Today, on the way to a meeting with the local NGO Elang, I passed villagers from the Kampar Peninsula, a carbon-rich and biodiverse ecoystem that is under attack by Sinar Mas’ oil palm operations and their timber division Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), on a hunger strike.

In front of the provincial parliament building, a group of men and women from the village of Kijang Kejo have set up a plastic tarp and banner, announcing to Riau’s elected officials that they will not eat until the oil palm plantation PT Arindo Tri Sejahtera, who stole their land and then paid thugs to kill three of their family members, is brought to justice.

10 days into their hunger strike, the villagers are pale and weak, sleeping while motor bikes and buses fly by them on the road. They told me they have not been able to meet with any members of the provincial government, and were not sure how much longer they could last without food.

The group that owns this particular plantation, Surya Dumai, might be on the nastier end of the scale of dirty, dangerous, and destructive oil palm and timber companies, but this is how the resource extraction game is played here in Riau, Sumatra; buy the military, government, and media and trample any local people that dare to stand up for their rights.

APP and Sinar Mas have been shown to violate Indonesian law and human rights, but with the authorities in their pocket, it is us, the consumers of timber and palm oil, that must demand  producers respect forests and the people who inhabit them.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Today Gucci Group, the prestigious conglomerate of fashion and luxury brands, including such brands as Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and Balenciaga, announced their move out of Indonesian and other endangered forests as a first step in implementing an industry-leading paper policy.  This policy is a continuation of the Gucci Group’s interest in curbing climate change, about twenty percent of which stems from forest loss, and through it, the Gucci Group has pledged to reduce the amount of paper it uses, eliminate fiber from high conservation value forests, and only purchase recycled products or those certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by December 2010.

Gucci Group’s leadership is commendable and sets Indonesian rainforest protection as the new fall trend for other fashion and luxury brands to follow.  Gucci Group’s policy puts it at the front of a list of major companies—including Tiffany & Co., H&M Group, Hugo Boss, and Ferragamo—that have decided  they don’t want their brands to be associated with the destruction of rainforests or with encouraging climate change.

Not everyone has caught onto the new fall fashion trend, however. Three companies that could use some encouragement to follow Gucci Group’s lead are Calvin Klein, Coach, and Marc Jacobs.

Our research indicates that these companies are implicated in Indonesian rainforest destruction through purchasing throwaway paper shopping bags from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and its affiliates. APP is the biggest Indonesian rainforest destroyer for paper and is responsible for past and ongoing clearing and converting of vast areas of rainforests and peat lands in Sumatra and Borneo.

I am sure that Calvin Klein, Coach, and Marc Jacobs can do better than doing business with some of Indonesia’s worst rainforest destroyers. Gucci Group has demonstrated that the fashion industry can make a difference for rainforests and for the climate. Now it’s time for the others to join.

Calvin Klein, Coach and Marc Jacobs should follow Gucci’s lead, and stop purchasing throwaway paper shopping bags from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and others who source from Indonesian and Endangered Forests. By implementing leadership paper policies, Calvin Klein, Coach and Marc Jacobs have the opportunity to protect rainforests and the climate and make Indonesian rainforest protection a fall fashion trend that won’t be forgotten.

Meanwhile, more and more companies and business groups (Apple, Exelon, PG&E) are dropping their membership in the Chamber and public opposition to the Chambers’ climate change denial is growing. The latest opposition is coming from the high tech sector, where the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Joint Venture are running an ad campaign against the Chamber for its opposition. And the Chamber is on the run, having been forced to backpedal on its claims to be the voice of the business community; last week the Chamber claimed to ‘represent’ 3 million businesses, but this week it quietly reduced that number to ‘300,000’ members. Investors are calling for companies that they own shares in to drop their membership in the Chamber, and local Chambers are formally distancing themselves from the US Chamber’s opposition to action on climate change.

As well they should. The Chamber of Commerce is behind the times: most companies have caught up with modern public values on climate change. For nearly ten years, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been surveying the leading global companies for their responses on climate change. In the most recent report issued earlier this year, 82% of the world’s largest 500 companies responded to the questionaire on their carbon emissions, 68% are reporting and tracking their emissions, and 51% have disclosed emissions reduction targets, all to report to investors representing over $55 trillion in capital investments. These companies are implementing global action plans for a carbon-constrained world, but the US Chamber of Commerce representing many if not most of these companies is heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s a note to Corporate America: every single company that claims to be taking climate change seriously yet continues to support the climate-change denying Chamber of Commerce, companies like Cargill, Microsoft (MSFT), Toyota (TM), FedEx (FDX) and Ford (F) – it’s time to come clean.

