- The Pathways Alliance for Change and Transformation (PACT), a coalition of Indigenous, community and nonprofit organizations, published a paper in September 2023 calling for a moratorium on the forest carbon trade out of concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
- PACT says a pause in selling carbon credits is needed until protections for the land rights of these communities are laid out “explicitly, proactively, and comprehensively.”
- In December at the U.N. climate conference in Dubai, carbon markets experienced a setback after negotiators failed to agree on texts to articles in the 2015 Paris climate agreement meant to guide the carbon trade.
Mina Setra recalls the time before oil palm plantations altered the landscape of her childhood home. Setra, an Indigenous Dayak Pompakng, grew up when forests surrounded her village in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Setra and her brother would spend their days canoeing on a nearby river, she says. “But now, it’s all gone. Dried out,” Setra says. Witnessing the changes over the course of her lifetime has guided her work as an activist and with AMAN, Indonesia’s biggest Indigenous alliance, where she now serves as deputy to the secretary-general on culture.
While palm oil production remains a linchpin of Indonesia’s economy, outsiders and the Indonesian government have increasingly focused on another commodity: carbon — particularly the carbon in communities that have managed to hold on to their forests for generations. That’s concerning because, as Setra sees it, the trade of carbon credits, typically used by companies and individuals to offset their emissions, often fails to consider the connection that Indigenous peoples have to their forests. “Indigenous spirituality has not really been taken into account in the discussions on carbon markets. Not at all. Zero,” Setra tells Mongabay.
In September, Setra and several colleagues from a group of Indigenous, community and nonprofit organizations that comprise the Pathways Alliance for Change and Transformation (PACT) published a paper calling for a moratorium on the forest carbon trade. The group wants to pause both voluntary and government-required compliance carbon markets until protections for the land rights of Indigenous peoples, as well as local communities that often face similar challenges, are laid out “explicitly, proactively, and comprehensively.”
A call for a pause. Mechanisms laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement allow for the exchange of carbon credits between countries in the push toward net-zero emissions. For example, a wealthy country might finance a forest conservation project aimed at reducing emissions from deforestation in a less-industrialized nation. This arrangement allows the rich country to count those emissions savings toward its own climate targets.
Voluntary carbon markets currently allow private companies and individuals to buy credits that offset their emissions. » …
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