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Carbon Upsets: Norwegian "Carbon Plantations" in Tanzania
By Jorn Stave, NorWatch/ The Future in Our Hands - Norway

Global Warming and Monoculture Plantations: A Double Menace to Bangladesh
By Friends of the Earth-Bangladesh

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to humanity. Millions of people have already lost their homes, farms and, in the worst cases, their lives, due to climatic extremes like hurricanes and droughts that are undeniably linked to climate change. Indigenous Peoples and impoverished local communities are by far the greatest victims of climate change. Climate change is also the biggest threat to forests and other ecosystems. For example, some studies predict 25% of the Amazon forests and up to 40% of the boreal forests will be lost, if climate negotiators do not succeed to come to an effective agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized countries.

The inclusion of so-called carbon sinks as an alternative for emission reductions seriously undermines such an effective agreement. The establishment of tree plantations is much cheaper than the fundamental change in consumption patterns and technology in the field of energy needed to reduce CO2 emissions in countries like the United States. This is why the US and a number of other Northern countries want to make use of carbon sinks to meet their (far too modest) quantified obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions with 5%. But emission reductions are permanent, sinks are, per definition, temporary. Accepting sinks now is accepting an even bigger disaster in the future.

The risks are even greater now that countries seem to have agreed on a provisional definition of "forests", which includes any kind of tree plantation. Biodiversity is not a requirement of forests anymore, any monoculture, be it of Eucalyptus, oilpalm or apple trees, is good enough to be counted as forests. In fact, under the current definition 1 big mango tree is enough to constitute a forest. Even worse, the draft definition includes "temporarily unstocked areas" which is the euphemism of the year for lands, which are completely deforested as a result of clearcutting or other destructive forestry practices.

It should also be noted that there is an increasing risk that only reforestation and afforestation projects will be included under the Clean Development Mechanism, which is supposed to fund "sustainable development projects" (an undefined concept) in developing countries. As these countries do not have a quantified obligation to halt deforestation, they could practically allow deforestation of their entire country while receiving funding under the Kyoto Protocol for "reforestation" projects which are nothing but the establishment of large-scale monoculture tree plantations.

Large-scale monoculture tree plantations - to make any sense to "compensate" even a small fraction os emissions plantations would need to be large-scale, are exactly the opposite to "sustainable development". Wherever implemented, they have invariably resulted in negative social and environmental impacts. Their inclusion as "carbon sinks" would exacerbate already proven impacts. It is clear who the victims of this lose-lose situation would be: forest peoples and their forests and local communities and biodiversity in general. This document highlights the social and environmental impacts of monoculture tree plantations through case studies and other testimonies from Costa Rica, Ecuador, Australia, Paraguay, Indonesia, Chile, Cameroon, Colombia, Czech Republic, Bangladesh, Uganda and Tanzania. These testimonies provide convincing evidence for the fact that large-scale tree plantations are not a solution to either climate change, or forest loss.

We therefore call upon the Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change to limit the use of carbon sinks as much as possible and to ensure monoculture tree plantations are excluded from all actions and mechanisms to mitigate climate change.