REDD in Cancun, part 1: What happened to Bolivia’s text in the AWG-LCA?

So far, the REDD negotiations in the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) in Cancun seem to have little to do with either cooperation or action. Yesterday, Bolivia’s Ambassador Pablo Solón said that the latest text “is imbalanced, and excludes the proposals of Bolivia and many other developing nations”.

How did we arrive here? REDD-Monitor is not in Cancun, but here’s an attempt to describe what’s happened so far in the LCA negotiations. At the end of the Tianjin meeting in August 2010, there were two possible versions of REDD in the LCA text. Option one was text proposed by Bolivia and other countries that came from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010. Option two was the text that came from Copenhagen, with only minor amendments from the Bonn meeting in June 2010. (A briefing from FIELD explains in detail the various places that REDD appears in the negotiating texts: “REDD-plus Briefing Paper, UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, 29 November – 10 December 2010.”)

Option one (the “Bolivian text”) includes several interesting items, such as the following, to ensure that REDD must:

• Guarantee rights of indigenous peoples under the basis of international normative instruments and local communities

• Not be market mechanisms on forest related actions

• Not be offset mechanisms that implies that developed countries will use emission reductions that were made by developing countres in order to fulfil their emission reduction commitments

• Proposals shall not be considered that allow industrial scale logging or that involve conversion of natural forests to plantations or other commercial or infrastructure activities and projects that damage the environment or violate the rights of local communities

It also included reference to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Free Prior and Informed Consent.

Both options are in this document: FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/14, dated 13 August 2010.

This should have been the text to be discussed in Cancun, but shortly before the meeting in Cancun started, the chair of the AWG-LCA, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, released a note titled “Possible elements of the outcome”. This document, which is dated 24 November 2010, is available here: FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.1. One of the main differences between the chair’s text and the text that came out of the Tianjin meeting is that the Bolivian text has disappeared.

The first problem that the negotiators faced in Cancun was to decide which document they should be discussing. Ben Vickers of RECOFTC who is in Cancun to follow the REDD negotiations explained on Saturday, 4 December 2010:

I must apologize. I seem to have given the impression that the Cancun talks started on Monday. My mistake; at least as far as REDD+ is concerned the negotiations only start tomorrow. For the last five days parties have been arguing over which text to begin with.

The negotiators decided to use the chair’s text. Hence Bolivia’s irritation, expressed by Pablo Solón yesterday.

A revised version came out on 4 December 2010: FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2.

There are, no doubt, some advantages of using the chair’s text. It avoids (for the time being) any discussion about how REDD will be financed, which as Vickers notes “could not possibly be agreed at this meeting”. The chair’s text instead only refers to financing of “readiness” activities. One obvious danger of this arrangement is that public finance will be used to help set up a carbon market from which private companies will profit. At a side event in Cancun Warren Evans, Director of Environment Department at the World Bank gave a presentation that one observer noted was “horrible – all about pushing REDD towards the markets”.

Before the decision to use the chair’s text was taken, the Indigenous Environmental Network put out a press release titled, “What Happened to the Text from the Cochabamba’s People’s Accord?” (Available in English below, and Spanish here.) It’s an excellent question and one that we deserve an answer to.

The diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks recently exposed how the US had manipulated the UN negotiations a year ago in Copenhagen. Then in April 2010, just before the Cochabamba meeting started, the US denied US$2.5 million climate aid to Bolivia and US$2.5 million to Ecuador for opposing the Copenhagen Accord. “It confirms what we’ve been saying all along,” said Bolivia’s Pablo Solón in a press release. “That is not a climate negotiation, it’s an imposition. We will not be bought.”

In an interview yesterday, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! asked Solón about the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. Here’s his reponse:

“I hope that we are not going to have to wait one year until we know really what happened here in Cancún, because what happened in Copenhagen is also happening here in Cancún, because there is a lot of pressure put into countries in order to force them to accept, I would say, a new version of the Copenhagen Accord. And we are afraid that we are going to have Copenhagen Accord part two in Cancún.”

Regarding the REDD text, Solón said in a statement, “Debates should continue on the negotiating text that includes the proposals of all parties.”

Statement of Concern from the Indigenous Environmental Network

What Happened to the Text from the Cochabamba’s People’s Accord?

As indigenous peoples, we are extremely concerned that the principles agreed upon in the Cochabamba People’s Agreement have been unilaterally removed from the negotiating document that was released on November 24th. Equally alarming is the misrepresentation of the Copenhagen Accord as a legitimate path forward, despite its widespread denouncement by civil society and its tepid reception last December in Denmark, when the United Nations merely “took note of” it.

“Cochabamba emphasized human rights,” said Alberto Saldamando, legal council for the International Indian Treaty Council. “Copenhagen advocated avarice. In Cochabamba, global civil society condemned a market approach that does nothing to address climate change and only threatens the most vulnerable. The disappearance of the Cochabamba text from the current working document sends an unfortunate signal about what we can expect from this COP.”

Beyond the lack of transparency in the process, a key concern with the Copenhagen document is its blanket support for REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). REDD, while it will allow industrial polluters to continue their practices virtually unabated, also threatens indigenous and land-based peoples with eviction and marginalization. It contains no safeguards, no guarantee of rights, and a disturbing array of potential governance challenges. Our interventions in this week’s climate negotiations will focus on these challenges.

Indigenous Environmental Network will move forward advocating four principles of climate justice:

1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground

2. Real and effective solutions based in equity and justice

3. Industrialized countries must take responsibility

4. Living in a good way on the earth