Front (Portuguese acronym, FPA). He met five times with its head, lawmaker Nilson Leitão.

Report: Worst land-related killings in decades expose Amazon’s lawless frontier

Serraglio, whose responsibilities include oversight of indigenous policies, has also halted the demarcation of new indigenous land claims, a priority for the beef caucus, and cut the budget and personnel of Funai, the national Indian foundation.

In response, indigenous leaders, who have never had a formal meeting with Serraglio, mobilised some 3,500 Indians to a protest in Brasília last month – an impressive share of Brazil’s total indigenous population of roughly 900,000.

A few days later, Funai president Antonio Costa was sacked. In his farewell interview, he accused Serraglio of being “the minister of one cause, the agribusiness” and said the foundation was “under a dictatorship”.

Even when the federal government moves against JBS interests, the conglomerate’s influence is clear. In March, minister of environment José Sarney Filho, publicly apologised to the beef lobby after Ibama, the environmental protection agency he commands, embargoed two JBS processing facilities for buying tens of thousands of cattle from illegally deforested areas in the Amazon.

In a video, Sarney Filho said he had no knowledge of the raid and that it had happened at an “inopportune moment”, as it “could weaken the agribusiness sector, a major exporter”.

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In recent months, during negotiations over a new environmental license law, Sarney Filho acceded to an exemption for large agricultural areas, stripping away protections, although he opposed a more flexible system in which the states would have the final word.

Temer’s alignment with the beef caucus’ agenda is also clear-cut in Congress. Last week, the government’s majority in the lower chamber approved a bill that downgrades 1,475 acres of protected areas, most of them in the Amazon, legalising land-grabbers and allowing mining activities.

At the same time, Temer was negotiating with the beef caucus a big debt pardon to the agricultural sector in order to gather votes for a controversial welfare reform project.

With the political crisis, all these deals in Congress will come to a halt. So far, the FPA has not decided whether to continue supporting Temer or join the chorus for his resignation.

Report: “Beef caucus” takes over indigenous policies in Brazil

But the impasse is unlikely to bring relief to an environment reeling from rapidly increasing deforestation. If Temer resigns, it is unclear whether elections will be held, or, as is constitutionally correct, Congress will choose. Either way, the new president will face similar pressure to comply with the powerful agricultural agenda. No president in recent years has failed to kiss their ring.

If Temer stays, he will be even more reliant on the Congress, and as a consequence the beef caucus, to keep him in power.

So why has Temer, so compliant with agribusiness, been betrayed? One reason is that JBS and the beef caucus are not the same thing, according to Alceu Castilho, head of the watchdog Agribusiness Observatory. He said several lawmakers oppose JBS’ quasi-monopoly of Brazil’s slaughterhouses. Moreover, the mammoth conglomerate is not as influential in the FPA as the soybean and corn sectors.

A Pantaneiro cowboy leads a herd of cattle in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where indigenous peoples are locked in a battle with farmers over land (Photo: Bernard Dupont)

“The interests of the ruralist group – represented in part by the FPA – are broader than those of a specific company. They are sectorial. But they coincide in common themes such as debt forgiveness, removal of legal obstacles, including environmental licensing, the defence of agribusiness lands, as well as in the fight against indigenous lands and conservation units. There are those in the ruralist group who uphold the interests of JBS competitors. But everyone knows how to walk together when it is convenient,” said Castilho.

One clue as to JBS’s motivation for betraying Temer is the conglomerate’s intention to move its headquarters overseas. In the process, the Batista family plans to move to the US, where it makes almost half of its global sales. In order to comply with both Brazilian authorities and US Department of Justice demands, the family agreed to cooperate with several investigations.

“In selling out Temer’s government and, in the process, throwing Brazil into the abyss of political, financial and economic uncertainties, Joesley Batista wants to secure his and the group’s passport to leave the country”, writes Valor Econômico newspaper columnist Vanessa Adachi.

The post Brazil’s pro-beef president Temer, betrayed by the industry he courted appeared first on Climate Home News.

