Steve Schwartzman: EDF Talks Global Climate

By Steve Schwartzman

Carbon markets are taking giant steps toward becoming a reality, with forests and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) central to the process. Many environmentalists support REDD+, but a few want to obstruct it.

Many states around the world are already curbing their greenhouse gas emissions, including by reducing deforestation. Photo credit

A few weeks ago in Chiapas, Mexico, the 17 states and provinces from  the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Nigeria that make up the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) met to discuss ways to collaborate on reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from cutting down and burning tropical forests. Several states are already reducing emissions, on a larger scale than is often recognized.

With California poised to start the first state-wide mandatory emissions reductions program in North America next month, you’d think that environmentalists would welcome more states’ leadership.

But instead, Greenpeace put out a document slamming the GCF for proposing state-level plans to reduce deforestation instead of waiting for national programs. Never mind that a number of the GCF states are larger and have more emissions than many countries. This sounds oddly reminiscent of oil company lobbyists’ arguments that California is wasting its time and its consumers’ money by starting to address the global problem of climate change by itself – or that the U.S. shouldn't act until China and the rest of the world do.

The world needs to start reducing emissions wherever possible, and there are real, practical, effective ways for states to do this now.

In a commentary piece for Carbon Market North America, I describe what I think is the forest that Greenpeace missed (actually, the trees too).

You can read the commentary here: Huge climate benefits from state, local REDD+.

By Steve Schwartzman

Update (May 14): President Dilma Rousseff has until Friday, May 25 to either sign the bill or veto some or all of it.

Leading environmental law experts this week issued a paper detailing why President Dilma Rousseff should veto the law (1876/99) passed by Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies last week that would replace the country’s core forest protection legislation, the Forest Code. (View English translation of the paper.) The attorneys' paper follows a late-April statement from some of Brazil's top scientific organizations also repudiating the legislation.

A protester in Brazil marches with a sign calling for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to "veta," or veto, the Forest Code legislation. The legislation could reverse the major gains Brazil has made in reducing deforestation in the Amazon by opening up hundreds of millions of acres of forests to deforestation. Photo thanks and credit to Flickr user Stefanny Silva.

With the Rio+20 environment and development conference, hosted by Brazil, only weeks away, many in Brazilian government are concerned that weakening the Forest Code would draw international criticism.

In recent years, Brazil has made major gains in reducing Amazon deforestation, but the new law could reverse the trend.

The revised Forest Code, passed with support of the large ranchers and farmers’ caucus of the Congress (or ruralistas), would exempt farmers from penalties for illegal deforestation before 2008.

The legislation would also open up hundreds of millions of acres of currently protected forest to deforestation, including more than 98 million acres of critical wetlands, according to Brazil’s National Space Research Agency. President Rousseff has maintained since last year’s electoral campaign that she would not sign a law that gave amnesty for illegal deforestation.

The paper’s authors call for President Rousseff to veto the entire bill passed in the Chamber, rather than vetoing parts of it (she can choose to do either). Partial vetoes would introduce ambiguities and lacunae into the law and could make it unenforceable. For example, the Chamber bill changes the way that required forest buffers along streams and rivers are measured, allowing tens of millions of acres of new forest to be legally cleared. Vetoing this paragraph would leave undefined the key question of how riparian forest buffers are measured.

The new paper follows a statement by a working group of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), the country’s two principal scientific organizations, repudiating the bill passed by the Chamber. The scientists argue that special interests pushed through changes detrimental to the national interest and will not provide a basis for environmentally sustainable growth of the agriculture sector.

President Rousseff should respect the wishes of the vast majority of the Brazilian public that wants an end to Amazon deforestation and veto this dangerous law in its entirety.

For more information:

• Brazil environmental groups' social media campaign and #VetaTudoDilma
• Press release (EDF): Brazil's President Rousseff should veto disastrous Forest Code
• Blog (EDF): Brazil's president and Congress could avoid backslide for Amazon protection

By Steve Schwartzman

Whether Brazil continues to reduce its deforestation could depend on the outcome of a vote on its forest protection law in Brazil's lower house in March and sign-off from the president. Above: the home of Brazil's Congress, Congresso Nacional do Brasil (Photo credit and thanks to Flickr user JorgeBRAZIL)

Brazil has made great strides in reducing Amazon deforestation in recent years, bringing rates down about 80% over the last six years. But President Dilma Rousseff is already showing signs of backsliding on her environmental commitments in just her first year in office.

