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The No REDD in Africa Network and the Global Alliance against REDD have denounced REDD as a new form of violence against women in an Open Letter to the United Nations entitled Carbon Trading, CDM and REDD: New Forms of Violence against Women NOT Women’s Empowerment!97
An excerpt follows:
As women, we know that carbon trading and carbon offset projects violate our right to life because they increase pollution and make global warming worse. Carbon offset projects have resulted in land grabs, human rights abuses, violations of the rights of women, children, and Indigenous Peoples, forced displacement, armed guards, jailings, persecution and criminalization of activists. The carbon trading scam also means more asthma, heart disease and cancer for communities living near sources of pollution. Carbon markets cynically greenwash increased fossil fuel exploitation, extraction and combustion, which create toxic hot spots and toxic body burdens for women, affecting the right of future generations to a healthy life.
As women who are guardians and collectors of water, we know that these false solutions allow polluting industries and governments to increase toxic emissions and releases, which poison our precious water. Furthermore, these false solutions to climate change cause more droughts, floods and natural disasters, during which women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men.98
We celebrate Mother Earth and women. We reject carbon trading, the CDM and REDD, and denounce them as new forms of violence against women, children, local communities and Indigenous Peoples. We also reject the Women’s Carbon Standard, ‘gender sensitive carbon offset projects,’ ‘women and children methodologies’ and the promotion and certification of carbon trading and carbon offset projects of any kind, in terms of women’s empowerment and leadership or our families’ and children’s wellbeing.
Pilot REDD-type projects in Africa are already negatively impacting women and children. Evicting some of the Ogiek People from the Mau Forest for UNEP-funded REDD, has hindered some Ogieks’ traditional practices inclu ding hunting and gathering wild honey. According to Judy Kipkenda, Communications and Media Officer of the Ogiek Peoples Development Programme, some Ogiek women and girls are forced to prostitute themselves by the road-side where they are camped.99 The studies of how REDD specifically affects women, girls and children; fuels gender violence and sexual exploitation as well as immigration from the forests and countryside are yet to be done, but all these forms of injustice are inherent to the scale of REDD land grabs.
However, violence against women goes beyond individual and even collective rights violations. The following summary of the emerging political economy of REDD and the role of extractive industries may help to begin to anticipate the greater adverse macro implications of REDD violence for the peoples of Africa and women, girls and children in particular.
As a carbon offset mechanism, REDD allows industrialized countries to use Africa’s forests, agriculture, soils and even water ecosystems as sponges for their carbon dioxide pollution rather than cutting emissions at source. REDD allows the North to shirk its historical responsibilities as the main source of emissions and force the people of the South, those most affected by the climate crisis and least to blame for creating it, to carry this responsibility.100
However, offsets are really just the frosting on the REDD cake. Claiming to save the climate with REDD is a ploy for grabbing all the remaining land, water and energy in the world. In addition, according to Larry Lohmann, an expert on carbon trading, REDD also “creates new kinds of commodification and rent, provides new sources of profit for certain companies, pacifies and corrupts middle-class environmentalists, and creates new avenues for corporate theft from the state and the public.”101
Furthermore, as REDD implementation advances, more REDD-type offset programs will include and actually promote fossil fuel extraction and mining in REDD project areas, as may happen in Ecuador’s Socio Bosque.102 It is highly probable that the REDD projects in Africa will do the same.
REDD with trees or even just grass is also planned as part of the expansion of mines, pipelines and other fossil fuel extraction, production and infrastructure sites. According to the president of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, Benjamin Phillip G. Romualdez, “the mining sector, and an extractive industry will need to replant trees in the vast tracts of lands in which they operate, hence, they might as well use the reforested trees as credits in the international carbon trade.”103 African mining consultant Steven Bluhm, CEO of Bluhm Burton Engineering (BBE) regrets that “South Africa is lagging behind in using the benefits that can be obtained from carbon credits.”104
