By Chris Lang When the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park was established in the 1970s in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, about 6,000 Indigenous Batwa people were evicted. For more than 40 years the Batwa have struggled to have their rights recognised. The Batwa communities around the park have no land, and find it difficult to earn…
Planet of the Humans (part 2): Bill McKibben and 350.org
By Chris Lang The documentary Planet of the Humans continues to raise controversy. This week, YouTube took down the documentary in response to a copyright infringement claim by Toby Smith, a British photographer. The offending four-second clip comes in a sequence titled “How Solar Panels & Wind Turbines Are Made” and shows a rare earth…
REDD in Colombia: Continued deforestation and extractivist development
By Chris Lang “The greatest issue, or challenge, of our time is climate change,” Iván Duque, president of Colombia, said in Davos at the 2020 World Economic Forum. “So if we really want to as a society be able to contain the effects of climate change, we need to protect the tropical forests.”
REDD notes: 25 May 2020
By Chris Lang Welcome to this new look “REDD in the news” post. Instead of linking to a wide range of posts (many of which were only tangentially related to REDD – and some of which were pure REDD propaganda), I’ll look at a few news items from the previous week with some brief comments….
Tanawthari Landscape of Life: Indigenous communities in Myanmar propose alternative to top-down conservation
By Chris Lang The Ridge to Reef project is a massive, top-down conservation project in Tanintharyi Region in the south of Myanmar. It started in 2018 with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and was implemented by the UN Development Programme, toether with Myanmar’s Forestry Department and Department of Fisheries, the Smithsonian Institution, and…