It’s a trend environmental groups have been following since Rousseff was sworn in last January, and one New York Times reporter Alexei Barrionuevo captures well in his recent story, "In Brazil, Fears of a Slide Back for Amazon Protection."

With global emissions from deforestation contributing about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions – as much as all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and airplanes combined – a lot is at stake in next month’s vote on a forest protection law in Brazil’s House of Representatives.

Whether Brazil, home to about 40% of the world’s remaining tropical forests, continues to reduce deforestation or not could depend on the outcome of the vote, and President Rousseff’s sign-off.

Forest Code enforcement and new protected areas slashed deforestation in 2000s under Marina Silva

Brazil’s law regulating deforestation on private land, the Forest Code, has been around since 1965; until relatively recently, it was hardly enforced and rarely obeyed.

That changed under former Environment Minister Silva. In 2003 she launched a national Plan for the Prevention and Control of Amazon Deforestation that ramped up law enforcement and established 600,000 square kilometers – an area the size of France – of new protected areas. These indigenous lands, parks, and forest-land reserves were located in the areas most affected by the expansion of agriculture.

Coupled with a temporary decline in agriculture commodity prices, the Plan brought deforestation way down, and persuaded policy makers that Brazil could commit not only to a national deforestation target, but to an overall national emissions reduction target as well.

Brazil made just such a commitment at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, pledging to reduce its emissions 36–39% below business-as-usual emissions by 2020 — the first emissions reductions target taken by any major developing country.  And Brazil is ahead of schedule to meet this 2020 target, having already reduced about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide below its 1996–2005 baseline – on the order of what the EU has pledged to do by 2020.

However, while the deforestation plan was supposed to have a carrot (positive incentives for conservation) in addition to the stick (cracking down on illegal deforestation), so far it’s pretty much been all stick and no carrot: lots of law enforcement, but no incentives to keep the forests standing.

Farmers lash back

Many large-scale farmers in Brazil historically had railed against the Forest Code as being too restrictive, but were too busy cutting down trees to plant cattle pasture and soybeans to do much about it. Since the Code was rarely enforced, they didn’t much care.

An aerial view of Mato Grosso shows the stark distinctions between protected forests and land that has been cleared for cattle pasture or agriculture.

But they started to take notice when government, under Minister Marina Silva, began enforcing the Code and fining them for violations.

They also noticed when the environmental group Greenpeace mobilized big European soy importers to declare a moratorium on soy imports from land deforested after 2006, and when national supermarket chains, prodded by Brazil’s Attorney General, called for deforestation-free beef in 2009. Most people in urban Brazil agree that Amazon deforestation should stop, and support such measures.

For many of the large-scale farmers in Brazil and their powerful block of congressional representatives – the “ruralistas” – the solution to their not being in compliance with the law when government started enforcing it was to weaken the law.

So for the past two years, the ruralistas have been making a concerted push to radically weaken the Forest Code.

Last June, the ruralistas pushed a revised Forest Code through the lower house of Congress that amounted to a license to deforest. The bill, sponsored by a ruralista-friendly member of the Communist party, would fix the ruralistas’ problem by giving an amnesty for past illegal deforestation, and could open up new land for clearance.

Environmentalists and the Brazilian scientific community strongly contested the House bill. President Rousseff had promised during the presidential campaign to veto a new Forest Code that would increase deforestation or amnesty past illegal deforestation, but her administration was a belated and ineffective participant in the House debate.

In December, the Senate passed somewhat improved amendments to the Code, which, however, still includes an amnesty for some past illegal deforestation.

This bill now returns to the House for a final vote in March.

The amnesty for deforestation that has plagued these bills is unfair to the few farmers who made the effort to comply with the law, and could give all farmers the bad idea that if one new law granting amnesty for illegal deforestation is good, two – or more – are better. If farmers think that an amnesty now means that future illegal deforestation will eventually be amnestied too, they will take the new Code as a license to deforest. Penalties for scofflaws, and a clear pathway to legality with positive incentives, especially for small famers, would be much better.

Environmentalists are calling on Dilma to keep her campaign promise and veto the amnesty.

Deforestation: the price of progress? Not really.

For years, the ruralistas have insisted with increasing vehemence that the current Forest Code is an enormous, unfair obstacle to the growth of Brazilian agriculture. (They also often claim that environmentalists who support the Forest Code are no more than a front for foreign agriculture interests trying to protect themselves against Brazilian competition).

