The U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) has drawn to a close and thousands of delegation members, heads of state and attendees have bid farewell to Rio de Janeiro. Expectations for Rio+20 were extremely high, but now the more important question is: what comes next? Or as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put it, "the world is watching to see if words translate into action, as we know they must."
While a great deal of media attention was focused on the Conference's outcome document, it is important to remember that the Conference also drew hundreds of voluntary commitments by participating organizations and featured many of the world's brightest and most innovative thinkers at the many side events that were held in the run-up to Rio+20. In many ways, what took place at those side events gave the world the best glimpse of the concrete actions that are already moving us away from the rhetoric and towards the future we want.
It was during one such Rio+20 side event that I had the opportunity to learn more about "new business models" that provide a synergistic opportunity to foster economic growth while contributing to healthier and more resilient ecosystems. It was precisely this topic that Professor Kazuhiko Takeuchi (Vice Rector, United Nations University), an expert on such issues, was addressing when he brought up the example of tea forests in Yunnan, China.
When thinking about tea production, many people may get a romantic image of thousands of rows of deep green tea plants stretching across the contours of a hilly landscape. Aesthetically, it's a wonderful image, but from an ecological viewpoint, such monoculture landscapes are extremely weak in the face of disease, droughts and pest damage.
Yunnan's tea forests, however, provide an exciting insight into the sort of new business models that need to be developed around the world. Here, tea is grown in the midst of forests. While overhanging trees block some of the light reaching the tea plants, the associated benefits are far more substantial. Fruits harvested from the trees bring extra income, fallen leaves provide important nutrient-rich fertilizer to the underlying tea plants, and the increase in biodiversity renders the landscape far more resilient.
On top of all this, the tea in these forests can be grown organically and has been found to be higher quality than tea grown in monoculture settings -- these factors combine to create a nine-fold increase in the tea's value!
Such examples leave me optimistic about the future. During my time at Rio+20, I was only able to attend a handful of the hundreds of side events. But even so, it was clear to me that the tremendous challenges our world is facing are being met with an equally impressive amount of energy and enthusiasm to find the right solutions.
REDD
R .... Reaping Profits from
E... .Evictions, land grabs
D..... Deforestation and
D... .Destructionof biodiversity
What is REDD?
According to the publication, “The Little REDD Book”, the basic idea behind Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is simple:
Developing countries that are willing and able to reduce emissions from deforestation should be financially compensated for doing so.5 However, according to many Indigenous Peoples, REDD is CO2lonialism of Forests because it allows Northern polluters to buy permits to pollute or “carbon credits” by promising not to cut down forests and plantations in the South.
The newspaper The Australian calls REDD a ““cllassic 21st C scam emerging from the global climate change industry."
Carbon Markets buy and sell permits to pollute called “allowances” and “carbon credits”. Carbon markets have two parts: emissions trading (also called “cap and trade”) and offsets. They are false solutions to climate change because they do not bring about the changes needed to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They claim to solve the climate crisis but really allow polluters to buy their way out of reducing their emissions. These multi-billion dollar trading mechanisms privatize and commodify the earth’s ability to keep its atmosphere balanced.
see: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
http://www.ienearth.org/REDD/index.html
Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director, Indigenous Environmental Network (218)760-0442
Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (+234)8037274395
Oil giant Shell, infamous for the genocide of the Ogoni People and environmental destruction in Nigeria’s Niger Delta is now bankrolling REDD, a false solution to climate change that puts forests in the carbon market and has been denounced as potentially the “largest land grab of all time.”
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) allows polluters like Shell, Rio Tinto and Chevron-Texaco to buy their way out of reducing their greenhouse emissions at source by supposedly conserving forests. However, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network, REDD is rife with “perverse incentives” to convert natural forests into monoculture tree plantations and to actually increase deforestation.
http://www.durbanclimatejustice.org/
Listen to Kandi Mossett, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, describe how hundreds of Indigenous were halted by the military today, while a small group did deliver the Kari-Oca Declaration to the UN Conference on Sustainability.
Five hundred Indigenous were halted by the military from entering the area where the UN Rio+20 is underway. The Declaration was delivered to the officials of the UN and Brazil.
"We can not commodify the sacred and expect a good outcome," says Mossett, from North Dakota, where oil and gas drilling has devastated her homeland. She is a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Mossett describes how Mother Earth has been assualted in the age of capitalism. The Kari Oca Declaration confirms that Indigenous have the answers to climate change and how to halt the devastation, Mossett said.
As the world leaders seek to profiteer from nature at the summit, Indigenous, barred by the military from attending, are holding their own encampment at the Kari Oca II and produced the Kari-Oca Declaration for the protection of Mother Earth, and the halting of false carbon credit schemes which allow the world's worst polluters to continue polluting.