The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading

In October 2004, about 20 climate and environmental activists met in Durban, South Africa. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the neoliberal false solution to climate change: carbon trading. After several days of discussions at the Glenmore Centre, the meeting produced a statement: The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading.

I mentioned the Durban Declaration to a journalist I was talking to earlier this week. She’s looking into a story about carbon offsetting. The Durban Declaration is well worth revisiting, 16 years later.

The meeting was organised by the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation but, as Patrick Bond notes, the idea came from conversations between the late Sajida Khan and Wally Menne about bringing activists and researchers to Durban to coordinate their critiques of carbon trading and the “privatisation of the air”. They wanted to bring activists to Africa’s largest landfill, the Bisasar Road rubbish dump in Durban.

Why a rubbish dump?

Khan and Menne wanted climate justice activists to see for themselves the utter destruction and absurdity that carbon offsetting brings. The Bisasar Road rubbish dump was to become a carbon offsetting project, recognised by the UN’s “clean development mechanism” with funding from the World Bank.

Yes, really.

The dump was opened in 1980 by South Africa’s apartheid regime, and was located in an “Indian” community. The Cancer Association of South Africa has described the area around the dump as a cancer hotspot. Community members have repeatedly called for the dump to be closed.

In 1987, Durban’s authorities promised to close the dump and convert it into a park for the community. In 1994, before an election, political parties promised to close the dump. The dump remained open.

Enter the World Bank

The dump got a new lease of life when it became a clean development project to burn the methane from the rotting waste. The World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund talked to Durban Solid Waste about the carbon trading project during the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

“Sustainable development”, indeed.

The World Bank jumped in with US$14.4 million to set up the project. The carbon trading scheme meant keeping the dump open for 15 years longer than was originally planned.

In 2005, shortly after the Kyoto Protocol became operational, the Washington Post ran an article featuring Sajida Kahn. She told the Post that trading carbon offsets from the Bisasar Road dump was “a new form of colonialism”.

Efforts to sell carbon offsets “meaningless”

As a result of the international outcry against this carbon offsetting project, the World Bank pulled out of its promise to market carbon credits from the project.

A 2014 review of the project by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the South African Local Government Association states that,

the carbon finance which the project had banked on, has proven disappointing since the price of carbon has collapsed, rendering the efforts to secure the Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) meaningless.

The problem wasn’t that the World Bank was no longer involved. GIZ and SALGA write that,

Carbon credit prices were high at the time of the project development – €15/ton of CO₂. The project agreement was for the sale of 3.8 million tons of emissions reduction over 21 years. Using these prices, the payback period was estimated to be 5 years. However, the carbon credits’ prices have drastically dropped from €15 to a few cents per ton of CO₂ and the project has now lost an important revenue stream, affecting financial viability.

A visit to Sajida’s home

We visited Sajida Khan’s home one evening during the 2004 meeting of climate activists at the Glenmore Centre. It was great to meet Sajida, if only briefly. Her living room looked out over the dump – the windows were closed to keep the smell out. The smell was terrible. Sajida said that it actually wasn’t too bad that day because the wind wasn’t blowing the toxic fumes towards her house.

Tragically, in 2007, Khan died of cancer. She had been diagnosed in 1996. Her nephew died of leukemia. Seven out of ten households in the Clare Estate downwind of the dump have reported tumour cases. As Trusha Reddy wrote in a 2005 article for Carbon Trade Watch, “it is entirely probable that dump emissions are the culprit”.

Reddy notes that,

According to studies, the limits of waste emissions considered potentially hazardous were exceeded at Bisasar Road many times over: hydrogen chloride by 50%, cadmium by 200%, and lead by more than 1000%. Limits for suspended particulate matter were also exceeded.

The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading

The Durban Declaration is now 16 years old but it is more relevant than ever. Oil companies, Big Tech, and the aviation industry are driving a new push for carbon offsetting. All, of course, with the generous support of the government of Norway.

Despite an announcement in 2017 that it will no longer finance oil and gas exploration and production after 2019, the Bank is still involved in financing fossil fuels. The Bank can still fund refineries or pipelines. Research by the German NGO Urgewald found that since 2014, the Bank has supported operations in at least 10 countries that subsidise oil, gas, or coal investments.

In September 2020, the International Finance Corporation published a “Green Equity Approach”. The IFC says it will stop equity investments in financial institutions that do no have a plan to phase out investments in coal. But a report by Recourse reveals that the IFC’s first Green Equity Approach client, Indonesia’s Hana Bank, is investing in two massive new coal-fired power plants, Java 9 and 10. The plants will release 10 million tons of CO₂ each year.

The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading makes clear that there is no such thing as a “credible carbon market” and that it is not possible to “improve” carbon offsets to ensure that they really remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The Durban Declaration states that,

People around the world need to be made aware of this commodification and privatization and actively intervene to ensure the protection of the Earth’s climate.

Carbon trading will not contribute to achieving this protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many ways.

Here, then, is the 2004 Durban Declaration in full. The full list of signatories is available here.

Climate Justice Now!
The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading

As representatives of people’s movements and independent organisations, we reject the claim that carbon trading will halt the climate crisis. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardising Earth’s ability to maintain a liveable climate.

