-A REDD mechanism must make explicit provisions that acknowledge and safeguard the rights, interests and needs of indigenous peoples and local communities in which it operates, and reaffirm rights and benefits under international instruments and treaties, including, inter alia, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

-A REDD mechanism must guarantee the security of land/property/customary use rights of local and indigenous communities as well as provide for and encourage their continued direct participation in the conservation of their forests.

-In many countries, participatory legal reviews to clarify tenure and access rights will be essential before funds from REDD can or should be distributed.

-If the rights, interests and needs of forest dependent peoples are not acknowledged and safeguarded in a REDD scheme, social and economic instability, lack of support, and active resistance to REDD will threaten its effectiveness and permanence and could ultimately cause its demise.

Overall, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation does not have to conflict with protecting indigenous peoples’ rights; indeed it can strengthen them. So the challenges are to a) make sure there is plenty of funding for REDD, and b) fight to make sure the funding mechanism and governance structures are just and effective in an international treaty. The latter fight will be done mostly through international negotiations before and at Copenhagen, but the funding battle is here, now, and critical.

Great job!! Thanks for doing this!

and also, why did all the “strongmen” have to be men? oh wait, patriarchy. also one of the main sponsors of Climate Change.

you all have this opportunity to get up close and personal with the politicians making the decisions that are ruining the future, why don’t you do something a little more radical, in solidarity with people all around the world being totally screwed by the american government and the world bank. please stop promoting capitalism as a solution to climate change, it doesn’t represent the views of those most effected who don’t have the privilege and opportunity to make it to dc to confront senators and have their voices heard [ignored].

REPRESENTED IN PARLIAMENT

APRA: nominally left-wing , actually right-wing;—leader: Alan Garcia
National Alliance: centre-right——————–leader: Lourdes Flores
Nationalist Party: left-wing———————–leader: Ollanta Humala
others(a mixture of minor parties and splits)

OUTSIDE OF PARLIAMENT

Peruvian Communist Party-Red Flag: maoist, dominates teacher’s labor union, SUTEP
Peruvian Communist Party: marxist-leninist,is active in the main labor union, CGTP
ALBA cells: are organisms funded by the government of Venezuela to coordinate political left-wing movements in Peru and other nearby countries.

The ruling party is APRA (American People’s Revolutionary Alliance), leaded by president Alan Garcia Perez. The party (as his name indicates) was once a left-wing party, wich not long ago supported the rebellions agaist the government of Alejandro Toledo (like the Arequipa Insurection of 2002).

Is the second time he is president, the first being from 1985 to 1990, when his disastrous government leave the country ruined by a 100000% inflation and a brutal internal conflict with the maoist Peruvian Communist Party-Shining Path guerrilla during which 70 000 people were murdered.

In the next years the APRA was betrayed by his former ally in the 1990 election, Alberto Fujimori, who established a right-wing distatorship that lasted until a corruption scandal caused his downfall in september 2000.

It was defeated in the 2001 elections by Alejandro Toledo( who headed the anti-Fujimori opposition that ended the dictatorship). Toledo presented him as centre-left, and Alan Garcia as “left”.In the next few years, he and his party suported rebellions , together with far-left groups like the maoist Peruvian-Communist-Party-Red-Flag (from wich Shining Path was an even more extremist split in the 1970s and 1980s)against Toledo government. As an anecdote, there was then (if I remenber right, in 2004) an episode when Garcia gave a strong kick in the butt of a worker who walked in front of him, showing his intollerant behaviour.

In 2006 Garcia was the presidencial candidate for APRA, who presented himself as “left-wing” against the centre-right National-Alliance-Party(a political coalition headed by former Cristian People`s Party) condidate Lourdes Flores, calling her “the rich`s candidate”, until the more radical-left and Venezuela-aided Nationalist Party headed by former military official Ollanta Humala grown ahead of her. Then him began drifting to the right.

Many people(like me) who detested Garcia voted for him as the less of two evils(Humala want to return to the policies of 1970s military dictatorship, a strongly statist dictatorship thar destroyed the contry`s economy. Humala was also aided by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the head of a government who claimed itself “socialist”, while really it is a state-capitalistic dictatorship who live of petroleum exports to the US)in the second electoral round, and after a hard count, he wins.

Many of us were happy that Humala lose the election, and then seems that he has learned to no repeat the economic failures of his first government(that caused from 1988 to 1990 a terrible hyper-inflation).

But in those years after 2006, he was becoming increasingly autoritharian , showed little respect for Amazon and Andine native people, and has forgotten all his left-wing ideas and worried only of economic growth, actually, he is now more right-wing than the cente-right National Alliance Party.

His policy has lead to an increasing social unrest and violence. The Bagua massacre was the last eruption of unrest. Even the former (and moderate) president Alejandro Toledo has denounced his rainforest policy.

The current president approved a group of legislative decrees to made peruvian legislation agree with the TLC ( Free trade treaty, Tratado de Libre Comercio) with the USA. This decrees where approved without parliament intervention and even worse, WITHOUT CONSULTING TO THE AMAZON NATIVES (both things were against peruvian law). The decrees, regarding land property management in the rainforest, triggered a wave of social unrest. The government ignored it for months, while the natives blocked the main local roads, specially around the city of Bagua, in the northern amazon.

