The term “carbon trading” refers to commercial approaches to promoting environmental responsibility. Under carbon trading programs, energy companies and others that release greenhouse gases can either agree to reduce their carbon emissions or buy the right to keep polluting.
The United Nations describes carbon markets as an an efficient system that can guide investments toward the cuts that are the cheapest. But indigenous leaders and independent experts on climate change dispute this notion on various grounds.
“It’s a new way to make money,” said IEN’s Jihan Gearon. “It has nothing to do with environmental concerns or indigenous peoples’ rights.”
Janet Redman, lead author of a new study released by the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) last month, tends to agree, especially with respect to the World Bank’s role in facilitating carbon trading programs.
“It is making money off of causing the climate crisis and then turning around and claiming to solve it,” she said of the Bank in a recent interview with OneWorld. “It’s dangerously counterproductive.”
carbon markets will not only violate indigenous peoples’ rights, but also further aggravate the threat of pollution and climate change.
IPS’ 79-page report, entitled “World Bank: Climate Profiteer,” shows that instead of encouraging clean energy investors, the Bank is lending much of its financial support to the fossil fuel industry.
“It’s playing both sides of the climate crisis,” said Redman, who notes that in just the past two years the Bank loaned no less than $1.5 billion to companies investing in fossil fuels.
Critics say such claims are highly questionable because the Bank, like many governments, is still reluctant to accept that indigenous peoples must give their prior and informed consent before any development projects are initiated on their lands.
Out of its $2 billion carbon finance portfolio, the Bank has directed nearly 80 percent to projects involving polluting industries.
The Bank admits that indigenous peoples, who manage 11 percent of the world’s forests and lands, have “a small carbon footprint and that their contribution to global warming is minimal.”
“We respect Mother Earth,” Marcos Terena, an indigenous activist from the Amazon region in Brazil said. “It’s the governments and corporations that are responsible for environmental destruction.”
The international treaty on biodiversity considers the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples’ perspectives as an essential part of the struggle to preserve the millions of species of life on the planet.
– from us.oneworld.net , www.ips-dc.org
It’s important to distinguish allowances and offsets in carbon trading schemes. Allowances, which are the primary instruments in cap-and-trade schemes, do not channel money and projects to the developing world – they are simply a tool for limiting emissions of certain organisations. The EU ETS is something like 80% allowances.
Concern says : I absolutely agree with this !