Aboriginal people rush to stop ‘wrong climate solutions’ ahead of next international climate conference

This article is part of the Global Aboriginal Affairs Desk, an Aboriginal-led partnership between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online and APTN.

Tom Goldtooth has been listening to conversations about the negative impacts of fossil fuel and carbon markets on First Nations for more than 20 years. On Wednesday, Goldtooth and the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) called for a permanent end to the carbon market. The organization believes they are not only an ineffective tool for mitigating climate change; they harm, exploit and divide indigenous communities around the world.

The recommendation, made to a group of Indigenous activists, policymakers and leaders at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), is the most comprehensive moratorium recommendation on the issue the panel has heard. If adopted, this position would force other UN bodies such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to adopt similar positions. The urgency stems from the COP29 conference planned for later this year, when provisions of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement on the structure of the carbon market are expected to be finalized.

Ding and Dakota, IEN executive director Kim Teeth, said a moratorium on false climate solutions like carbon markets is long overdue. This is a matter of life and death for our people, related to the mitigation solutions being negotiated, particularly under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.Article 6 is all about the carbon market. It’s a smokescreen and a loophole. [that keeps] Fossil fuel polluters agree to phase out carbon.

The internet’s language about false climate solutions is intentional. Tamra Gilbertson, coordinator and researcher at the organization’s climate justice project, said a false climate solution is any tool that looks like it will reduce emissions or combat climate change, but allows extractive companies to continue to trigger Something to profit from the fossil fuel crisis.

Gilbertson said polluting industries already have carbon markets in place. The carbon market as a prerequisite for good mitigation results or good mitigation plans under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is itself a flawed concept. We know this because of who put it together.

The carbon market moratorium the network is calling for would end CO2 removal projects such as carbon capture and storage; Forest, soil and ocean offsets; nature-based solutions; debt-for-nature swaps; biodiversity offsets and other geoengineering techniques.

This year’s moratorium recommendation builds on a similar proposal IEN made at last year’s forum, when it called for the carbon market to be halted until Indigenous communities could thoroughly investigate its impacts and make appropriate claims. The call led to an international conference in January, where indigenous experts discussed the impact the green economy has had and could have on their communities. Ultimately, participants produced a report detailing how green economy programs and measures could create a new way to colonize Aboriginal lands and territories.

Daro Jos Meja Montalvo of the Zen Tribe of Colombia attended the January meeting and chaired the previous UNPFII. He highlighted the report at a United Nations meeting last week.

Transition to a green economy [keeps] Prioritizing the private sector starts from the same logic based on extractivism, which is guided by the national economic interests of multinational corporations and ignores the struggles of indigenous peoples, the fight against climate change and the fight against poverty, Montalvo said. United Nations translation of his speech in Spanish.

Goldtooth and Gilbertson said that while the January report provided broader consensus on the negative impacts of the green economy, IEN believed the report’s recommendations were unclear and did not go far enough to halt the development of carbon markets, which is why the group is calling for a permanent moratorium. .

“In the climate emergency we’re in, we have to do everything we can from every direction because we don’t have any more time,” Gilbertson said. If the carbon market is included in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement as currently stipulated and becomes a more powerful international network, then we are in a new era of unprecedented global carbon market interconnection. Then we were stuck.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries submit plans detailing how they will reduce emissions or increase carbon sequestration. Article 6 provides a pathway for countries to voluntarily cooperate and trade emissions to achieve their climate goals. More specifically, paragraph 6.4 will create a centralized market and lead to the large-scale implementation of emission reduction trading. The nuances of these structures, and the way carbon markets are presented in Article 6, have far-reaching consequences: a November report from the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) showed that 80% of countries said they would or would use carbon markets to achieve this their climate goals.

In its current form, the carbon offset program outlined in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement will further threaten Indigenous peoples’ land tenure and access to resources. If completed in November, the pilot program is expected to launch as early as January 2025.

At this year’s forum, organizations including the United Nations Development Program, Climate Focus, Forest Peoples Project and Rainforest America discussed new initiatives to protect Indigenous rights within carbon markets. In particular, there is growing interest in policies that more effectively incorporate free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) into carbon offset operations. But Kimaren Riamit, executive director of ILEPA-Kenya, an indigenous-led non-profit organization, said the foundation must be established before FPIC can be better recognized.

FPIC without a self-determination push is useless because how do you give consent when your land rights don’t exist? If you are not involved in decision-making governance arrangements, what are you agreeing to? said Ryamit, who is from the Maasai tribe in Kenya. Drivers of self-determination include protection of Aboriginal land sovereignty and land tenure security.

Riamette said free, prior and informed consent has become a strategic tool and a confusing way to spread messaging in carbon market plans, rather than a way to gain meaningful tribal consent. When participating in carbon market schemes, tribes must be thoughtfully and fully disclosed what they agree to, and allow them time to digest the information, consult internally, provide feedback, and be able to say no critically.

Riamette is noteworthy that carbon offset companies do not advocate strongly, if at all, for increasing the self-determination rights of the indigenous communities they work with.

He said they were not sharpening their knives to commit suicide.

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