The US Chamber of Commerce is a national embarrassment, and corporations that continue to support this institution are standing in the way of progress in stopping climate change. It’s time for Chamber members to change or leave.

Supporting this belief, a new study by researchers at U of Illinois and U of Michigan has added to the growing body of evidence that indigenous peoples are better protectors of their forests than governments or industry. In a review of 80 forests in 10 tropical countries, the study showed that when indigenous and local communities own their forests, they effectively conserve their forest resources over the long term.

Reflecting the growing momentum behind viewing rainforests as carbon sinks that can either exacerbate or reduce climate change, the researchers measured the carbon emissions from forests under community and government control. The New Scientist recently ran an interview with the authors of this research, who said “our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities.” This is a bold assertion, but one that is supported by their research.

However, the idea that indigenous peoples are the best protectors of rainforests is considered controversial by some, who usually argue that forests should be protected by governments, following the National Parks model of conservation pioneered by the USA.

In this model, forests are enclosed in conservation areas and put off-limits, supposedly to be protected from loggers and commercial agribusiness by government agencies. This rational has been used to move control of forests away from indigenous peoples and into the hands of the government in many tropical nations. In an article cited by hundreds, researchers highlighted the  problems with this approach in Indonesian Borneo, where conservation areas lost over half of their forest cover in the period from 1985 to 2001.  These supposedly protected areas have become increasingly fragmented, degraded, and isolated, greatly decreasing ecosystem functions.

Another compelling piece of evidence supporting indigenous peoples’ ability to protect forests comes from Brazilian Amazonia. In a study published in Conservation Biology, researchers showed that many indigenous lands prevent deforestation completely even though there are high  rates of forest destruction directly outside their borders. In a compelling statement for the value of the protections indigenous peoples give to forests, the researchers claim that indigenous lands are the most important barrier to deforestation in the Amazon.

As usual, the research is racing to catch up with what indigenous peoples around the world have known for hundreds of years: indigenous people’s are the most effective protectors of tropical forests.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.

He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Recently divisions have cropped up in the U.S. Chamber. Three prominent utilities dumped the chamber in the last month, publicly slamming the Chamber’s position on climate change. Nike just left its position on the board of directors. Brad Figel, Nike’s director of government relations, told Greenwire that “We just weren’t clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made.” And yesterday, computer giant Apple announced it was leaving the Chamber over climate policy.

What gives? What could the trade group be doing that has so offended its major members?

For starters, back in August, the Chamber filed a petition opposing the regulation of CO2 emissions by the EPA. This despite the fact that the EPA is acting under orders of the Supreme Court, which found in 2007 that CO2 is indeed a pollutant within the EPA’s mandate to regulate.

If that wasn’t sufficiently offensive to Chamber members, then the content and messaging surrounding the petition certainly should have been. The Chamber was setting about to equate climate science with evolution and link their denial of climate science with a belief in creationism. This, from the world’s largest business lobby.

Chamber VP Bill Kovacs publicly called to subject climate change to “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” Kovacs goes further, believing that federal action on climate change will “virtually destroy the United States.”

Of course now that companies are calling them out, Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue has changed the tune, saying that “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to support strong federal legislation and a binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change.” Just not on these terms. Even though current climate legislation gives away all the rights to pollute to the industries currently polluting, that’s still not enough for the Chamber.

The Chamber’s actions as well as its rhetoric are out of step with modern public values. It’s time for more companies to distance themselves from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Walking in the streets with these people was powerful and achingly painful at the same time – almost all of them are living without access to clean drinking water and many of them can’t afford to buy bottled water. I watched as an elderly indigenous woman drank deeply from a plastic water bottle that had been handed to her by one of the Frente (the coalition of groups working to fight Chevron and represent the affected peoples), wondering when the last time was that she had quenched her thirst without poisoning her body. It sounds dramatic, but it is no word of exaggeration to say that these people are dying. The indigenous groups are losing the last of their land and livelihoods and the peasant farmers are barely surviving on land that is growing more and more toxic as oil from the waste pits leaches out into streams and rivers.

Is there any doubt about this? I don’t think so. Just two nights earlier, I was sitting in the lounge of our hotel in Quito when a clean-cut American man came into the room and began to work on his computer. I asked him what his business in Ecuador was and he replied that he was just here for a visit to the Galapagos Islands. But as it turns out, Rick is a biophysical chemist, specializing in cancer research. So I inquired without telling him why I wanted to know: “is there any way that there is NO connection between long-term exposure to crude oil and cancer”. I expected to get some scientific prevarication, but Rick didn’t even pause, not for a second. “No way at all” he said.

