World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs

An appalling crime covered by Nafez Ahmed in the Guardian (UK): Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 500 million acres of land in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean was acquired or negotiated under deals brokered on behalf of foreign governments or transnational corporations.

...The concentration of ownership of the world's farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is rapidly accelerating, driven by resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US land rights organisation Grain: "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing."

Less known factors, however, include 'conservation' and 'carbon offsetting.' In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.

Since 2007, successive Kenyan governments have threatened Sengwer communities in the Embobut forest with eviction. A deadline for residents to leave the forest expired in early January, prompting the most recent spate of violence. The pretext for the eviction is that the indigenous Sengwer – labelled wrongly as 'squatters' – are responsible for the accelerating degradation of the forest.

...The devastating plight of Kenya's indigenous peoples is symptomatic of the flawed approach to conservation on the part of international agencies.

...A damning new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) based in Washington DC thus warns that the UN and World Bank approach to REDD is paving the way for large-scale "carbon grabs" by foreign governments and investors, putting at risk the land rights, livelihoods and lives of indigenous communities....

Mt. Elgon Forest in Kenya, shot by Kristina Just, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Government's biodiversity offsetting proposals 'too simplistic'

Leigh Stringer in edie.net:  [The UK g]overnment proposals to introduce a system of 'biodiversity offsetting' must be improved to properly protect Britain's wildlife and woodlands, according to the Environmental Audit Committee.  In September, the Government set out proposals for biodiversity offsetting in a Green Paper consultation, Biodiversity Offsetting in England.

The Green Paper envisages the development of 'habitat banking', where an offset provider would restore or recreate habitats in anticipation that they would be able to sell the offset units at a later date.  Although the new system could enhance the way the planning system accounts for the damage done to valuable natural habitats, there is a risk of giving developers "carte blanche to concrete over important habitats," according to the Environmental Audit Committee report on the proposals.

Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, Joan Walley MP, said there is a danger that an overly simplistic offsetting system would not protect long-established eco-systems, such as ancient woodland and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.  The Government's Green Paper does not provide an evidence based analysis of how offsetting would deliver "biodiversity gain", according to the MPs.

A major concern highlighted by the Committee is the twenty minute assessment for calculating biodiversity losses at a site, proposed by Ministers, which it also labels "overly simplistic".  According to the committee, it should include particular species, local habitat significance, ecosystem services provided - such as pollination and flood prevention - and 'ecosystem network' connectivity to reflect the full complexity of habitats....

Whitelee forest. New wind turbines and forest clearing machine, a Ponsse harvester. Shot by Scott, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license