Governments, export credit agencies, corporations and international financial institutions continue to support and finance fossil fuel exploration, extraction and other activities that worsen global warming, such as forest degradation and destruction on a massive scale, while dedicating only token sums to renewable energy. It is particularly disturbing that the World Bank has recently defied the recommendation of its own Extractive Industries Review which calls for the phasing out of World Bank financing for coal, oil and gas extraction.

We denounce the further delays in ending fossil fuel extraction that are being caused by corporate, government and United Nations’ attempts to construct a “carbon market”, including a market trading in “carbon sinks”.

History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history and turns the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a global market. Through this process of creating a new commodity – carbon – the Earth’s ability and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.

People around the world need to be made aware of this commodification and privatization and actively intervene to ensure the protection of the Earth’s climate.

Carbon trading will not contribute to achieving this protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many ways:

• The carbon market creates transferable rights to dump carbon in the air, oceans, soil and vegetation far in excess of the capacity of these systems to hold it. Billions of dollars worth of these rights are to be awarded free of charge to the biggest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases in the electric power, iron and steel, cement, pulp and paper, and other sectors in industrialised nations who have caused the climate crisis and already exploit these systems the most. Costs of future reductions in fossil fuel use are likely to fall disproportionately on the public sector, communities, indigenous peoples and individual taxpayers.

• The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as well as many private sector trading schemes, encourage industrialised countries and their corporations to finance or create cheap carbon dumps such as large-scale tree plantations in the South as a lucrative alternative to reducing emissions in the North.Other CDM projects, such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC)- reduction schemes, focus on end-of pipe technologies and thus do nothing to reduce the impact of fossil fuel industries’ impacts on local communities. In addition, these projects dwarf the tiny volume of renewable energy projects which constitute the CDM’s sustainable development window-dressing.

• Impacts from fossil-fuel industries and other greenhouse-gas producing industries such as displacement, pollution, or climate change, are already disproportionately felt by small island states, coastal peoples, indigenous peoples, local communities, fisherfolk, women, youth, poor people, elderly and marginalized communities. CDM projects intensify these impacts in several ways. First, they sanction continued exploration for, and extraction, refining and burning of fossil fuels. Second, by providing finance for private sector projects such as industrial tree plantations, they appropriate land, water and air already supporting the lives and livelihoods of local communities for new carbon dumps for Northern industries.

• The refusal to phase out the use of coal, oil and gas, which is further entrenched by carbon trading, is also causing more and more military conflicts around the world, magnifying social and environmental injustice. This in turn diverts vast resources to military budgets which could otherwise be utilized to support economies based on renewable energies and energy efficiency.

In addition to these injustices, the internal weaknesses and contradictions of carbon trading are in fact likely to make global warming worse rather than “mitigate” it. CDM projects, for instance, cannot be verified to be “neutralizing” any given quantity of fossil fuel extraction and burning. Their claim to be able to do so is increasingly dangerous because it creates the illusion that consumption and production patterns, particularly in the North, can be maintained without harming the climate.

In addition, because of the verification problem, as well as a lack of credible regulation, no one in the CDM market is likely to be sure what they are buying. Without a viable commodity to trade, the CDM market and similar private sector trading schemes are a total waste of time when the world has a critical climate crisis to address.

In an absurd contradiction the World Bank facilitates these false, market-based approaches to climate change through its Prototype Carbon Fund, the BioCarbon Fund and the Community Development Carbon Fund at the same time it is promoting, on a far greater scale, the continued exploration for, and extraction and burning of fossil fuels – many of which are to ensure increased emissions of the North.

In conclusion, ‘giving carbon a price’ will not prove to be any more effective, democratic, or conducive to human welfare, than giving genes, forests, biodiversity or clean rivers a price.

We reaffirm that drastic reductions in emissions from fossil fuel use are a pre-requisite if we are to avert the climate crisis. We affirm our responsibility to coming generations to seek real solutions that are viable and truly sustainable and that do not sacrifice marginalized communities. We therefore commit ourselves to help build a global grassroots movement for climate justice, mobilize communities around the world and pledge our solidarity with people opposing carbon trading on the ground.

Signed 10 October 2004
Glenmore Centre, Durban, South Africa

DURBAN MEETING SIGNATORIES

Carbon Trade Watch
Indigenous Environmental Network
Climate & Development Initiatives, Uganda
Coecoceiba-Amigos de la Tierra, Costa Rica
CORE Centre for Organisation Research & Education, Manipur, India
Delhi Forum, India
Earthlife Africa (ELA) eThekwini Branch, South Africa
FERN, EU
FASE-ES/Green Desert Network Brazil
Global Justice Ecology Project, USA
groundwork, South Africa
National Forum of Forest People And Forest Workers (NFFPFW), India
Patrick Bond, Professor, University of KwaZulu Natal School of Development Studies, South Africa
O le Siosiomaga Society, Samoa
South Durban Community Alliance (SDCEA), South Africa
Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, USA
The Corner House, UK
Timberwatch Coalition, South Africa
World Rainforest Movement, Uruguay

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