The Nature Conservancy

There are 26 posts tagged The Nature Conservancy (this is page 1 of 2).

Offsetting fossil fuel emissions with tree planting and ‘natural climate solutions’: science, magical thinking, or pure PR?

By Chris Lang (REDD-Monitor) and Simon Counsell (Rainforest Foundation UK)

Unlike carbon capture and storage systems, trees do actually take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it – temporarily, at least. In theory, planting enough new trees, and allowing existing forests to grow and regenerate, could mop up some of the excess CO2 now in the atmosphere. The idea has been around since the mid-1970s, when theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson came up with the idea of planting vast areas with trees (“in countries where labor is cheap”) to soak up the CO2 that burning fossil fuels is putting in the atmosphere.

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Companies won’t meet the New York Declaration or the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 deforestation targets. The Nature Conservancy tells us “that’s okay” and TFA says “let’s not dwell on it”

In September 2014, more than 50 companies signed on to the New York Declaration on Forests. The declaration has a target to “At least halve the rate of loss of natural forests globally by 2020 and strive to end natural forest loss by 2030.”

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The Nature Conservancy is wrong. Planting trees is not equivalent to halting the burning of oil

Here we go again. “Plant more trees to combat climate change: scientists” is a Reuters headline from earlier this week. The article is based on a press release put out by The Nature Conservancy about a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper’s argument relies on the scientific fraud that the carbon stored in forests, soil, and landscapes is climatically the same as the carbon stored underground in fossil fuels.

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Deforestation in West Papua: The role of PT Austindo Nusantara Jaya, The Nature Conservancy, REDD, RSPO, and Wilmar

West PapuaPT Austindo Nusantara Jaya Tbk (ANJ) is an Indonesian palm oil company, that is clearing forest in West Papua to make way for an oil palm plantation. George Tahija is a commissioner of PT ANJ and a member of both The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Indonesia Chapter Advisory Board and the TNC Asia Pacific Council.

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Indonesia treats its indigenous peoples “worse than any other country in the world” – Survival International

On 13 September 2007, the Indonesian Government adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Five years later, Survival International announced that “Indonesia treats its indigenous and tribal people, especially in West Papua, worse than any other country in the world.” What went wrong?

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Community voices on The Nature Conservancy’s Guaraqueçaba Climate Action Project: “We’re suffering here to help them over there”

“It would be better if we’d never heard of SPVS in this region,” says a farmer in Guaraqueçaba in southeastern Brazil, referring to Brazilian NGO Sociedade de Pesquisa em Vida Selvagem e Educacao Ambiemental. SPVS is the local organisation that The Nature Conservancy hired to run its carbon project.

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A question for African Wildlife Foundation: “Is this what conservation is really about?”

African Wildlife FoundationIn November 2011, African Wildlife Foundation and The Nature Conservancy gave an area of land covering 6,920 hectares to the Kenyan government to create the proposed Laikipia National Park. What African Wildlife Foundation doesn’t tell us in its press release is that people were violently evicted to make way for this conservation project.

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