Fake Climate Solutions Spread Across Latin America — Global Issues

by Humberto Marquez (caracas)Friday, June 14, 2024Inter Press Service

The map “presents an outline to know the dynamics and the misleading language of faux options, which permit massive polluters to acquire allocations to proceed their actions and contribute to international warming,” Ivonne Yánez, president of Ecuador’s Acción Ecológica, instructed IPS.

Made by the Latin American and Caribbean Platform for Local weather Justice, a community of environmental teams, the map exhibits the faux options of dozens of tasks for inexperienced power and the manufacturing of its inputs, and for storing carbon in forests, different ecosystems and agricultural methods.

There are additionally geoengineering tasks to forestall local weather change, and local weather change adaptation primarily based on ecosystems, infrastructure and engineering tasks.

“Greater than a format, it’s a software for visibility, a pedagogical software that joins very various gamers, akin to students, researchers, NGOs and activists gathered within the Platform,” stated Liliana Buitrago, a researcher on the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela, which launched the map in Could, to IPS.

The community “states that transition initiatives coming from the territorial cloth and communities, outdoors the frameworks imposed by the inexperienced financial system, company greenwashing and company seize” of carbon emissions, “are pressing,” Buitrago stated.

Presenting the map, Yánez defined that “what inexperienced capitalism seeks isn’t solely to acceptable nature’s means to cleanse itself, to recreate life, to photosynthesise”.

“By means of faux options, it additionally takes benefit of and appropriates what indigenous peoples have achieved for 1000’s of years, which is defending and taking good care of forests, or peasants that look after the soil. And for what? To hold on an escalation of fossil gasoline extraction,” stated the activist.

Carbon, an unscathed villain

An evaluation of the 83 instances that make up the primary map – 100 extra will seem in future editions – exhibits that 70 per cent of faux options to the local weather disaster are privately funded, and that indigenous communities and small farmers are essentially the most affected.

The commonest amongst faux resolution classes are tasks to retailer carbon in forests, different ecosystems and agricultural methods, in 50 per cent of instances.

REDD+ tasks (Lowering Emissions – primarily carbon dioxide, CO2 – from deforestation and forest degradation in creating international locations) account for 33 per cent of the instances.

The REDD+ framework permits international locations to subject and market carbon offset certifications “which are put within the monetary system on the disposal of corporations that need to use them as licenses to proceed polluting and producing emissions”, criticizes Yánez.

Wind power tasks, and new forestry plantations justified by carbon sequestration, comprise 10 and 11 per cent of the tasks on the map.

The Platform considers the latest launch of blue carbon credit (debt points that finance ecosystem conservation tasks) in oil-producing Trinidad and Tobago, for work within the southwest of Tobago and within the Caroni swamp in Trinidad, as a type of greenwashing.

In Brazil, amongst a number of instances, Portel-Pará is proven on the head of 4 carbon storage tasks in 7,000 sq. kilometres of forests and different ecosystems, by way of land negotiations and agreements on deforestation boundaries with communities within the northern Amazonian state of Pará.

The Latin American platform Alianza Biodiversidad criticises that these tasks create carbon credit which are purchased by massive corporations that proceed to pollute, akin to Repsol (oil), Air France, Delta Airways and Boeing (aviation), Amazon and Aldi (commerce) or Samsung and Toshiba (expertise).

Displaced folks, a cliché

Trying on the map from North to South, the faux options begin in Mexico, with the instance of lithium mining in 13 salt flats within the states of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí (north-central Mexico) by the Canadian agency Advance Gold Corp.

This undertaking has brought about displacement of peasant populations, air pollution, and adjustments in land possession and use.

Initiatives for photo voltaic photovoltaic energy crops in Quetzaltepeque (japanese Guatemala) and Namasigüe (southern Honduras), run by non-public consortiums with capitals from the Norwegian agency Scatec, have in frequent the displacement of peasant and fishing populations, lack of habitats and biodiversity.

In Colombia, the San José ranch obtained funding from the Inexperienced Local weather Fund and Dutch banks for a undertaking within the japanese division of Vichada to develop its cattle herd from 9,000 head on 8,000 hectares to 750,000 animals on 180,000 hectares.