This implies that to meet ambitious targets, global strategies to combat climate change – including forest restoration – should have started years ago.

Tropical forests soak up vast quantities of carbon dioxide released by industrial combustion of fossil fuels, limiting global warming.

Burning, clear-felling and ploughing of forest lands release centuries of stored carbon back into the atmosphere to accelerate global warming and climate change.

So forest conservation and carbon emissions reduction are both vital parts of any strategies to contain global temperature rises.

Researchers report in the journal Current Biology that they looked at the history of forest clearance in the tropics to work out the ups and downs of the forest carbon budget and estimate the loss of species that make the rainforests their home.

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“We show that even if deforestation had completely halted in 2010, time lags ensured there would still be a carbon emissions debt equivalent to five to ten years of global deforestation and an extinction debt of more than 140 bird, mammal, and amphibian forest-specific species, which, if paid, would increase the number of 20th century extinctions in these groups by 120%,” says Isabel Rosa of Imperial College, London, who led the study.

“Given the magnitude of these debts, commitments to reduce emissions and biodiversity loss are unlikely to be realised without specific actions that directly address this damaging environmental legacy.”

The research is a restatement of the message from other studies of the relationship between the forests, the atmosphere, the species that depend on forest ecosystems and the likely trajectory of climate change.

Scientists have warned, more than once, that destruction of the great rainforests invites catastrophic climate change.

They have also warned that rising global average temperatures, and consequent shifts in climate patterns, can accelerate the process: drought can turn a rainforest into a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWdpPJHv_dc

The scientists report that they estimated the annual rates and spatial patterns of deforestation from 1950 to 2009 in the Amazon basin, the Congo, and southeast Asia.

They then did the sums to calculate the carbon emissions that followed clearance, and the toll such action takes on citizens of the forest. This revealed a total of 144 extinctions of vertebrate species that exist only in the tropical forests.

“We need to do more if we want to avoid paying these debts, thus preventing further loss of species and carbon emissions,” Dr Rosa said. “We need to preserve existing habitats, but also restore forests that have been degraded.

“Allowing the forest to regrow on areas that have been deforested helps by creating ‘new’ suitable areas for species to survive in while allowing some of this excess carbon to be stored back in the new trees rather than emitted into the atmosphere.”

If animal extinctions are a measure of forest loss, studies of forest species could also deliver a measure of the success of forest restoration, according to a separate study.

British and Australian researchers report in the Journal of Applied Ecology that they tested the proposition that restoration of a forest could enable animal communities to recover.

Signs of recovery

They set traps and caught 3,317 dung beetles in 12 different places where forests were being restored – some begun two years earlier, some 17 years earlier – and compared their catches with four rainforest sites and four degraded pasture sites in Australia’s moist tropics.

They found that where native tree species had been replanted, dung beetle communities and their roles in the ecosystem showed signs of recovery.

But the scientists warn that the true measure of recovery is not a simple index of animal numbers and variety. What matters most is the functions they perform. Diversity alone is not enough to answer the important questions.

“Traditional identification methods do not capture these complexities and so could potentially misjudge the true response of biodiversity and functioning to land use change, disturbance and ecological restoration,” said Mia Derhé of Lancaster University in the UK, who led the study.

“We provide clear evidence that species-based measures of diversity are insufficient predictors of ecosystem functioning in the context of forest restoration.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Fire is the cheapest way to clear land for cash crops, but it comes at a climate cost (Flickr/Rainforest Action Network)

By Megan Darby

Smouldering peat fires across Indonesia produced more greenhouse gas emissions on some days in 2015 than the entire US economy.

It was the worst ever instance of what has become an annual phenomenon. Each dry season, people burn land to clear it for cash crops. This cyclical climate crisis is also a health, education and economic disaster for communities in the middle of it.

That is why 118 “fire-free villages” in South Sumatra, one of the worst-affected provinces, are taking control.

Najib Asmani, adviser to provincial governor Alex Noerdin, told Climate Home by Skype that part of the solution was devolution.

More than half the region’s fires started in natural forest supposedly under central government’s protection. Jakarta was a long way away and enforcement weak.

