FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE - 12 January 2007
Human
rights abuses, land conflicts, broken promises
The reality of carbon ‘offset’ projects in Uganda
A new World Rainforest
Movement report ‘A funny place to store
carbon’ (1) documents human rights abuses
at Mount Elgon National Park in east Uganda, where the Dutch FACE
Foundation (2) 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.
The ‘offset’
project sells carbon credits to Greenseat, a Dutch company with
clients including Amnesty International, the British Council and
the Body Shop.
In Britain, ‘offset’
company Climate Care buys carbon credits from the FACE Foundation’s
Kibale ‘offset’ project, in west Uganda. A report today
on BBC1’s Inside Out programme will expose how villagers around
Kibale National Park are paying a high price for living next to
the FACE Foundation carbon ‘offset’ project and how
workers are paid well below subsistence rates for tending the ‘carbon
trees’.
“No-one is
starving but it’s not enough anymore for luxuries such as
milk” commented a former local council member at Kibale in
a meeting with FERN’s climate campaigner Jutta Kill.
“In Uganda,
villagers see their already meager subsistence livelihood compromised
even further by the FACE Foundation’s carbon ‘offset’
projects,” says Jutta Kill. “In Britain, Climate Care
clients like The Co-operative Bank offer cheap indulgences. For
a bank with ethical credentials, that’s a disgrace.”
On its website,
the Co-operative Bank assures customers that their “mortgages
could not only save you money. They can help save the planet too,”
and a car insurance from the Co-operative Bank comes with the conscience-salving
message that ‘offsetting’ is “the easy way to
make your car greener without costing you a penny more”.
“FACE gets
a license to continue polluting – we get to plant some trees,”
explained Alex Muhweezi, country director in Uganda for IUCN, the
World Conservation Union at a meeting with WRM’s Chris Lang
in July 2006.
“’Offsets’
are bad for the climate because they delay a shift away from our
oil addiction,” explains Timothy Byakola of the Ugandan NGO
Climate and Development Initiatives, who co-wrote the WRM report.
“They are also bad for people when they exacerbate local land
conflicts. Resolving the crisis at Mount Elgon would be much easier
without the extra complication of a carbon contract.”
The villagers affected
by the Mount Elgon ‘offset’ project are in no doubt
that the FACE Foundation is storing the carbon they sell to climate
conscious clients in Britain and the Netherlands on someone else’s
land, and they possess title documents showing they are entitled
to land now occupied by ‘carbon trees’. “We just
want our land back”, said one.
“To prevent
a climate crisis we need effective strategies that will transform
the way we use and produce energy,” says FERN’s climate
campaigner Jutta Kill. "The feel-good ‘offset’
business undermines the push towards a rapid switch to low-carbon
economies. It nurtures the illusion that carbon emissions for that
holiday trip to Miami have no impact on the climate as long as we
buy our indulgences and pay someone else somewhere else to deal
with our excessive emissions. In cases like Kibale and Mount Elgon,
‘offsets’ not only prolong our fossil fuel addiction,
they escalate local land conflicts. Far from benefiting the poor,
they make their struggle for access to land even harder.”
(2)
FACE stands for Forest Absorbing Carbon-dioxide Emissions. The FACE
Foundation was set up in 1990 by the Dutch Electricity Generation
Board.
(3)
BBC1 Inside Out programme (London area) report 12 January 2007 at
19:30
For more information please contact:
Jutta Kill (jutta@fern.org)
Tel: +44 1608 651 864 & +44 7931 576538
Timothy Byakola (acs@starcom.co.ug)
Tel:+256 41 342685
Chris Lang (chrislang@t-online.de)
Tel: +49 69 7079 2903
