MANAUS, Brazil — Some wore traditional headdresses, and some traveled by riverboat or canoe. But the dozens of “forest peoples” who descended on this capital of Amazonas State last week had a common goal of becoming bigger players in global climate talks.
A conference here that ended last Friday drew leaders of hundreds of indigenous groups in 11 Latin American countries and observers from Indonesia and Congo, the largest gathering of its kind, organizers said. They came to build a consensus for a plan in which wealthier countries would compensate developing countries for conserving tropical forests like the Amazon.
Such an international carbon-trading plan has been gaining momentum and was a central topic last December at a climate conference in Bali, Indonesia. Scientists generally agree that tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“There is a real sense that this potentially represents a huge opportunity for forest peoples to influence climate change negotiations and create larger-scale incentives to stop deforestation and improve their living conditions,” said Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, who attended the discussions here.
On Friday, representatives from the 11 Latin American countries signed a declaration establishing the International Alliance of Forest Peoples and vowed to continue to push for a place at the table of climate change talks.
The Indonesian government has been promoting the idea of carbon trading at climate talks. But environmentalists see South America, where native populations have stronger legal claims to the land, as a major staging ground for building support for the concept.
Unlike Southeast Asia, where land is more tightly controlled by national governments, Brazil has set aside huge swaths of the Amazon for native groups, who now have permanent rights to 12 percent of the country’s territory and 21 percent of the Amazon. Some 49 million acres of “extractive reserves” were set aside for the rubber tappers, Brazil nut gatherers and river communities that live there.
Brazil’s government has also recently shown a willingness to crack down on rampant logging. Deforestation rates in the country, despite a spike last year, had been declining for several years. But little value has been assigned to the role of native peoples in sustaining the Amazon.
Large-scale clearing of the Amazon forest — for wood, cattle-grazing and agricultural products like soybeans — is threatening the native people’s traditional way of life. “The climate changes are a reality,” said Manoel Cunha, chairman of Brazil’s National Council of Rubber Tappers. “We have rivers that are unnavigable” and trees that no longer bear fruit, he added.
The plan, formally known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, would involve payments by wealthy countries, principally the United States and European nations, to developing countries for every hectare, or 2.47 acres, of forest they do not cut down.
Some doubt it will be possible to measure how much carbon is being conserved, and question whether the forest lands involved can be protected from illegal logging and government corruption.
Calculating what fair compensation for forest conservation would amount to is no easy task. The Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts recently estimated that indigenous groups should receive $10 per square kilometer for “perimeter defense.”
The total cost of paying private landholders and governments to conserve the Amazon would be $531.6 million a year by the 10th year of the program, the center calculated. Several indigenous leaders here expressed concern that such a system would ultimately be devised to compensate governments with the carbon credits, but not indigenous communities.
“The challenge is to pay the native peoples, not the governments,” said Elisa Canqui, a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “They need to be direct beneficiaries in this process.”