But there is solid evidence that while deforestation rates were falling to the lowest levels on record, Brazil and Amazon states were getting richer and agriculture production was growing to record levels.

A vivid example is Brazil’s biggest agricultural state, Mato Grosso.

Deforestation (red line in Fig. 1 above) in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso plummeted as production of soybeans (green) and cattle (blue) increased substantially from 2001-2010. (PNAS)

The state had the highest deforestation rate in the Amazon from 2000–2005, but over the next five years (2006-2010) saw deforestation fall more than 70% below historic levels. At the same time, agriculture production reached an all-time high, according to a recent article in the leading scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In “Decoupling of deforestation and soy production in the southern Amazon during the late 2000s,” Marcia Macedo, Ruth DeFries and others also show in great detail that in recent years, while soy prices and production picked up substantially, deforestation kept going down.

Ruralista rhetoric to the contrary, Brazil and Amazon states have shown decisively that, so far, they have the wherewithal to reduce deforestation substantially while they grow their economies and their agriculture sectors.

Brazil should encourage – not undercut – global action against climate change

However, as the Times story correctly notes, Forest Code amendments threaten to usher in open season on forests. The government has watered down environmental licensing for big infrastructure projects like dams and roads and has rolled back protected areas in the Amazon by a form of executive fiat. Brazil’s Congress is also considering a bill that would give it a veto over recognizing new indigenous lands.

Brazil is home to about 40% of the world's tropical forests and a pioneer in policies to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), which could provide the positive economic incentives needed to maintain Brazil's progress in continuing to curb deforestation.

Perhaps most critically, there has been little progress on providing the carrot – positive economic incentives to keep deforestation going down and to restore degraded forests – that Brazil needs in order to sustain the progress it made during the last decade into the future.

One candidate for the carrot is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)  – the concept that reducing deforestation is good for the atmosphere and needs international compensation. Brazil was one of the pioneers of this idea in the international climate talks, and consequently created the Amazon Fund, to which Norway has committed $1 billion if the country continues to meet its 2020 target.

Brazil’s National Climate Change Policy also calls for the creation of a Brazilian emissions reductions market. But the federal government has made little headway on creating its own carbon market and has been reluctant to look at linking up with international carbon markets to pay for reducing deforestation. Both could go a long way to creating the incentives needed to grow the economy and sustainably expand agriculture and forestry, while stopping deforestation and restoring degraded forests.

What all of this means is that Brazil still leads the world in reducing carbon emissions because of its success in reducing Amazon deforestation – but risks reversing the trend if it approves a general amnesty for illegal deforestation. President Rousseff should listen carefully to Brazil’s world-class scientific community on how to balance environmental protection and development priorities, in the Forest Code and more broadly.

As Brazil prepares to host the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, it will find no lack of major developed countries to criticize for foot-dragging, omission, or outright obstruction on global environmental issues.  Ambitious new commitments on environment and development are unlikely under the specter of economic crisis in the EU and anemic growth in the U.S. Blaming richer countries for tepid results is one possible outcome.

But if President Rousseff  musters the political will to kill the deforestation amnesty and save the Forest Code, Brazil could do much better in Rio+ 20. It might find ways to use its world-leading achievement in reducing emissions from deforestation to chart the way to both more ambitious commitments and effective actions from other major economies going forward, and for funding for a sustainable low-carbon development strategy.

By Steve Schwartzman

This past week I could have sworn I was back in the 1980s, based on the news coming out of Brazil.

Brazil's powerful agriculture caucus (bancada ruralista) and Communist Party led the charge in the House of Representatives to pass a bill that, if enacted, would essentially legalize deforestation in vast amounts of land.

And three activists who worked for years to protect forests from illegal logging were killed for their efforts.

Then, yesterday, the Brazilian environmental agency approved the Belo Monte dam – a hydroelectric project so controversial and flawed that the Federal Attorney General's office brought a series of lawsuits against it, most of which have not been judged, and recommended that it not be licensed.

As someone who works with indigenous and environmental groups in Brazil and has been active in tropical forest policy for years, I find this series of events deeply troubling, and reminiscent of the Brazilian Amazon's dark past. And these events come at a time when, because of strong pressure on land use from increasing commodity prices, and an expectation that the Congress would revise the 1965 Forest Code, the clearing of trees for expanding farms and cattle ranching in the Amazon rainforest is on the rise, possibly up 30% over last year.

