There are 22 posts filed in Ecuador (this is page 1 of 2).
In 2007, the Forest Peoples Programme put out a briefing paper about reduced emissions from deforestation, or RED, as REDD was called back then. The briefing warned of the risks of the rapid expansion of avoided deforestation schemes without due regard to rights, and social and livelihood issues.
On 20 December 2016, the Ecuadorian Environment Minister threatened to close down the NGO Acción Ecológica. The threat is in relation to Acción Ecológica’s raising awareness about the environmental impacts of a planned mega-copper mine on the lands of the Shuar indigenous people. The police raided the office of the Shuar Federation, detaining Agustín Wachapa, the Federation’s president.
Life Mosaic‘s video “Communications” takes a look at three communities that are successfully using communications strategies to organise in defence of their territories. It’s another video in the series “Territories of Life“.
Last week, the Indigenous Environmental Network held a press conference at COP21 in Paris. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said, “REDD and other carbon market regimes violate our traditional beliefs”.
On the first day of the UN climate negotiations in Paris, the governments of Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom pledged US$5 billion for REDD, between 2015 and 2020. The GNU countries say they “have signaled they will increasingly target results-based finance for countries who deliver verified REDD+ emission reductions”.
LifeMosaic’s new video on “Land Rights” takes a look at three different types of land rights: community concessions on state land, individual land ownership and communal ownership of territory. It’s the fourth in LifeMosaic’s series “Territories of Life“.
Grains, meat, sugar, palm oil, pulp and paper, coal, aluminium, copper, gold, oil. Just some of the commodities that corporations take from the lands of indigenous peoples to ship around the world in order to generate profits.
LifeMosaic has produced an excellent new series of 10 videos, sharing “stories of resistance, resilience and hope with communities on the frontline of the global rush for land”. The video series is titled, “Territories of Life: A video toolkit for indigenous peoples about land and rights”.
A paper published this week in Nature concludes that the Amazon is losing its capacity to absorb carbon. In the past decade, the carbon absorbed by the Amazon each year has decreased by about one-third.
Last month, Ecuador’s government approved permits for oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park. The drilling will be carried out by a subsidiary of the national oil company, Petroamazonas and will start in 2016.
Yesterday, officials from the Police Administration of Pinchincha closed down Fundación Pachamama’s office in Quito. They left a resolution from the Ministry of Environment stating that the organisation is dissolved.
“REDD+ projects can be expected to have poor social and environmental outcomes unless they use substantially different approaches, which build on the capabilities of the wide range of local natural resource managers to undertake efficient resource management and conservation in the Amazon.”
Ecuador has abandoned its plans to leave the oil where it belongs under the Yasuní National Park. Ecuador was asking for US$3.6 billion, or half the market value of the 850 million barrels of oil in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil field below Yasuní. Last week, Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa cancelled the plan and announced that “The world has failed us.”
BluForest Inc claims to be setting up REDD projects in Ecuador. It plans to generate carbon credits from 105,000 hectares of land in Ecuador. BluForest announced last week that it had signed a letter of intent with Global Fuel Limited for the pre-purchase of carbon credits.
BluForest describes itself as “a publicly traded carbon offsets marketing company that is setting a new standard for sustainable business in carbon offset credit trading.” BluForest owns 135,000 hectares of forest in Ecuador, “from which it will generate tradable carbon credits”.