The corporate is singled out within the Fund for sequestering extra carbon than it emits, however the Platform questions the cattle growth’s contribution to local weather and highlights dangers to a neighbouring reservation of the Sikuani folks.

Power with color

In Costa Rica, a hydroelectric “inexperienced power” facility was proposed in 2013 within the southwestern canton of Pérez Zeledón. It lacked the required documentation, had falsified land-use permits by the mayor’s workplace, and would trigger foreseeable air pollution and lack of habitats and biodiversity.

The state environmental technical secretariat granted it expedited permits however, within the face of public criticism and rejection, the federal government cancelled the undertaking.

In Jamaica, a “inexperienced power” undertaking has been underway since 2016, 90 kilometres west of Kingston. A wind farm of 11 wind generators, with funding from the USA and Canada, is meant to cowl three p.c of the island’s electrical energy demand and cut back emissions by 66,000 tonnes of CO2 per yr.

The map factors out that, on the identical time, Jamaica is handing out concessions for bauxite mining and aluminium discount, a key materials for power transition however whose manufacturing causes desertification, illness, and deepens extractivism.

The Dominican Republic hosts the most important photovoltaic energy plant within the Antilles, the Girasol photo voltaic park, within the southern municipality of Yaguate, west of Santo Domingo. It has 268,200 panels put in, with an funding of 100 million {dollars} by the Cayman Islands-based agency Haina Funding.

The map exhibits the adjustments in territorial dynamics, the connection of locals with the surroundings, and the influence brought about within the lands from which minerals are extracted to provide the put in expertise.

Monocultures and deaf ears

In 2006, oil-producing Venezuela introduced a undertaking for ethanol manufacturing with sugar mills, utilizing sugar cane grown on 300,000 hectares within the southwestern plains. This by no means got here to fruition however confirmed an inclination to favour monoculture for fuels as an alternative of diversified meals manufacturing.

The map additionally exhibits the nation just lately initiated a undertaking to decelerate the extinction of its final glacier, greater than 4,000 metres above sea stage on Humboldt Peak, within the southwestern Andes, by protecting it with polystyrene mesh.

The undertaking ignored suggestions from the College of the Andes regarding dangers in its implementation, plastic air pollution of air, water and soil, and since it won’t forestall the glacier from melting as a result of international warming.

The Luxembourg-based Arbaro Fund, lively in seven international locations within the South, purchased 1,080 hectares of land in three Ecuadorean provinces and is planning one other 500 hectares for monoculture tree plantations, whose administration goals, in idea, to guard the surroundings and seize CO2.

The identical fund acquired 9,000 hectares within the central division of San Pedro in Paraguay, and two thirds might be planted with eucalyptus timber. The Platform warns that the undertaking legalises land grabbing, with devastating results on the surroundings and on indigenous and small farming communities.

Some 100 civil society organisations alerted the Inexperienced Local weather Fund in 2020 in regards to the hurt small farmers could undergo from land regime change and air pollution, plus the lack of habitats, biodiversity and agro-diversity. Nevertheless, Arbaro Fund obtained 25 million {dollars} to assist its plantations.

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A stark distinction to the “faux options” on the map are initiatives akin to Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s determination to set a deadline on his nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, or the rejection of sure oil and mining operations determined in a referendum by the folks of Ecuador.

“The folks’s determination to go away oil within the floor is a transparent contribution to the combat towards local weather change, as is the choice to ban mining within the Andean Chocó, which is wealthy in biodiversity,” Yánez burdened.

Within the referendum held on 20 August 2023, 59 per cent of Ecuadorians voted to forestall oil exploitation within the Yasuní nationwide park within the Amazon. In Quito, 68 per cent of the vote vetoed gold and copper prospecting within the Andean Chocó space, west of the capital.

Buitrago believes that, “removed from being options to the issue, faux options are methods of perpetuating the extractivist and exploitative mannequin of accumulation that has brought about the local weather disaster”.

That’s the reason the map, by exhibiting contrasts and criticisms of faux options, “additionally seeks to state that different organisations could make the actual ones seen”, stated Yánez.

© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal supply: Inter Press Service

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