Whose Clean Development? Communities Speak Out

http://www.foodfirst.org/en/Whose+clean+development%3F

Focus on the Global South, Authors include Dorothy Grace Guerrero, Jacques-chai Chomthongdi, Joseph Purugganan, Mary Ann Manahan, and Nicola Bullard

This report is a response to Rio+20.

Our analysis, and that of many communities and organisations across Asia, is that the CDM is an extension of the generalised approach to big project and energy intensive development that has systematically marginalised indigenous peoples and local communities and over- exploited the Earth. The “clean development mechanism” is, quite simply, a mechanism that allows polluters to avoid binding emissions reductions in one location, while shifting emissions to another location. At the same time, it allows corporations and state entities to reap additional profits from projects that are questionable in terms of sustainability, community benefits or even addressing climate change.

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FOCUS ON TRADE
Number 160, June 2012

RIO +20 SPECIAL:
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED “GREEN ECONOMY” ?

Twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit, the Earth is in a sorry state.

Twenty years of accelerated growth based on extractivism, productivism and consumption in the framework of highly unequal trade rules, all-powerful corporations and speculative finance capital has created unprecedented political, economic, social and ecological fragility, and even outright collapse. In a desperate effort to re-ignite the engines of economic growth, the G20, UN agencies and some sectors of capital are pinning their hopes on the new “green economy”. Although the precise definition of the “green economy” is not clear (the hefty UN Environment Programme report on the green economy slips all over the place) what IS clear is that there is nothing very green about it. Behind the rhetoric of “sustainable development” and “poverty alleviation” the “green economy” is a capitalist project that aims to open all spheres and dimensions of life to finance, claiming that by putting a “price” on nature, environmental policy can be delivered through market signals. Many fear that this will not only be a total failure in terms of achieving the kinds of policies needed to shift the balance of forces in favour of life and the planet and away from profit (see the current state of carbon markets for just one example of a failed market-based environmental policy) but that it could very easily lead to (yet another) speculative bubble which will eventually have to be paid (yet again) by us, the 99 percent.