Brazil's government is at a crossroads – either it can go back to a future of rampant deforestation and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment. Senate action on the Forest Code over the next few months could spell the difference.

Is Brazil going backward or forward?

Forests are slashed and burned in Brazil primarily to expand cattle ranching and agriculture. Above: Cows graze in a pasture where lush forests -- still visible in the distance -- once stood in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

This series of events recalls the former status-quo, business-as-usual days when deforestation was accepted – even promoted – as a necessary corollary to development and prosperity.

Those were the days when Brazil was the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, with about 70% of its emissions caused by clearing forests.  At the height of deforestation, the Amazon was losing more than 21,000 km2 – more than 8,000 square miles, about twice the size of Connecticut – of forest a year.

Those were also the days when grassroots environmental and union leaders were killed for working to protect the forest and forest peoples' rights; prominent activists like rubber tapper and union leader Chico Mendes and Roman Catholic Sister Dorothy Stang were both slain for their efforts to keep forests standing for the sake of communities' livelihoods and the environment.

Brazil has come a long way since then, particularly in reducing deforestation and altering public perception of it.

Reducing deforestation: Brazil has experienced seven years of almost uninterrupted decreases in deforestation, establishing it as the world leader in greenhouse gas pollution reductions. Between 2006 and 2010, Brazil has reduced Amazon deforestation about two-thirds below the annual average from 1996–2005, reducing about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution.  This was due largely to the 2003 National Plan to Prevent and Control Amazon Deforestation and the subsequent 2009 National Climate Change Policy, in which Brazil committed to reducing deforestation 80% below the 1996–2005 average by 2020.

Social shift against deforestation: Popular opinion on the Amazon has clearly changed – most people want deforestation to stop. Most people also think that murders for hire in land conflicts should be punished – and in cases when international spotlights shone on Amazon assassinations, like Chico Mendes and Sister Dorothy Stang, it seemed as though the rule of law could be taking hold.

But despite these encouraging environmental strides, and even aside from the passage of the explicitly anti-environment bill, three disturbing themes of the past couple weeks are calling into question just how permanent Brazil's environmental progress is:

1. Lethal intolerance of activists who protect forests

José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, a Brazil nut gatherer and forest defender, was slain the morning of the Forest Code vote with his wife Maria do Espírito Santo in Nova Ipixuna, in Pará state in the Brazilian Amazon.  The couple had long resisted illegal logging and forest clearing for smelters for pig iron (made from iron ore and charcoal and used for manufacturing steel) and had received numerous death threats. In a public lecture in November 2010 José Claudio said, recalling slain grassroots environmental leaders Chico Mendes (1988) and Sister Dorothy Stang (2005), "What they did to Chico Mendes and Sister Dorothy, they want to do to me."

Then, on Friday, May 27th small-scale farmer leader Adelino Ramos was shot dead in Vista Alegre do Abunã, in Rondonia state.  Ramos had received death threats for denouncing illegal logging in the region.

And on Saturday May 28th, the body of a small-scale farmer Eremilton Pereira dos Santos, was found shot to death about 7 km away from where José Claudio and Maria were killed.  Police say they do not know whether these three killings are related, but representatives of the Pastoral Land Commission surmise that Eremilton may have witnessed the earlier killings.

2. Heavy influence of the Agriculture Caucus on Congress's Forest Code debate

Listening to the Forest Code debate in the Brazilian Congress so far is about as informative and edifying as listening to the U.S. Congress talk about climate change – that is, to say, not very.

It is commonly agreed within Brazil that the 1965 Forest Code needs revision and updating.  But Communist Party representative and author of the just-passed bill Aldo Rebelo didn't focus on looking at other solutions, like using taxes, credit or a carbon market to incentivize farmers to keep forests standing or restore past deforestation.

The Rebelo proposal instead falsely supposes that forests are inherently, as Márcio Santilli of the Instituto Socioambiental put it, "nothing more than 'anti-food'" – that more forest means less agriculture, less growth and less development.  Rebelo's bill, and its ultimate success, capitalized on the erroneous, purely ideological notion that environmental regulation is a foreign plot designed to keep Brazilian agriculture from competing with U.S. agriculture.

The agriculture caucus leadership has a sense of entitlement and cronyism about it that can get ugly. During the discussion before the vote on Tuesday, former Environment Minister and current Congressman José Sarney Filho made a motion in the House to ask for the federal police to investigate the killing of Ribeiro and his wife – and was met with boos from the agriculture caucus.

