With a vacuum of federal leadership on climate change, California Governor Jerry Brown convened a first-of-its-kind Global Climate Action Summit in September to forge “deeper worldwide commitments” among global leaders. But the exclusive gathering failed to include those most impacted by the crisis, instead inviting some of the institutions most responsible for it. On the second day of the summit, hundreds of people representing frontline communities, environmental justice organizations, and indigenous groups blocked the entrance, risking arrest. They called out market-based schemes touted at the conference, such as carbon pricing, as false solutions to the climate crisis.
Among these is REDD+, an acronym for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, in which companies invest in environmental projects and forest preservation initiatives around the world to offset their own carbon footprint. But the program, according to Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, allows “corporations from developed countries to buy and sell indigenous lands as commodities, getting richer off of far-away lands ‘preserved’ in exchange for unmitigated carbon emissions at home.”
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Ayşe Gürsöz
The movement against REDD+ has roots that stretch back to 2005, when it was was first placed on the agenda at international climate change negotiations. At the United Nations 20th Conference of Parties in Lima, Peru, in 2014, indigenous peoples from across the globe, including activist and actress Tantoo Cardinal (left) of the Cree Nation and a climate leader Casey Camp-Horinek (center), a Ponca tribal council member, participate in an opening ceremony for a march to protest the conference’s lack of indigenous representation.
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Ayşe Gürsöz
Indigenous leaders and local community organizers block the entrance outside the exclusive Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force at the Global Climate Action Summit in September. They were at the meeting to deliver an open letter to Brown and other members. The task force is pushing market-based and Big-Oil-friendly efforts to address climate change, including carbon trading and offset programs such as REDD+.
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“Carbon trading and carbon tax simply allow the fossil fuel industry to continue to increase climate disruption,” says Isabella Zizi of Idle No More SF Bay, who grew up in Richmond, California, near the infamous Chevron refinery. The REDD+ program proposed in California became so controversial that it was rebranded as the innocuous-sounding “Tropical Forest Standard” (TFS). The TFS would lay the groundwork for accepting REDD+ offset credits into California’s carbon trading system, opening the floodgates for major corporations like Chevron to purchase indigenous lands as carbon credits.
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Chief Ninawa Huni Kui traveled from the Amazon rainforest of Acre, Brazil, to the summit in San Francisco. “Carbon trading does not reduce global warming. It violates our rights to life. It is the same colonialism we’ve been fighting for centuries,” he says. “They used to kill us with bullets; now they create laws and policies.”
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Ayşe Gürsöz
The morning that protesters blocked the entrance to the summit, Chief Ninawa Huni Kui leads demonstrators outside in a traditional “snake dance.” “We know that in the state of California, oil companies are sickening people, killing people,” says Huni Kui.