"No Rights, No REDD!"

For those of you who don’t know, REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Basically it is a strategy to reduce emissions and increase sequestration of GHGs by preserving and improving forests. Most of this is focused on the tropical forests of South America, Africa and Indonesia, which are some of the most extensive, and some of the most threatened forests. Those areas also happen to be largely developing nations that are home to a large portion of the world’s poor, and a large population of indigenous people who live in the forest and rely on its resources. For many decades now these people have been abused by officials and companies seeking to exploit the land they call home. Now they are worried that these practices will continue if proper safeguards put into place in the text of REDD protocol. So far the REDD paper contains one line encouraging nations to include indigenous peoples in discussions, but this is not nearly enough, and it does not actually require anything of governments. Indigenous people have an opportunity to profit from REDD as developed countries will fund projects and buy carbon credits, but measures need to be taken to ensure that the indigenous people who have the rights to the land are the ones to see the profits.

So today they staged a demonstration.

I was on my way to “Making REDD Work”, a session on building preparedness for international REDD mechanisms, when I heard a chant off in the distance. At first I couldn’t tell what they were saying. Then a line of people holding hands rushed past me, they were shouting “No Rights, No REDD!”. The chain of people holding hands just kept going and going as they ran all over the conference center. Reporters with cameras were running along side them, trying to keep up, and before I knew it I was a part of the chain, running right along with them and chanting. There were people from developing nations all over, many of them in traditional dress, all of them excited for change.
As if to underscore the importance of this issue when I finally got to “Making REDD Work” the room was packed. I had to sit on the floor and within a few minutes it was so crowded I couldn’t get to the door to leave even if I had wanted to. Speakers from Indonesia, Brazil, Panama and the Norwegian Rainforest Federation expounded on the need for active participation from civil society and transparency in the government. Over 50% of Panama’s GHG emissions come from deforestation, and over 34% of their forests are within the lands of indigenous people. In the final texts for REDD they want to see concrete requirements and plans for involving indigenous people, governmental reforms to improve transparency and safeguard human rights, and courts set up to resolve conflict between indigenous peoples and outsiders attempting to change the forest. And they want it to be recognized that as a people who have inhabited these forests for thousands of years they have a lot of good knowledge about how to maintain them