Brazil's farmers deserve better political representation than this. I've met farmers and ranchers across the Amazon who have worked hard to build productive, competitive businesses, and are proud that they're in compliance with the current law.  These voices are not being heard in this debate, and if the Rebelo bill is enacted, they will be penalized for their efforts, while the scofflaws will be rewarded.

3. Surge in deforestation

In mid-May, we learned that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in March and April may have spiked dramatically over those same months last year, and Brazil's Environment Ministry and many researchers hold that expectations that the Congress would weaken forest protection requirements in the Forest Code are contributing to the increase.  Preliminary reports from Brazil's National Space Research Agency (INPE) now suggest that deforestation has increased about 30% from last year, which is also widely attributed to the anticipation of the approval of the new Forest Code.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in March and April may have increased dramatically over last year. Above: Deforestation has replaced tropical forest with cattle pasture in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

So, what does all this mean for Brazil?

EDF believes that the brutal killings, the influence of the agriculture caucus, the rapidly increasing deforestation, and the House vote to cripple Brazil's environmental legislation, must be met with a solid government response for Brazil to maintain its international leadership on the environment. And we're not the only ones calling for action at this critical juncture.

The Forest Code changes were opposed by Brazil's major national scientific associations – the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science – as well as numerous forestry sector trade associations and ten former Environment Ministers. The Ministers wrote in a letter to President Dilma Rousseff:

"We understand… that history has reserved for our times… above all, the opportunity to lead a great collective effort for Brazil to proceed on its pathway as a nation that develops with social justice and environmental sustainability."

And the range of interests that came together to support forest protect protection – the scientific community, the National Council of Brazilian Bishops, the national association of attorneys, small farmers' organizations and environmentalists — are coming together to provide the efforts needed to produce balanced and fair revisions to the Forest Code.

If enacted, the House language would open up wholesale entire categories of land that are now protected, and could completely roll back the progress Brazil has made in the last seven years by:

• Giving amnesty for past illegal deforestation
• Opening up to deforestation hundreds of thousands of acres of currently protected forests along watercourses, on steep slopes and hilltops and mangrove swamps
• Making virtually any regulation against forest clearance unenforceable, by inter alia, allowing illegal deforestation to be compensated with replanting over a twenty year period.

Justification for change in Forest Code "patently false"

The most common justification for Congressional support for the bill – that environmental regulation has shackled Brazil's development and growth of agriculture – is patently false.  The Communist Party's Rebelo and his large landholder and rancher allies also justified the measure in the name of small farmers burdened with environmental restrictions.

The fact is, since 2003, Brazil's economy has grown steadily and robustly and some 25 million people escaped poverty, all while Amazon deforestation declined two-thirds below the average of the previous decade.  In recent years, Brazil has become the world's largest exporter of beef, chicken and sugar, and the second biggest exporter of soy.

And major small farmers' organizations actually opposed the bill.  The Amazon has enormous potential for growth through intensification – some 80% of the deforested land in the Amazon is extremely low-yield cattle pasture (less than one head per hectare).  Small farmers are poor because they lack access to credit, technology and technical assistance, not because of environmental regulation, as Rebelo claims.

World watching Brazil as Forest Code moves to Senate, President

An aerial view of deforestation in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

The House passage of the Forest Code is certainly not the end of this story.

The bill now goes to Brazil's Senate, which could spend months debating it.  (Before last week's passage of the bill, the House had been debating the Forest Code since 2009). The rapporteur for the bill, Senator Jorge Viana, has an outstanding record on forest protection and sustainable development as former governor of Acre state. If the Senate makes any changes, the bill goes back to the House, and so on, until the bill's language is agreed. The bill is then sent to President Rousseff, who has the option to veto portions of the bill or the entire bill.

During Rousseff's presidential campaign last fall, she pledged to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 39 percent by 2020.  Reuters quotes the then-candidate saying, in regards to these pledges from her environmental platform:

"I will keep those promises.”

President Rousseff and the Senate have — and should grab — the opportunity to preserve Brazil's leadership on sustainable development and signal investors that they can count on rule of law and a stable investment environment in a plethora of sustainable, green economy alternatives from biofuels, to sustainable forestry and forest carbon credits.

However, if the bill should pass the Senate and be enacted as currently written, it could, over time, erase Brazil's gains in controlling Amazon deforestation, undermine the considerable international stature the country gained through its environmental leadership, and foreclose Brazil's enormous green growth potential.