Are you listening Chevron? These people need something very simple – clean water, free from crude oil residue. Or they will die.

Before I arrived in Ecuador, I read about the terrible health problems that settlers and indigenous people living in the oil-affected area are experiencing. I knew about the toxic oil pits and the constant gas flaring. I knew that people were sick. But I wasn’t prepared for Fabiola. Fabiola was born with her heart on the wrong side of her body and doctors said that she would never walk. She proved them wrong on that count, but she is tiny for her age and she and her mother have had to make endless trips to doctors, sometimes traveling for days, to try and diagnose her many illnesses.

Fabiola’s grandmother moved to Taracoa twenty-three years ago, looking for land to farm. Texaco (now owned by Chevron) was already operating in the area, but the family didn’t know that the land they chose was right beside a toxic waste pit. The oil company didn’t advertise the whereabouts of its disposal sites, and hundreds of people moved into the area to set up home, not realizing that they were settling in an area that was so profoundly polluted. Oil from the open waste pits has been seeping into groundwater and streams for decades, gradually contaminating all the potable water in an area the size of Rhode Island. Animals started to die and over time, people started falling sick at unusually high rates.

Fabiola’s mother told us that she used to tend to the cows close by their house when she was pregnant with her daughter. Most days she would spend walking around the oil pit, and drinking water from the family’s well. It smelt like crude oil, and had a constant film of oil floating on the top, but it was their only source of water. Chevron/Texaco for their part assured residents of the area that the crude oil was actually good for them, encouraging people to rub it on their skin to treat arthritis. To this day Chevron claims that there is no connection between exposure to crude oil and human illness, an assertion that would be laughable if the effects were not so tragic.

Fabiola was born with severe birth defects just like many other children whose families live on the edge of Chevron’s oil sites. The company claims that they have cleaned up their mess, but one look at a ‘remediated site’ makes it abundantly clear that the so-called clean up is a cover up at best. There is very little that the residents of Taracoa can do to help the little ones like Fabiola who have already been so affected by Chevron’s legacy. Almost everyone buys their drinking and washing water these days, but money is scarce, and many can’t afford it. Their best hope of a long-terms solution lies in a court case that is being fought to hold the giant oil company accountable for cleaning up its mess once and for all, and for providing healthcare and clean water for all the many people who have suffered from Chevron/Texaco’s irresponsible waste dumping. The company has been fighting the case every step of the way. But I don’t think that any Chevron lawyer or executive who met Fabiola could fail to have a change of heart, and I hope with all of mine, that Chevron will ensure that hers is the last generation to suffer.

Sumatra is ground zero for the oil palm and pulp-and-paper industries, and, like many tropical habitats, suffers from a severe lack of forest cover and deforestation data to inform natural resource use discourse.

The REDD project in Aceh, named ‘Reducing Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in the Ulu Masen Ecosystem’, is to be implemented by Flora and Fauna International, and Merrill Lynch signed on to fund the carbon project back in 2007.

Over the past two years, this project has been mired in political and practical considerations including uncertainty over the involvement of the Indonesian Government in a private and voluntary carbon project, as well as the status of project funding during Merrill Lynch’s financial implosion.

But many observers in Aceh and in the environmental community consider it a shining example of the positives REDD can potentially deliver to the protection of forests, local communities, and the world’s climate; California, along with two other US states, has committed to purchasing carbon offsets generated by the project.

With their paper, Gaveau et al. have produced the region’s first reliable deforestation maps, a critical tool for forest management and policy groups. These maps depict historical deforestation rates in Aceh and also serve as a model for future deforestation scenarios. This research is on the forefront of landscape ecology by not simply generating a ‘one-rate-fits-all’ model for deforestation in Aceh, but rather it evaluates the importance of factors such as road expansion and forest type – parameters that significantly impact the chance that any given block of forest is deforested.

REDD and deforestation scenarios in Aceh through 2030

The researchers used their new forest deforestation maps to examine the potential for Ulu Masen’s REDD project to effectively conserve Aceh’s forests. Using some basic assumptions of potential REDD scenarios, Gaveau et al conclude that the Ulu Masen project will only protect a small percentage of Aceh’s forest, and very little of Aceh’s highly threatened lowland forests.

