There are 71 posts filed in Guyana (this is page 1 of 5).
In 2009, Norway launched Guyana’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation programme. Back then, it was an amibitious US$250 million scheme. Ten years later Guyana’s REDD has been almost completely abandoned.
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Conservation International and the University of Guyana recently accepted US$10 million from ExxonMobil Foundation. This grant (or “investment”, as ExxonMobil likes to call it) reveals a lot about Conservation International and its support for the REDD carbon trading scheme.
The Amaila Falls Hydropower Project is the keystone of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy, that was launched in 2009 by then-President Bharrat Jagdeo. But the project has been on hold since August 2013, when the project developer, Blackstone Group’s Sithe Global pulled out.
On Monday, Guyana’s Finance Minister, Winston Jordan, presented the state budget in Parliament. In his speech, he slammed the proposed Amaila Falls hydropower dam, the flagship project of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.
Before the World Bank’s Carbon Fund meeting last month, the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) wrote to the participants of the meeting, expressing concerns about Guyana’s proposal to the Carbon Fund.
In August 2014, after a series of articles in the Guyanese media about Chinese company Bai Shan Lin’s logging operations, a Guyanese PhD student wrote to the Norwegian government with a simple question: Is the Low Carbon Development Strategy just a sham?
On 8 May 2015, the Government of Guyana put out a press release announcing that Norway had agreed a further US$40 million “for maintaining low deforestation rates and improving forest governance”.
Norway has transferred US$80 million to the Inter-American Development Bank as part of the Norway-Guyana US$250 million REDD deal. Perhaps surprisingly, if Guyana spends the money it will involve the destruction of a large area of rainforest.
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.
A company called Pinnacle Green Resources (Guyana) Limited is planning to develop bioenergy plantations and a biomass plant in Guyana. Is this green development? Or a land grab?
Late in 2013, the Guyana Forestry Commission released a series of annual reports from 2005 to 2012. The oldest of these reports was already eight years old.
Over the past two weeks, a series of articles has appeared in the Kaieteur News about Chinese logging company Bai Shan Lin’s operations in Guyana. The articles accuse Bai Shan Lin of operating illegally. The Guyana Forestry Commission responds that “there is no circumventing of Guyana’s logging laws by Bai Shan Lin”.
A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists highlights countries that have successfully reduced their rate of deforestation. In a post last week, I pointed out that the analysis deeply flawed.
Gold mining in Guyana is booming. It’s the country’s biggest export. Last year Guyana exported gold worth US$1 billion. But government is failing to address the serious environmental and social impacts caused by gold mining.
In mid-February 2014, Nancy Birdsall and Jonah Busch, of the Center for Global Development, visited Georgetown in Guyana. Their visit was part of CGD project looking at how well performance-based payments for forest conservation are working in Guyana, Brazil and Indonesia.