With Brazil set to host the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development next year, the world will be watching the Senate and President closely.

Read EDF's press release: Brazil's Forest Code vote would cripple environmental regulation, call into question country’s environmental leadership

Learn more about EDF's work in Brazil and the Amazon.

By Steve Schwartzman

Since 2004, Environmental Defense Fund and partners Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Foundation for Life, Production and Preservation (FVPP) have been working on a project to create and implement the world’s largest continuous tropical forest corridor, in Brazil’s Xingu River Basin.

Xingu River Basin Protected Areas from space. The Protected Areas Corridor covers about half of the basin. Source: Alicia Rolla, Instituto Socioambiental (2009)

At 27 million hectares, the corridor is about the size of the United Kingdom.  Like the United Kingdom, you can see it from space.

While protected areas are still verdant, an explosion of deforestation around cattle ranching, soy farming and other activities has devastated forests on the frontier.  If you were to look on the corridor from Earth’s moon, you could make out a distinct line where the forest stops and the frontier begins.

Since deforestation contributes to about 15% of global carbon dioxide emission, there’s an environmental imperative to preserve tropical forests.

But there’s also a very real human element: The Xingu Indigenous Park area of the basin alone is home to 18 indigenous communities and features 16 languages.

Indigenous community survives disease and displacement, takes future into own hands

One of these groups is the Panará community.  Thirty years ago I lived among the Panará while doing anthropological field work. One of their leaders, Krentom, is a friend to this day.  When I think about what’s happened (and happening) in the region, I think about it through the experience of Krentom.

My friend Krentom, a leader of the Panará community.

The story of indigenous communities in Brazil since the last half of the 20th century is one of tragedy and transformation.  They went from having generic constitutional rights, but almost no land, to enjoying full recognition under the law and extensive forested territories.  They’re now stewards of 20% of the Amazon – an area of forest twice the size of California –and are  at the core of the Brazilian government’s forest protection efforts.  None of this came easily.

In the early 1970s, the Brazilian government built a major road through the Panará’s traditional homeland, which would prove devastating to the environment and the community.  With the road came previously unknown diseases that claimed 60% of the population at the time.

Areas of deforestation in the Xingu River Basin shown in orange. Deforestation levels in 1994 are on the left, and in 2005 on the right. Source: Instituto Socioambiental (2009)

The survivors were relocated by the government, and Krentom led them through the difficult process of putting their community back together as their traditional lands were destroyed by ranching and logging.  In the mid-1990s, EDF and ISA helped the Panará regain a forest area about the size of Delaware — their remaining traditional land — in what is today the Xingu Protected Areas Corridor.

The Panará took their future into their own hands, establishing their presence by way of villages and gardens to secure their territory before land grabbers and ranchers could take it.  Their population has returned to at or above pre-1968 levels.

Protecting forests offer indigenous communities path to sustainable prosperity

Many indigenous communities like the Panará are now faced with a dilemma.

Growing up, Krentom didn’t know what it was to be poor.  Now he does.  But what to do?  He’d like economic opportunity, but not from anything that degrades the land (e.g., unsustainable farming) or that violates the law (e.g., illegal logging).

Krentom gets the concept of payment for environmental services, and he likes the idea of REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) programs, which would create a positive economic value to reducing deforestation.  Environmental Defense Fund is working independently and with partner organizations around the world to advance REDD+ work at the regional, national and international level.

This photo from the Panará village of Nansepotiti (their first village in their remaining traditional territory) illustrates the group's vibrant ceremonial life.

REDD+ means much more than cash for forest protection. We’re constantly exploring ways we can better support indigenous communities in their quest for sustainable prosperity.  There are projects that add value to responsibly produced Brazil nut oil, and others that collect seeds from native tree species for sale to reforesting efforts outside of the indigenous lands.  Our partner ISA also worked with indigenous beekeepers, getting jars of certified organic honey on the shelves of the largest supermarket chain in Brazil.

There’s clearly no one simple answer, but there are viable options that can add up to a solution.  The key to all of them is creating a basis for sustainable prosperity, which is why we are working to bring REDD+ into carbon markets.

If you’re interested in other work we’re doing in South America, my colleague Chris Meyer recently wrote about the important role indigenous communities play in Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador are playing in the monitoring, reporting and verifying (MRV) activities associated with REDD+.

