In 2016, Sara Peña Valderrama completed her PhD in social anthropology, where she studied a forest carbon project run by Conservation International in Madagascar. Her thesis is available on Durham University’s website: Entangling Molecules: an ethnography of a carbon offset project in Madagascar’s eastern rainforest. She submitted this Guest Post about what happened when the project changed…
Norway’s failed REDD experiment in Tanzania
Norway launched REDD in Tanzania in 2008, with a promise to fund US$83 million over a five year period. But in a recent article in Development Today, Jens Friis Lund, Mathew Bukhi Mabele and Susanne Koch argue that Norway’s involvement in REDD in Tanzania “failed to produce models that work”.
With deforestation increasing in Brazil, will Norway ask for its US$1 billion REDD money back?
On 29 November 2016, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released its estimate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon for the period August 2015 to July 2016. It’s not good news. Deforestation increased by 29% compared to the previous year.
How the aviation sector’s carbon offset plans will undermine the Paris Agreement
A recent article by Kate Wheeling in Pacific Standard magazine highlights four ways that the aviation sector’s carbon market proposals could undermine the Paris Agreement. The article points out that, “as the rest of the world is cutting back, aviation’s climate plan includes increasing emissions.”
REDDheads: Norman Myers and his 200 million hectares of tree plantations
In the previous post in the “REDDheads” series, about the people behind REDD, REDD-Monitor looked at Freeman Dyson’s thought experiment in the mid-1970s about planting vast areas with trees to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.