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Gill Cerbu - My Blog
Gill Cerbu - My Blog
Indigenous Rights scare with REDD
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Hey guys,
I'm really lucky to be part of the Canadian Youth Delegation to Poznan this year as a member of the policy team (dealing with forestry and reduced emissions through reduced deforestation and degradation or REDD). I realize this is my first post, but I'm not so great at intros, so I'm just going to get right to the fleshy bits.

The last week and a bit, and before this—the second week and a bit, many countries, indigenous organizations and ENGOs (including the Climate Action Network), etc. have been contributing submissions to the Subsidiary Body on Technical and Scientific Advice (SBSTA), on methodological issues surrounding REDD. What this means is, that there was this sort of semi-democratic (albeit still semi-exclusive) process of including feedback and ideas on what this mechanism could look like. The idea behind REDD is that it not only contribute to reduced deforestation in developing countries but also act as a force to promote sustainable development alternatives, especially for those peoples reliant on forest resources. In an awful lot of the developing world, these people happen to be indigenous.

Despite this obvious truth, my country--Canada teamed up with New Zealand, Australia and its US neighbour to the South to undermine this democratic process and lobby to strike most clauses relating to the promotion of indigenous rights and peoples, although people was retained, as well as biodiversity in the REDD proposal.

Following this, the open contact group meeting under SBSTA dealing specifically with REDD was cancelled!!! This means that any parties that opposed this exclusion of indigenous rights from the draft of a REDD proposal were not consulted or even included in the process.

Although we are aware that the purported democratic values of the UN have always been under scrutiny, most notably in these Kyoto and post-Kyoto talks, it was shocking to see this so out in the open. Realizing also, that Canada, especially as of late has become famous for its laggard status in moving forward with science-based emissions, I was completely disappointed in its lack of support for indigenous rights. In addition, I feel that this was such a horrible example of the lack of transparency and due process in this segment of this conference of the parties (COP) in Poznan.

December 9, 2008 | 5:36 PM Comments  0 comments

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