By Steve Schwartzman

The sun and sea in Cancún can almost make you forget how difficult it is to get around the U.N. climate conference here.  Hotels, conference center and meeting venues are far from one another, conference bus routes change unexpectedly, traffic ebbs and flows.

The traffic was certainly a challenge last night as we headed to a resort hotel strangely reminiscent of resort hotels in Bali in the 2007 U.N. climate conference, and it was hard to get to our off-site venue.  So it was surprising to see the room slowly fill up for a conference “side-event” hosted by the government of the State of Acre, one of the poorest and most isolated — but also environmentally progressive — states in the Brazilian Amazon.

Signaling the strong interest in Acre’s state sustainable development program and new state System of Incentives for Ecosystem Services (SISA) law, in the audience were climate heavyweights including the Climate Change Director for Brazil’s Environment Ministry; the head of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s national program to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD); the Environment Secretary for Campeche, Mexico; and France’s Special Ambassador for Climate Change.

What’s particularly impressive about Acre is the political stability it has achieved in the past dozen years, after a tumultuous past.  This is primarily due to the Workers’ Party (PT) winning the governor’s office in 1998, bringing to power the group of people who formed the social movement and stood off ranchers and their gunmen to protect the forest with legendary rubber tapper, union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes.

Environment Secretary Eufran Amaral gave a detailed breakdown of what the state has achieved through the Workers’ Party’s three terms in government (and about to start a fourth).  The state has increased its GDP while decreasing deforestation, and has built the basis for a sustainable forest-based economy that includes:

• environmental certification programs and incentives for family farmers
• participatory land-use zoning
• subsidies and tax incentives for forest protection
• an ambitious state incentive program for ecosystem services (SISA), which was passed by the state legislature in October and creates the regulatory infrastructure to certify reductions in deforestation and issue marketable carbon credits

State consultant Dr. Gylvan Meira Filho (former head of Brazil’s Space Agency and vice-chair of the IPCC) explained in rigorous detail the state-of-the-art remote sensing analysis Acre is using to establish a baseline and control for leakage and permanence, with seamless, cross-scale coverage from individual properties to the whole state.

Virgilio Gibbon, economist with the prestigious Getúlio Vargas Foundation, addressed financial mechanisms for the state’s REDD and reforestation programs.

But it was Senator Marina Silva, former environment minister and green party candidate for president, who kept everyone in their seats until the end.  Listening to Marina talk, it’s not hard to understand how she got more than 19% of the vote – from nearly 20 million Brazilians – in the last presidential election, despite her being allotted one minute of TV time per day to campaign, compared to the half-hour allotted to her principal opponent.

I won’t try and capture the extensive landscape she covered, but in one of the more moving parts of her speech she recalled that back when Chico Mendes was alive, she thought nobody else in the world (except perhaps me) cared about what was happening in Acre or the social movement’s issues.  But with time she came to see that there were other people outside of Acre who shared their vision – that they were part of a planetary community of thought that is seeking the same ends, a sustainable and equitable future for the planet.

Like most all here in Cancún, Marina thinks industrialized countries need to take more responsibility for climate change.  It’s not, she said, only a question of emissions, but also of omissions (in particular, omissions in making real commitments to deal with the climate change crisis.)  If we reduce omissions, reducing emissions will follow.

Acre is a good example of what’s most needed here in Cancún, and in the world: vision, pragmatism and the conviction and persistence to make change even when it seems impossibly difficult and distant.

When Chico Mendes was murdered in 1988, almost no one thought the social movement would ever amount to much.  But ten years after he was killed, Chico Mendes came to power in Acre. Last night we heard a lot about how far the state got in the following ten years, and where it's going now.

Last month, Acre and the Mexican state of Chiapas signed an agreement with California through which those states can define the criteria for allowing reduced deforestation to enter California’s carbon market.  This is a major step towards transforming living forests from a problem — and obstacle to development — into a solution for the peoples of the forest and for climate change, as Chico thought they needed to become.

But what’s needed above all in Cancún is to put good ideas into action – as Acre has done, and as Marina did in making Brazil a world leader in emissions reductions.  And while Chico’s home of Xapuri, Acre is a long way from California, I’m sure Chico was there on the stage with Governor Schwarzenegger at the signing of the agreement between their states, and here in Cancún, too.

This is part of a series from EDF's experts, who are blogging regularly from the U.N. climate conference in Cancún on EDF's Climate Talks blog.