The researchers are correct to point out that limiting REDD efforts to large protected areas of forest will not give any protection to many fragments of primary forest immediately threatened by oil palm concessions or other agribusiness throughout Aceh, and to focus on the giant role road expansion plays in deforestation.

The paper proposes an alternate REDD model, where these endangered forest fragments are protected with REDD-based revenues, which are paid directly to land owners to compensate for potential revenues earned through the conversion of forest to oil palm or other agriculture. This would be in place of Ulu Masen’s focus on funding law enforcement to protect the Ulu Masen Ecosystem Protected Area.

Road construction and deforestation risk

I commend Gaveau et al. for thinking big and working out the details of how to maximize forest conservation in Aceh with REDD revenues.  They realistically point out that the current price of carbon offsets will have trouble competing with oil palm development, and, in my opinion, this might indeed be a fatal flaw in the potential implementation of their ‘maximum forest protection’ model in Aceh.

Their work makes clear that the Ulu Masen REDD project is not sufficient to protect all of Aceh’s forests, which is a valid contention. But in my view, the Ulu Masen project is promising not because it attempts to conserve all of Aceh’s forests, but rather because it attempts to establish a novel pathway to securing long term funding for the protection of a single block of Aceh’s forest.

In fact, as deforestation rates recover to pre-tsunami and pre-conflict levels in the province, any measure that secures the protection of Aceh’s forests from oil palm and illegal loggers deserves support.

After a year and a half of taking a close look at the social and economic dynamics of illegal logging and oil palm expansion in Aceh, I have serious concerns if Gaveau et al’s maximum forest protection REDD scenario could ever be implemented in Aceh. While working with the Leuser International Foundation, I became acutely aware of the giant political and community support road building projects, in particular. Even with the implementation of a comprehensive REDD-based forest protection project in Aceh, efforts by Acehnese politicians and industry to expand Aceh’s limited road network will remain.

As Gaveau et al. point out, current carbon offset prices would have trouble competing with potential profits from oil palm and illegal logging revenues. An additional barrier would be the enormous technical challenge of monitoring a large patchwork of forest fragments for changes in carbon stocks over time. And the absolutely essential outreach needed to gain local communities support in any REDD project would become a logistical nightmare for even the largest and most capable of implementing partners, not to mention the financial distribution and reporting requirements of an REDD project spread through out rugged and isolated Aceh.

While many REDD mechanisms deserve attention for their potential to fund forest conservation, they must be viewed not as stand alone mechanisms, but as tools to influence the natural resource use debate currently raging in Aceh.  Intrinsic to this approach, REDD project design must be based in the social, economic, and political realities on the ground faced by forest management groups operating in Aceh, not just the carbon quantities or even blocks of forest potentially conserved.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights

The report also finds that if we don’t take action to rein in the rapid global expansion of agrofuels we will in fact be making these problems worse. Particularly when expanding in rainforest regions, the carbon debt accumulated by agrofuels will take decades or sometimes centuries to pay back.

April 2009: Activists protest agrofuels in California

Read the full report at: http://ran.org/fileadmin/materials/comms/mediacontent/reports/Agrofuels_White_Paper.pdf

Margaret Swink’s great depiction of the threat the pulp-and-paper industry poses to the Tigapuluh, and how current climate negotiations in Bangkok completely fail to offer up a Reduced Emissions through Avoided Deforestation (REDD) based solution to save this critically important landscape.

Sinar Mas’ pulp and paper operation in Tigapuluh has shown to be an immediate and dangerous threat:

Climate chaos? The carbon emissions emitted by Sinar Mas’ Tigapuluh operations will be equal to one tenth of total emissions reductions achieved under the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol.

Ecological effects? Leveling rainforests hundreds of thousands of years old will destroy all key ecological functions of the Tigapuluh landscape.

Social impacts? Local people are forced off their land, attracted to dangerous debt schemes, and forced to work as poorly paid day laborers.

Now Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has teamed up with The Wilderness Society and The Australian Orangutan Project to draw a line in the remaining forest that Sinar Mas’ pulp-and-paper industry dare not cross.  There are hundreds of concerned experts watching Sinar Mas’ next steps in Tigapuluh, will they convert the defined buffer area of this protected area to cheap paper products and a monoculture of eucalyptus and oil palm?

The need for a post-kyoto climate agreement in 2010 to provide effective mechanisms to save tropical landscapes from agribusiness giants such as Sinar Mas, and Raja Garuda Mas (now called Royal Golden Eagle) is clear. But will the climate negotiators in Bangkok see the smoke signals?

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.