Friday, December 7, 2007

Behind Closed Doors with Yvo de Boer

Yvo de Boer is a very busy guy this week. But yesterday, Yvo (as everyone seems to call him), who heads the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat , invited 50 representatives of non-governmental organizations (environmental groups, trade unionists, youth groups, and last—but hardly least—the private sector) to meet with him. It was a chance to hear his views on how the negotiations are going and for "civil society" to put its own concerns forward. I was there, representing MADRE and the Gender Caucus here in Bali.

To be honest, I was afraid the session might be deadly boring. If you step into the wrong meeting at this climate change conference, you find yourself in a pit of opaque UNFCCC jargon, accompanied by endless charts and graphs presented with a jumble of acronyms that pass for language around here. But the meeting with Yvo was anything but boring. For one thing, he told jokes. Here's a sample:

Someone asked how many more of these meetings would be held this year, considering that developing (read: exploited) countries simply can't afford to come and don't have enough qualified personnel to participate effectively. "We're assessing the cost of enabling developing countries to attend future meetings," Yvo assured us. "Of course, if they don't have the personnel, it won't cost too much!" Yvo giggled, but the man from Ghana sitting by me was not amused.

In fact, developing countries—and poor people in general—are marginalized in this process. When Yvo began his talk, it took him all of about 20 seconds for the words "private sector" to come out of his mouth. A lot of his commentary was devoted to the importance of reassuring corporations that the carbon markets will be going strong for decades to come. A guy called Nick Campbell sitting with Yvo on the stage nodded approvingly. He is the representative of the International Chamber of Commerce, "coordinating the voice of business in Bali," as he explained.

According to Nick and Yvo, the private sector and its booming new carbon market is key to saving the world. You see, the UN Adaptation Fund, which is supposed to finance projects to help people survive and adjust to climate change (though it has yet to give out a penny) is financed by the carbon trade (through a 2% levy on transactions). Never mind that the carbon trade itself is actually accelerating climate change by turning carbon pollution into a valuable new commodity, thereby creating incentives to produce more of it. If this sounds to you like they're making the problem worse in order to solve it, you're not the one who's crazy.

Anna Pinto, an Indigenous activist from India, raised a question that Yvo clearly didn't like. She asked how the Secretariat that he leads is going to protect the rights of people who are harmed by the carbon trade and its "Clean Development Mechanism." CDM, as it's called, is the process by which polluting companies with cash to spare (overwhelmingly based in the Global North) can continue to emit carbon in exchange for financing projects (overwhelmingly in the Global South) that absorb carbon.

CDM does nothing at all to address the root causes of climate change (burning fossil fuels and destroying forests). Its goal, in fact, is not to reduce emissions, but to reduce pressure to cut emissions by giving polluters an easy alternative. CDM also creates a host of problems for communities where projects are implemented, which is what Anna was asking about.

In India, Uganda, Colombia, Uruguay and many other places, the human rights abuses associated with CDM are becoming legion. In fact, most of the community-based and Indigenous Peoples who have come to Bali are here to raise that very issue. Yet, Yvo's response to Anna was categorical. He simply said there are no victims of the CDM.

That's not what members of the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus have to say. But they were not represented in the meeting with Yvo de Boer. We found out afterwards that they were forcibly kept out. That's right—barred from the room by armed security officers. Today, the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus held a protest in response.

Given that we are on the verge of ecological collapse, you might think that world leaders would want to hear from the one global constituency that has successfully managed and maintained the world's most delicate ecosystems for millennia. But no. Let's face it, there's just not much money to be made from community control of forests or low-carbon agricultural technologies.

Finally, I myself got to ask Yvo a question. I asked what he is going to do to ensure that women's perspectives and issues of social justice and human rights are advanced in the UNFCCC process and in the document that governments will commit to next week. Yvo's answer: "I have no idea."


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