“We must say NO! to this Green Economy regime.” Indigenous Environmental Network calls for a moratorium on all false solutions to the climate crisis
IEN's call for a permanent moratorium on carbon markets and REDD came at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Last year, at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the Indigenous Environmental Network called for a permanent end to carbon markets and other false solutions to the climate crisis. IEN also requested a special session at the UNPFII to address false solutions to the climate crisis and the green economy and its impact on Indigenous Peoples.
The call for a moratorium was echoed by Francisco Calí Tzay, the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
A moratorium on all false solution activities
At a side event at this year’s UNPFII meeting in New York, Tom Goldtooth, IEN’s Executive Director, repeated the call for a moratorium1:
“The request included a moratorium on all false solution activities until affected Indigenous Peoples from the South to the North can thoroughly investigate the impacts and make appropriate demands. The expert group meeting on Indigenous Peoples in a Green Economy did take place a couple of months ago in January.
“The meeting was a starting point. However, there are key issues that still remain. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific climate reports have, for over 20 years, called for a dramatic reduction of CO₂ emissions to begin as soon as possible.
“I have been involved with the UNFCCC conferences of the parties since 1998. Our network has compiled over 20 years of undeniable evidence showing how carbon markets, pricing, and carbon offset mechanisms do not reduce emissions at source.
“Carbon markets provide the loophole that the fossil fuel industry needs to continue extraction, combustion, and a fossil extractive economy that is wrecking the harmony of Mother Earth and Father Sky.
“We are long overdue for demanding a permanent moratorium on false solutions being negotiated in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
“The UNFCCC has goals to finalise these negotiations this year. After two decades of polluters profiting from causing human rights violations, land grabbing, and division, harm, and exploiting Indigenous Peoples through carbon markets and REDD+.
Indigenous Peoples and UNDRIP
The theme of this year’s UNPFII meeting is “Implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples within United Nations Member States and the United Nations system, including identifying good practices and addressing challenges.”
IEN published a report for this year’s UNPFII meeting titled, “Indigenous Peoples Resisting Carbon Markets and REDD+ in Cases Citing UNDRIP”.
The report highlights nine cases from Colombia, Kenya, Brazil, Cambodia, Peru, Sweden where projects have violated the principles in UNDRIP. The report makes four recommendations for UNPFII to make to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC):
End Carbon Markets and Carbon Pricing Regimes and REDD+ Projects. We reiterate the call for a Permanent Moratorium on all carbon markets and carbon pricing and offset mechanisms, REDD+ programmes and projects, including geoengineering technologies and practices, particularly those sanctioned under the UNFCCC and UNCBD, due to widespread human rights violations with no guarantees of effective safeguards.
Legally Operationalize UNDRIP within the UN system across all international climate and biodiversity frameworks, including Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Therefore, ensure that countries have robust systems and effective mechanisms to provide redress for Indigenous Peoples in accordance with Article 8 and 28 of UNDRIP.
Establish a global database of violations resulting from these false solutions, and implement mandatory reporting mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability and to address grievances.
Recognize and Uphold Indigenous Jurisprudence and Governance Systems. The United Nations should formally recognize Indigenous legal systems and customary governance as valid sources of law within international human rights, global climate, biodiversity and environmental regimes. This recognition must include establishing legal pathways to enforce Indigenous Peoples’ decisions against state or corporate actors violating sacred lands and the territorial integrity and rights of Mother Earth.
“We must say NO! to this Green Economy regime”
Great Grandmother Mary Lyons of the Indigenous Environmental Network made an intervention during the UNPFII meeting, posted here in full:
I am Great Grandmother Mary Lyons of the Anishinaabe Nation. I come before you today on behalf of the Indigenous Environmental Network with the support of Indigenous Knowledge Holders and Spiritual Authorities.
My intervention is to sound the alarm on a new wave of Biological, Environmental, and Conservation Colonialism and the Capitalism of Nature – of Mother Earth. We have submitted a research report revealing that Carbon Markets, REDD+ schemes, and Nature-Based Solutions consisting of the commodification and privatization of forests, soils, coastal and marine ecosystems are being pushed forward by governments, corporations, NGOs, financial institutions and UN agencies including the Sustainable Development Goals. These are false solutions for mitigating climate change!
My Relatives, we must say NO! to this Green Economy regime that places a monetary price on Nature and creates new derivative markets that will only increase inequality, violations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with increases in the destruction of Mother Earth. We cannot put the future of Mother Earth and humanity in the hands of financial speculative mechanisms and other market systems of conservation and biodiversity offsets and payment for environmental and ecological services.
We say NO! We respectfully urge the Forum to request ECOSOC to advance these following actions across the UN system:
Declare a Permanent Moratorium on carbon markets, REDD+ and geoengineering technologies and practices, particularly those sanctioned under the UNFCCC and UNCBD, due to widespread human rights violations that have no guarantees of effective safeguards.
Issue an immediate call to end the expansion of new coal, oil and gas projects and manage a global transition away from fossil fuels.
There is no such thing as sustainable mining – we say NO! to critical minerals extraction on and near Indigenous lands and territories.
Establish a global database of violations resulting from these false solutions, and implement mandatory reporting mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability and to address grievances.
Recognize and uphold Indigenous governance systems and Indigenous jurisprudence as legitimate, binding sources of law in global climate, biodiversity, sustainable development and human rights regimes.
The United Nations needs to listen to Indigenous Peoples, to our Wisdom, our Cosmovisions and to honor the Territorial Integrity of the Sacredness of Mother Earth.
Goldtooth’s statement has been lightly edited for clarity.
Connecting back to the previous post about the Tohmle Statement in the IKPA, it's always inspiring to see global Indigenous communities mobilizing against the neocolonial false solutions and foregrounding this agenda in the international negotiations. Carbon markets and their ripple effects are shared extraction and exploitation faced by indigenous people around the Globe (being aware that indigenous communities are not homogeneous groups, and different individuals in the communities have different positionalities) that requires empowerment of the communities, formal land titles, appropriate FPIC, respect of local knowledge and practices, and most importantly, an end to carbon trading and REDD+.
Mary Lyons of Anishinaabe has it correct in her intervention address. These financializations of Nature are a far-right neoliberal scheme to bring all of Nature into the world economy, by putting a numerical price-value on each part of Nature, so that it can all be traded in the Capitalist, extractivist economy. This supposedly ends the perceived ills from the environment being an externality to the economy. This notion of externality deliberately twists the fact that the economy actually operates within the bounds of Nature. Trying to put a numerical value on the intrinsic value of the Commons is discussed in https://thevaluecrisis.substack.com As well, there is no mechanism which allows a certain entity to monetize then claim exclusive ownership of the portion of Nature to be traded on the Market. The deliberate act by the far-right to monetize Nature is another ploy to permanently alter traditional societal norms to their exclusive financial advantage. This must be resisted at all levels. This permanent alteration can be illustrated by the results of the previous Harper regime in Canada, which underhandedly altered Indigenous relationships to the land by introducing private-property rights, actually forcing private property rights, to sneakily abolish the Indigenous historical culture that “we can not sell the Earth our Mother.” This action was intended to, and was successful in, changing the value-landscape permanently, an indelible “legacy.” As such, the problem is now arising in which First Nations are being co-opted into resource extractive projects and pipelines by the government loaning them money to be a “stakeholder” in these projects, sneakily abandoning their sovereignty for some dividend income. Bought out, in other words. Excellent that this report also brings in geoengineering and carbon pricing, both false solutions which paper-over the need to drastically reduce emissions at source.