FERN’s aim is to move the climate debate beyond carbon trading and to support communities faced with carbon offset projects.
FERN’s analysis: The European Commission has described climate change as “one of the greatest environmental, social and economic threats facing the planet”. FERN believes that to attempt to combat such a threat with a market mechanism designed to allow emissions in one place to continue on the back of a claimed reduction in another place is foolish. Reductions need to happen everywhere, particularly in industrialised countries. And they need to happen now. We should not be spending time, money and effort putting in place the infrastructure for a new global carbon trading scheme at the expense of investment in genuine emission reductions and establishing low carbon energy and transport infrastructures.
What FERN is doing: In 2004, FERN co-founded the Durban Group for Climate Justice a group of organisations that believe climate policy needs to move beyond carbon trading and focus on ending fossil fuel dependency. We document how carbon trading delays action to end fossil fuel dependence and thus acts as a distraction from the urgent need to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially in industraliased countries. FERN also supports organisations documenting and exposing the impact of carbon offset projects on local communities.
To learn more about this campaign: see www.sinkswatch.org
In the drive to tackle climate change, carbon trading has become the policy instrument of choice among governments. It is also a central element of the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol. National or regional carbon trading schemes are now operational in Europe, the USA, New Zealand and elsewhere.
Carbon trading has become the central pillar of international efforts to halt climate change. It is a term that most people will recognise, but far fewer will have a good understanding of what it means and how it is supposed to work. Fewer still will feel confident to judge whether it is a success or not.
