Voices from Madagascar’s Forests: “The strangers, they’re selling the wind”

“Many scholars conducting research in Madagascar have demonstrated that the livelihoods of Malagasy people have been negatively impacted by various natural resource conservation and extraction interventions which have burgeoned over the last two decades.” This comes from a report of a June 2010 conference that took place in the UK.

The two-day conference, titled “Voices from Madagascar’s Forests Improving Representation and Rights of Malagasy Forest Peoples,” took place at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia in the UK. Despite the evidence of the impact of conservation and mining on local communities in Madagascar, the report of the conference (available here – pdf file, 1.2 MB) notes that,

Almost no mechanism exists enabling the voices of communities living in or near protected or mined areas to be properly heard, and at the same time conservation organisations and mining companies provide little publicly available information which is evidence based about the claims of the social impacts of their activities.

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Green Resources’ carbon plantations in Tanzania: Curse or cure?

A recent report gives a critical view of the Clean Development Mechanism in Africa. The report, “The CDM in Africa: Can’t Deliver the Money”, draws together a dozen researchers under the guidance of Patrick Bond of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.

One of the chapters in the report, co-authored by Adrian Nel and Kadija Sharife, looks at a Norwegian company called Green Resources AS and its plantation operations in Tanzania.

Green Resources was founded by Norwegian forestry analyst Mads Asprem in 1995. According to the company website, it employed 5,300 people at the end of 2010 and has invested US$100 million in its operations in Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Southern Sudan.

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Carbon Discredited: Why the EU should steer clear of forest carbon offsets (Mozambique)

Ten years ago, the EU invested over 1.5 million Euros in the N’hambita carbon project in Mozambique, a model scheme to show how forests could be used to offset industrial emissions. This press release coincides with the release of a report – ‘Carbon Discredited' -  explaining why forest carbon projects fail to provide climate, environment, development  or financial gains. The organisations call on the EU and Member States to stop funding carbon offset projects, including REDD+ projects.

Download the Report here.

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