April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The promised money is, however, in doubt. Hedegaard also noted with
concern that some of the $30 billion in pledged North-South climaterelated
aid from 2010-2012 – e.g. from Tokyo and London, she said – would
come in the form of loan guarantees, not grants. Pershing was not opposed
to this practice, because “donors have to balance the political need to
provide real financing with the practical constraints of tight budgets.”
Even while observing Washington’s tendency to break financial promises,
Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, the leading African head of state
on climate, was also unveiled by WikiLeaks as a convert to the Copenhagen
Accord. This appeared to be the outcome of pressure applied by the US
State Department, according to a February 2 cable, with Zenawi asking for
more North-South resources in return.
REDD as wedge
Besides Bolivian leadership, the world’s best hope for contestation of
these power relationships rests with civil society. Along with La Via
Campesina network of peasant organizations, which attracted a Mexicowide
caravan and staged a militant march that nearly reached the airport
access road on the morning of December 7 as heads of state flew into
Cancun, the most visible poor peoples’ representatives were from the
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). On December 8, IEN spokesperson
Tom Goldtooth was denied entry to the UN forum due to his high-profile
role in non-violent protests.
According to Goldtooth, Cancun’s ‘betrayal’ is “the consequence of an
ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and
bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord.” For
Goldtooth, an ardent opponent of REDD, “Such strategies have already
proved fruitless and have been shown to violate human and Indigenous
rights. The agreements implicitly promote carbon markets, offsets,
unproven technologies, and land grabs – anything but a commitment to
real emissions reductions. Language ‘noting’ rights is exclusively in the
context of market mechanisms, while failing to guarantee safeguards for
the rights of peoples and communities, women and youth.”
The founder of watchdog NGO REDD-Monitor, Chris Lang, argues that
attempts to reform the system failed because, first, “Protecting intact
natural forest and restoring degraded natural forest is not a ‘core
objective’ of the REDD deal agreed in Cancun. We still don't have a
sensible definition of forests that would exclude industrial tree
plantations, to give the most obvious example of how protecting intact
natural forest isn't in there – also ‘sustainable management of forests’ is in
there, which translates as logging.”
Second, says Lang, “The rights and interests of indigenous peoples and
forest communities are not protected in the Cancun REDD deal – they are
demoted to an annex, with a note that ‘safeguards’ should be ‘promoted
and supported’. That could mean anything governments want it to mean.”
During the Cancun negotiations, positioning on REDD came to signal
whether climate activists were pro- or anti-capitalist, although a difficult
in-between area was staked out by Greenpeace and the International
Forum on Globalisation which both, confusingly, advocated a non-market
REDD arrangement (as if the balance of forces would allow such). But they
and their allies lost, and as Friends of the Earth chapters in Latin America
and the Caribbean explained, “The new texts continue seeing forests as
mere carbon reservoirs (sinks) and are geared towards emissions trading.”
In the same way, the Green Fund was promoted by World Bank president