‘UN forest plans risk local rights’
Experts: Ecological protection schemes currently shortchange natives
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 MaiNdombe 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 do not benefit from REDD+ because there is no benefit-sharing plan in place,” she said, using the UN acronym for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).
So far, more than US$90mil (RM3.51bil) has 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.
Tropical forests provide livelihoods and anchor the cultural identities of at least 250 million indige- nous people.
Research has shown that stewardship by local communities significantly slows the pace of deforestation.
“Unfortunately, REDD+ projects in the DRC – as currently structured – are channelling money to private sector actors who do not have the same incentives to protect the forests,” said Alain Frechette, RRI’s director of strategic analysis.
Negotiated under the UN’s 1992 climate change treaty, REDD+ projects began a decade ago, but many are on hold until 2020, when the mechanism’s “strategic framework” will be finalised.
In the meantime, it is a work in progress.
Indeed, pilot programmes in dozens of countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa have, all too often, shortchanged local communities and underperformed as a bulkhead against climate change – their primary goal.
Unfortunately, REDD+ projects in the DRC are channelling money to private sector actors who do not have the same incentives to protect the forests. Alain Frechette