“A funny place to store carbon”:
UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda

By Chris Lang and Timothy Byakola - December 2006

 

“A funny place to store carbon: UWA-FACE Foundation’s tree planting project in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda”, by Chris Lang and Timothy Byakola, documents human rights abuses at Mount Elgon National Park in east Uganda, where the Dutch FACE Foundation has been planting carbon ‘offset’ trees since 1994. The report exposes how villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, have been barred from their land and have seen their livestock confiscated by armed park rangers guarding the ‘carbon trees’ inside the National Park.

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Table of Contents

1. Ticking the right boxes or offsetting responsibility?
Box: FACE: The facts
Box: The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA

2. Mount Elgon
The peoples living in and around Mount Elgon
The Bagisu
The Sabiny

3. A chronology of conflicts at Mount Elgon
Box: The British in Uganda
Box: International support for evictions
Mount Elgon is declared a national park
Evictions from the Kapkwata Softwood Plantation
Land rights, shootings, killings
A new boundary and more evictions
Parliamentary committee on natural resources
More conflict
Boundary disputes, another survey and the Benet sue UWA
Illegal logging and yet more conflicts

4. The UWA-FACE project
Is the FACE project additional?
UWA’s version of events at Mount Elgon
The UWA-FACE project and the boundary of the national park
Benefits to local people from carbon sales?
Notes from a visit to Mount Elgon

5. IUCN and NORAD
Box: Carbon forestry in Uganda
IUCN and the Katoomba Group

6. Forest Stewardship Council Certification
Does the project comply with FSC standards
SGS’s visits to Mount Elgon
Certifying the trees or certifying the park management?

7. “We just want our land back”