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Forestry and Development E-News:
February 2008 |
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Forestry and Development
(F&D) is an online resource on sustainable forestry. It supports
commercial forestry as a viable source of economic growth which is compatible
with sustainability. |
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WWF
and Flannery promote climate change forestry experiment in PNG
30 January 2008: WWF and Australian
climate change author Tim Flannery have made a joint submission
to the Australian Garnaut Climate Change Review,
proposing that PNG villagers in remote areas sell carbon or biodiversity
credits via Internet auction site eBay to conserve their forest areas. They
will apparently do this using a combination of mobile phone technology,
laptops, Internet auction sites and satellite mapping. The concept is that the rural poor would
benefit more from trading carbon in trees than from harvesting them. PNG's rural poor need more income. Less
than 9 per cent of rural households have access to piped water and less than
15 per cent of the rural population attends school beyond the age of 15. The scheme, however, is likely to decrease
not increase income. For a start, the idea requires a globally
managed system to trade carbon credits and none is in prospect. A related idea was proposed at the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change last year and was even given some
World Bank support. It depends on the
establishment of a global system to trade carbon credits under the Convention. At Bali in December, parties to the
Convention did not endorse the idea of globally managed carbon trading and
remain unlikely to do so. With less than 0.5 per cent of people able to
access the Internet, communications in PNG could not support such a system
anyway. Only 1.2 per cent of the
population of five million have fixed-line telephones. A simpler and more effective strategy would be
to improve commercial forestry and to increase harvesting: that generates the environmental benefit of
increasing the carbon sink in PNG forests and increases the returns from
commercial forestry, thereby increasing rural incomes. But WWF (along with Greenpeace and the
Australian Conservation Foundation) have consistently worked against
commercial forestry in PNG. |
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Greenpeace
assessment of legal verification systems – who benefits?
30 January 2008: In a
new "assessment"
of systems to verify the legality of forest logging, Greenpeace has advanced
a set of criteria which requires a "time-bound commitment" to adopting
FSC-certified forestry management. The report criticises many of
other verification systems for lack of transparency. Greenpeace fails to mention in the report
that it has a proprietary interest in FSC as a founding member and that it is
a member of one of FSC's governing bodies. Greenpeace has an established
record of targeting businesses that do not adopt its preferred policies on
forestry and sourcing of timber. It
usually also promotes the FSC system set up by WWF which companies must pay
to join. FSC is facing increasing competition from legality verification schemes, which offer legality verification
without onerous procedures and costs that can be prohibitive for developing
country operators. UNFF
agreement adopted
17 December 2007: The UN General Assembly has
adopted the UN Forum on Forests Non-Legally Binding
Instrument on All Types of Forests (NLBI), eight months
after the agreement was reached in April 2007. The agreement on international
forest policy and cooperation calls for greater international cooperation and
national action to reduce deforestation, reverse the loss of forest cover, prevent
forest degradation, promote sustainable livelihoods and reduce poverty for
all forest-dependent peoples. It "sets a new standard in
forest management", according to the General Assembly. Under-Secretary-General for
Economic and Social Affairs, Sha Zukang, stated
that the agreement represented "a new era
for international forest policy, characterized by reinvigorated dialogue at
all levels". Zukang also
said that "further pro-poor, pro-nature and pro-growth actions that link
trees and forests to the achievement of the internationally agreed
development goals" are needed "to enable forests to contribute to
the overall development of society". |
Tropical
forests: What crisis?
8 January 2008: A new study
from the University of Leeds challenges claims of
a global crisis in tropical forestry.
The study, published in the US-based National Academy of Sciences, has
found that evidence of a decline in tropical forest area is unclear. "The picture is far more
complicated than previously thought", said Dr Alan Grainger, the study's
author. "If there is no long-term net decline in global forestry, it
suggests that deforestation is being accompanied by a lot of natural
reforestation that we have not spotted", he said. Dr Grainger is one of the
world's leading authorities on deforestation.
He has found inconsistencies among United Nations' forest resources
assessments. He has
concluded that current data cannot be used to monitor tropical forest area
with great accuracy. "Scientists all over the
world who have used these data to make predictions of species extinctions and
the role of forests in global climate change will find it helpful to revisit
their findings in the light of my study", he said. IFC
withdraws from Olam
8 December 2007: In
another disappointing development in World Bank forest policy, the
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World
Bank, divested
its 3.4 per cent stake in Olam, a Singapore-based
company with holdings in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in December
2007. Olam had been
under repeated attack from Greenpeace over its involvement in the DRC. These
attacks were maintained despite Olam holding just
less than 1 per cent of all forestry concessions allocated by the DRC
Government (which were subsequently handed back earlier in 2007) and having
never cut down a single tree in the DRC. The company issued a statement
strenuously denying Greenpeace's charges, stating
that the IFC and Olam's policy approaches had
diverged, and also stating that it believed that it had been unfairly
targeted because of the IFC's stake in the company. UK DFID
as anti-forestry advocate
29
November 2007: The UK's Department for International Development (DFID) has
employed the advocacy tactics of Green NGOs with two booklets
on illegal logging in Indonesia, Ghana and Cameroon. The DFID publications are 'policy lite', written in a journalistic style with no sourcing
of data and information. Aid
agencies are usually more responsible, with reports backed up with sourced
statistics, serious analysis and solid policy recommendations. The
reports attempt to equate the timber trade in Indonesia, Ghana and Cameroon
with the trade in illicit drugs. They also squarely blame Chinese demand for illegal
logging and are critical of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for not
cracking down on the illegal timber imports - despite this being well outside
the WTO's ambit. However,
the booklets are heavily in favour of the European Union's mooted voluntary
partnership agreements (VPAs) which encourage developing countries to sign
away their WTO rights. This
is not new for DFID. In PNG in 2006,
it funded a scurrilous report by the Australian Conservation Foundation
suggesting that the forest industry was responsible for gun trafficking. Also on Forestry and
Development
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