UN schemes to save forests ‘can trample on tribal rights’

PARIS: The only UN-approved financial mechanism to curb deforestation, a key driver of global warming, has bulldozed the rights of forest-dwelling peoples on three continents and needs to be fixed, experts say.

The latest sign that these schemes – which pay to restore tropical forests rather than cut them down – are falling short comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where 20 pilot projects in Mai-Ndombe province have upended indigenous communities, according to a detailed report from the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington DC-based research group.

Backed by the DRC government and international financing, private companies that manage huge tracts of forest have ignored the land rights of local peoples, engineered displacements, and avoided prior consent requirements, the report says.

They have also failed to share the windfall such programmes can bring, said lead author Marine Gauthier, who has monitored the projects in the western province of Mai-Ndombe since 2012.

“Indigenous peoples simply do not benefit from REDD+ because there is no benefit-sharing plan in place,” she told AFP, using the UN acronym for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

So far, more than US$90 million (73 million euros) have been disbursed or committed in the province for forest-related climate change projects. Funding from Norway, France, Britain, the European Union and the United States, along with private sources and NGOs, is funnelled through the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.

Destroying forests intensifies global warming in two ways.

Losing a wooded area the size of Greece each year not only reduces Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, it releases huge amounts of the planet-warming gas into the atmosphere, accounting for nearly a fifth of global emissions.