Finally, it ordered the police to clear the roads. The police was not prepared (they have no clear plan, and instead of tear gas and rubber bullets, most of them have only MACHINE GUNS!), and when they try to clear the road, a major battle began. After some time, some natives steal the gun from the police, and a riot exploded. In the battle, more than 20 policemen were killed, and an unknown number of natives were wounded or killed ( officially, there were just 9 natives killed, but probably there were several tens dead and hundreds wounded)

When another group of natives hear the news of their killed comrades, they kidnapped 20 policemen from a station post in the north pruvian oleoduct , and began executing 6 of them , until the peruvian army arrived and liberate the others after shooting on the natives.

The president after that began claiming that natives were “salvage murderers” and that an international conspiracy against the peruvian democracy directed the uprising. The official news claimed that the police was the victim. The left political parties claimed that the natives were victim of a massacre. As the information (I pick some of them by international press) arrives, there seems that it was a massacre for both sides.

This was the worst single episode of political violence in Peru, and the cause were both the government incompetence and the activity of some far-left groups who told the natives(falsely) that the government will take his land. Peru is still shocked by this massacre, and the prime minister have resigned for that.

I PERSONALLY DO NOT TAKE ANY SIDE, FOR ME BOTH THE GOVERNMENT AND THE RADICAL OPPOSITION WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TRAGEDY.

Iquitos, capital of the Loreto Region is located in north peruvian amazon. Here there are some oil extraction pits, connected to the cost by the north-peruvian-oleoduct(you can consult a map of the region). Here LIQUID CRUDE OIL is extracted, oil that is exported because we have no petrochemical industry. Here NATURAL GAS IS NOT EXTRACTED.

There is a natural gas field far away in south-central amazon, the Camisea Gas Field, located in the Cuzco Region. The field is in high-elevation rainforest(here we call it “selva alta”). Today is used only for internal(peruvian) consuption. The gas in transported in a gasoduct to the capital Lima, where is destined to industrial, domestic and transportation use. There were plans to export the gas in near future, but they where abandoned when the amount of reserves was revised and found that we will run out of gas by 2012. That means that ALL this natural gas will be destined to the peruvian demand.

The gas discovery and exploitation was actually GOOD NEWS for all peruvians corcerned about polltion. It permitted too swich all petroleum powered thermic power plant to the cleamest gas. Numerous factories use natural gas now , and finally a lot of cars now use it. Natural gas is much cleaner than petroleum derivatives. It emits more than 25% less carbon dioxide(CO2), and more important, it soot and sulfur emissions are near zero (soot is composed of organic and black carbon, the second largest contributor to climate change, and, together with sulfur, is highly toxic, causing even lung cancer).

Lima is one of the most polluted cities in the world, pollution caused mainly by the burn of diesel petroleum (fuel oil) by decade-old cars and buses, that are imported thank to a law made by the corrupt government of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s(now he is in jail for mass murder and corruption crimes).Switching to natural gas is the easiest form ( plus trashing all obsolete cars as rubbish)to save Lima’air.

After explaining this( showing that peruvian natural gas will NOT be exported and it is environmentally friendly), I will explai what really happened in the amazon a month ago.

The current president approved a group of legislative decrees to made peruvian legislation agree with the LTC ( Free trade treaty, Tratado de Libre Comercio) with the USA. This decrees where approved without parliament intervention and even worse, WITHOUT CONSULTING TO THE AMAZON NATIVES (both things were agaist peruvian law). The decrees, regarding land property management in the rainforest, triggered a wave of social unrest. The government ignored it for months, while the natives blocked the main local roads, specially around the city of Bagua, in the northern amazon.

Finally, it ordered the police to clear the roads. The police was not prepared (they have no clear plan, and instead of tear gas and rubber bullets, most of them have only MACHINE GUNS!), and when they try to clear the road, a major battle began. After some time, some natives steal the gun from the police, and a riot exploded. In the battle, more than 20 policemen were killed, and an unknown number of natives were wounded or killed ( officially, there were just 9 natives killed, but probably there were several tens dead and hundreds wounded)

When another group of natives hear the news of their killed comrades, they kidnapped 20 policemen from a station post in the north pruvian oleoduct , and began executing 6 of them , until the peruvian army arrived and liberate the others after shooting on the natives.

This was the worst single episode of political violence in Peru, and the cause were both the government incompetence and the activity of some far-left groups who told the natives(falsely) that the government will take his land. Peru is still shocked by this massacre, and the prime minister have resigned for that.

I hope have explained clear what happened in few words (there can be lots of pages written about this tragedy), and forgive me if my explanation in particular was too long of if my english is not good. I hope I can tell more about peruvian reality and politics

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fclimateprogress.org%2F2009%2F07%2F12%2Fhow-sharper-than-a-serpents-tooth-energy-action-coalition-its-getting-hot-in-here-the-breakthrough-institutes-anti-climate-disinformation%2F%23more-9033#more-9033