There are 37 posts tagged Forest definition (this is page 2 of 3).
Just in case you’re still wondering, yes, we are still waiting for the Indonesian forest moratorium to start. It was due to start at the beginning of January 2011, but it needs President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to sign a decree to make the moratorium legally binding. The moratorium is part of the US$1 billion REDD deal between Indonesia and Norway.
On 1 February 2011, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, awarded two concessions covering a total area of 18,855 hectares for conversion to rubber plantations. No surprises there, then. Hun Sen’s government awards land concessions on an astonishingly regular basis.
Rainforest Action Network has sent a briefing note to more than 100 companies that consume pulp, paper and palm oil, requesting that they support a robust moratorium on forest concessions in Indonesia. The companies include Staples, General Mills, Levis, and Bank of America.
Last week, Financial Times journalist Fiona Harvey lamented that “Without a sturdy fundraising mechanism, REDD is worthless.” Her solution is to revive carbon trading, “with a mighty effort of political will.” Her timing could hardly have been worse, coinciding as it does with the closure of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to spot trading in carbon credits after yet another fraud.
The forests in the Congo Basin, the second largest area of tropical forest in the world, are receiving increasing interest. Enormous amounts of carbon are stored in these forests, meaning that REDD proponents are increasingly looking at these forests to “offset” continued pollution in the rich countries.
If you’re looking for a list of what’s wrong with REDD, then look no further. The Climate Justice Research Project at Dartmouth College has just produced this top 10 list (fully referenced version below):
Of all the topics under discussion at Cancún, perhaps the oddest is a proposal from Brazil to include something called “forests in exhaustion” in the clean development mechanism. In short, it is a subsidy to the plantations industry either to re-establish plantations or to clear forests and establish new plantations.
A group of scientists has written to the governments of Indonesia and Norway, to emphasise the importance of not only reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also supporting “the conservation of Indonesia’s rich and diverse forest ecosystems.”
In 2005, a Japanese company called Oji Paper took over a project to plant 50,000 hectares of mainly eucalyptus plantations in central Laos. The following year, as part of his research in Laos, a Canadian researcher took a series of photographs of forests cleared by Oji’s bulldozers. Now, Oji Paper wants to get REDD funding for its plantations in Laos.
As the UN’s climate negotiations resumed yesterday in Bonn, Germany, the Ecosystems Climate Alliance released a statement calling for a new UN forest definition – one that makes clear the difference between native forests and monoculture plantations. A second Ecosystems Climate Alliance press statement released today outlines “outstanding REDD issues” to be addressed in Bonn.
Three straws in the wind: Two pieces of policy news and a new piece of research. Two weeks ago, a leaked document from the EU revealed that the European Commission and some member states hope to include oil palm plantations in the definition of forests.
While REDD proponents and critics often provide lists of conditions that should be met before REDD can go ahead, they rarely conclude that REDD should not go ahead if these conditions are not met.
The first thing that you need to know about “forests in exhaustion” is that they are not forests. According to the Clean Development Mechanism, the photograph on the left is a forest. All of it.
Global deforestation accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all CO2 emissions. Everyone knows that. We’ve read it over and over again. The figure comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But recent research takes a new look at the data behind the figure and comes up with a figure of around 12 per cent.
This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is holding the 13th World Forestry Congress, in Buenos Aires. With the slogan “Forests in Development”, the Congress will discuss seven themes, with titles such as “forests and biodiversity”, “producing for development”, “caring for our forests” and “people and forests in harmony”. It all sounds harmless, perhaps even progressive. It is not.