Noerdin, who apologised publicly for the situation, has this year been given more power – and responsibility – to tackle it.

But with an area the size of Portugal to cover and many conflicting private interests to juggle, he can’t do it alone.

Major fires recorded by Global Forest Watch from data supplied by NASA between June-October 2015. Blue = peatlands, lime green = palm oil. Riau province is located on the mid-eastern seaboard of Sumatra (Pic: Global Forest Watch)

Sering in Riau province was one of 20 villages to pilot the “fire-free” concept. Before the initiative launched, 80 hectares a year were slashed and burned. In 2014, its first year, that came down to 50ha. By last year it was 11ha.

So far in 2016 there have been no blazes in the community, made up of 2,000 people over 10,000 square kilometres. Village leader Amirul Mukminin wants to keep it that way.

The main practical intervention has been to make it cheaper for smallholders to clear land without torching it. Pulp and paper giant APRIL, vilified by environmentalists over its own deforestation record, contributed heavy lifting equipment.

That means some trees are still being lost – although not natural forest, Mukminin claimed – but the carbon-rich peat stays intact.

Community patrols also keep a lookout for lawbreakers to report to the authorities.

Mukminin stressed the importance of communication to get everyone on board: “We built awareness from home to home, from mosque to mosque.”

Report: Indonesia’s Jokowi cuts short US trip to fire-fight at home
Report: Indonesia climate pledge hazy on deforestation

The scale of devastation in Indonesia makes it more than a local concern. Its smog drifts over to choke Singapore and Malaysia, while the global warming impacts are, well, global.

So too is the market demand for products like paper and palm oil, which give a commercial incentive to destroy forests. Multinational buyers and developed countries bear some responsibility for the problem. Many have signed up to the New York Declaration on Forests or other international pledges to end deforestation.

As such, the problem has drawn in consultants and foreign aid from around the world.

Netherlands-based IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative is one organisation supporting the fire-free villages concept.

Daan Wensing, head of the IDH landscape programme, told Climate Home in London it was important to get all levels of government involved.

Last year’s record fire season pushed it up the political agenda. So too did the prospect of hosting the 2018 Asian Games in South Sumatra capital Palembang and Jakarta.

“Those fires, the impact it had on health and the public standing of the province, the international repercussions have been substantial,” said Wensing. “The political will has changed. The governor is a very, very strong supporter now.”

Study: Cleared rainforest bounces back faster than thought

Beyond ending the practice of slash-and-burn, other initiatives aim to make peat less flammable, by re-wetting areas that have been drained.

President Joko Widodo has set up a Peat Restoration Agency, headed by former WWF director Nazir Foead.

Asia Pulp and Paper, the culprit for large swathes of Indonesia’s deforestation, is also trying to rehabilitate peatland – and its reputation. It aims to build 7,000 dams by the end of March, to raise the water table and protect ecosystems.

This month it founded the Belantara Foundation to help prevent the social conflict and illegal logging – weaknesses identified in an eco-audit last year.

Veteran British environmentalist Tony Juniper is on the advisory board.

“There has been this elevation of ambition to not only avoid damaging forests but start the complex task of restoring them,” he told Climate Home by phone.

“If we are going to be able to do forest restoration at scale in Indonesia, it is going to have to be at the level of landscapes.”

Analysis: Why love of landscapes is central to climate challenge

The Belantara Foundation is tasked with balancing environmental conservation with economic development – goals which can appear to be in conflict.

“If a local community wants to convert natural forest to a rubber plantation… it requires further work and negotiation, which takes time. This is genuinely difficult,” said Juniper.

“Where there are differences of opinion or conflicts of interest, there is not really any structure to deal with that. Hopefully, one of the things we can do is to be offering a space in which people can come together and join forces.”

It was not just about protecting tigers and orang-utans, he stressed, but sustaining natural resources. “If you don’t have an environment, you don’t have an economy.”

The post 100 ‘fire-free villages’ take on Indonesia’s haze hazard appeared first on Climate Home News.