Global Issues
Salvadoran Civil Society Groups Opposed to Carbon Credit Plan
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 02 (IPS) - Civil society organisations are asking the World Bank to reject the Salvadoran government’s proposal to join a programme for reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to deforestation, on the argument that it will actually harm the environment.
Elsy Álvarez and María Menjivar – with her young daughter – planting plantain seedlings in a clearing in the forest. Credit: Claudia Ávalos/IPS
If the government’s proposal is accepted it would delay “complaince of urgent national and international commitments on climate change,” say activists in a letter sent to Benoît Bosquet, coordinator of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), in June.
The FCPF coordinates the global programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). El Salvador kicked off the adherence process when it sent the first document in April.
The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources submitted a revised version of the proposal in June and the acceptance process is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
According to the UN-REDD programme’s web site, it is “an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. ‘REDD+’ goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
Activities to preserve pristine woodlands from deforestation or revive degraded forests earn emissions savings certificates which can be sold to industries in wealthy countries by trading on the so-called carbon offset or carbon market, which thus buy the right to emit or discharge a specific volume of CO2-equivalent.
But many local and international civil society organisations criticise REDD+. They argue that, beyond the praiseworthy aim of preserving forests in developing countries, the mechanism does nothing to enforce reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the industrialised countries that are the prime causes of the pollution.
“This is perverse logic on the part of sectors emitting the most greenhouse gases, like industry, energy generation and transport, which produce 60 percent of all emissions and are seeking to avoid responsibility,” said Ivette Aguilar, an expert on climate change.
“Rich countries do not want to change their consumption patterns,” she told IPS. Aguilar said that at the international climate change conferences in Cancún, Mexico in 2010 and in Durban, South Africa in 2011, the industrialised nations distanced themselves from their duty under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose targets remain unfulfilled to this day, and instead offered to negotiate new reduction goals in 2015 that would only enter into force in 2020.
“They have to cut their emissions by 50 percent before 2020 in order to limit the rise in the planet’s temperature to two degrees, otherwise it may increase by four degrees, with disastrous effects,” Ángel Ibarra, the director of the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), told IPS.
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