2021 was another year during which we failed to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The reasons for this failure are disturbingly similar to the reasons we’ve failed to address the climate crisis: A lethal combination of denial, and a reliance on market mechanisms, false solutions, and climate deals based on nothing more than wishful thinking and business as usual.
Here are REDD-Monitor’s top ten posts in 2021. Click on the images to read the posts:
1. Sabah’s Nature Conservation Agreement: A two million hectare carbon deal involving a fake director, an inequitable agreement, a history of destructive logging, massive corruption, a series of offshore companies, and a sprinkling of neocolonial racism
2. Bill Gates: “Now some of these offsets are very complicated. Ah, you know, trees for example . . .”
3. Anatomy of a ‘Nature-Based Solution’: Total oil, 40,000 hectares of disappearing African savannah, Emmanuel Macron, Norwegian and French ‘aid’ to an election-rigging dictator, trees to burn, secret contacts, and dumbstruck conservationists
4. Open letter to the lead authors of ‘Protecting 30% of the Planet for Nature’: “This paper reads to us like a proposal for a new model of colonialism”
5. Kevin Conrad signs REDD deal with Papua New Guinea
6. Court of Appeal upholds conviction of Dylan Creaven and Andrew Rowe, the men behind the Agon Energy carbon credit investment scam
7. Plant for the Planet: Felix Finkbeiner’s fake forests
8. Open letter to Mark Carney’s Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets: Carbon offsets are “riddled with fraud and human rights abuses”
9. “Illegal operations by NIHT Inc”: Kamlapar Incorporated Land Group writes to Papua New Guinea’s Climate Change & Development Authority and Verra
10. Indonesia scraps US$1 billion REDD deal with Norway
