Swaziland/South Africa/Uganda: The illusion of storing carbon in tree plantations goes up in smoke

 

Wild fires blazed through parts of Swaziland and eastern South Africa in the end of July. The fires had a death toll of over 20 people, killed thousands of cattle and wild animals, incinerated homesteads and destroyed crops and plantations. In both countries, fire fighters and emergency personnel were being overstretched. It was a huge catastrophe.

 

Reports from IOL (Independent Online) informed that about 80 percent of the countryside surrounding the South African northern KwaZulu-Natal town of Paulpietersburg - one of the worst-affected areas and with many timber plantations - had been devastated.

 

According to FSC-Watch, the fires in Swaziland started in the FSC-certified plantations of the Mondi company --now apparently bought by the US based Global Emerging Markets Forestry Investors LLC-- in the Piggs Peak region, and also affected part of an FSC-certified plantation owned by another South African pulp and paper conglomerate, Sappi.

 

The environmental and social damaging impacts of plantations in the region have long been denounced (see WRM bulletins at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/SouthAfrica.html#articles) and many feared that a disaster was in store for them. Now that the disaster has arrived, fingers point also at the FSC for having validated a plantation scheme which renders people nothing else than havoc.

 

Quoting FSC-Watch, “80% of the 19,500 hectare Mondi plantation is reported to have gone up in flames, and around 7% of Sappi's.” “Mondi's certifier, SGS , noted in their original certification assessment that ‘Inherent in good silvicultural practice is the physical management of fire risks and the implementation of fire controls supported by well-trained and well-equipped fire-fighting teams.’ Now that one of Mondi's plantations has burned to the ground, claiming several lives, SGS will no doubt have to conclude that they were not managed according to 'good silvicultural practice'.”

 

This tragedy also exposes the infeasibility of the concept of planting trees to store carbon, further reinforced by what has been happening in Uganda, where farmers cut down considerable part of Dutch CO2 "forests".

 

The conflict goes back to an agreement signed in 1994 by the Dutch FACE (Forests Absorbing Carbon dioxide Emissions) Foundation and the Ugandan authorities to plant trees on a two to three kilometre wide strip on 25,000 hectares inside the 211 kilometre-long boundary of the Mount Elgon National Park, a highly contested zone.

 

Allegedly to absorb and store carbon to compensate for the emissions of Dutch firms and those of air traveling, approximately 9,000 hectares of trees were planted since 1993. They had to remain standing for one hundred years.

 

The tree planting played havoc with local villagers who not only were evicted from their land but also lost access to the forest. For the project to be implemented, people living along the boundary of the park were beaten and shot at, barred from their land which was added to the national park, and had their livestock confiscated by armed park rangers guarding the ‘carbon trees’ inside the National Park. They were left landless and jobless (see World Rainforest Movement report ‘A funny place to store carbon’, at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Uganda/book.html, and WRM Bulletin Nº 115).

 

All along the past year, evicted farmers have retaken their old land, chopped down the trees and turned them into charcoal, converting 1,300 hectares into farmland. Jeroen Trommelen from the Dutch De Volkskrant reports that FACE has stopped the sale of CO2 credits from the Ugandan tree plantations until the conflicts concerning the land rights have been solved.

 

Last year the credits were sold to a Dutch energy firm to compensate the climate effect of the use of fossil fuel. FACE does not want to say the name of the company. Until last year CO2 credits from the Uganda tree plantation were also sold through the organisation Greenseat, a Dutch company with clients including Amnesty International, the British Council and The Body Shop.

 

Currently, of the 3.4 million trees planted, the carbon stored in some half a million trees has already been released into the atmosphere (estimated at some 182,000 tons of CO2) following their conversion into charcoal. As Trommelen put it, “The carbon dioxide that was stored in the wood to compensate the CO2 emissions, has now therefore partly gone up in smoke.”

 

In the face of the global catastrophe of accelerating increase of atmospheric CO₂ levels -from about 280 parts-per-million in preindustrial times to about 380ppm in the current day – with the potential for future temperature increases, the market-based approach fix has proved not only not to solve the problem but even to worsen it.

 

Article based on information from: “Swaziland: fires in certified plantations spark national emergency”, FSC-Watch, http://www.fsc-watch.org/archives/2007/08/28/Swaziland__fires_in_c
ertified_plantations_spark_national_emergency_; “South Africa Fires”,  IOL (Independent Online), http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de/GFMCnew/2007/07/0730/20070730_sa.htm; “Farmers in Uganda cut down considerable part of Dutch CO-2 forests”, Jeroen Trommelen, De Volkskrant, disseminated by Simone Lovera, Global Forest Coalition, email: simonelovera@yahoo.com, http://www.globalforestcoalition.org