There are 18 posts filed in Panama (this is page 1 of 2).
Kevin Conrad was born in the USA. His parents were missionaries living in Papua New Guinea. Conrad grew up in Wewak in East Sepik province on the north coast of the country. “I grew up deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea”, he says. “I didn’t consistently wear shoes until I was 16. Forests are a very real part of who I am.”
On 15 November 2016, Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein was arrested when he arrived at Tocumen International Airport in Panama. Monte Friesner, a Canadian who lives in Panama, filed a complaint about what Ornstein had written on his website about Friesner’s business practices. In Panama, defamation is a criminal offence.
This month’s World Rainforest Movement Bulletin includes an article about REDD in Central America, written by Henry Picado (Red de Coordinación en Biodiversidad), Zuiri Méndez (Kioscos Ambientales), and Mariana Porras (Coecoceiba Amigos de La Tierra).
For the past 10 years, Kevin Conrad has been working to push a carbon trading mechanism called REDD through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Last year, he turned his attention to the massively polluting aviation sector as a source of finance for REDD.
Last night at 21:00 a new version of the Draft Paris Outcome was released at COP21 in Paris. It’s down to 27 pages and has only 50 pairs of square brackets. That’s the good news. The rest is practically all bad news.
The Guna General Congress has taken the decision to reject all REDD projects in Guna Yala territory in Panama and specifically to reject a proposed project by Wildlife Works Carbon, a US-based REDD project developer.
In February 2013, the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama, COONAPIP, withdrew from UN-REDD. In a letter to UN-REDD, COONAPIP explained that, UN-REDD “does not currently offer guarantees for respecting indigenous rights [nor for] the full and effective participation of the Indigenous Peoples of Panama”.
Forest Peoples Programme’s April 2013 E-Newsletter focusses on safeguards. The E-Newsletter starts by looking at why safeguards matter. Other articles explain and comment on the World Bank’s safeguards review, forest policy and oil palm policy, the failure of safeguards in the Camisea gas project in Peru and examples from the Congo Basin and Cameroon.
On 27 February 2013, Panama’s Indigenous Peoples Coordinating Body, COONAPIP, withdrew from the UN-REDD process in Panama. In a letter announcing the withdrawal, COONAPIP explains that UN-REDD “does not currently offer guarantees for respecting indigenous rights” or “the full and effective participation of the Indigenous Peoples of Panama”.
COONAPIP, the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama, has withdrawn from the UN-REDD process in Panama. In a letter to the UN, COONAPIP explains that UN-REDD “does not currently offer guarantees for respecting indigenous rights [nor for] the full and effective participation of the Indigenous Peoples of Panama.”
COONAPIP, the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama, has written a series of extremely critical letters about the UN-REDD process in Panama. The process “has been riddled with incongruences and inconsistencies”, COONAPIP wrote in a letter dated 20 June 2012, adding, “We feel used in this process.”
Representatives of Forest Peoples Programme are in Rio for the Rio +20 meeting. FPP put out a press release highlighting Indigenous Peoples’ concerns about the negotiations.
As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases trees in tropical forests grow faster and more carbon is stored above ground in the increased forest biomass. But a paper recently published in Nature Climate Change suggests that we should take a somewhat less optimistic view of how much carbon might stored in forests as the climate warms.
A new report from FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme concludes that the safeguards put in place by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership (FCPF) are inadequate. The report looks at eight Readiness Preparation Proposals (R-PPs) submitted to the FCPF and finds that FCPF safeguards are not clear and do not conform to the World Bank’s own safeguards.
A six-part series in the latest issue of Christian Science Monitor investigates carbon offsets. The researchers look at several offset projects and conclude that “Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and – in many cases – not worth their price.”
