forests and biodiversity
Friends of the Earth International and member group publications on plantations, forests and climate change and agrofuels.
featured report
community based forest governance
Friends of the Earth International, June 2008: Community-based forest governance is a concept that opens new horizons and new spaces for communities to exercise political control of their territories and resources. Through horizontal decision-making mechanisms, it allows for community transparency and accountability. Read the report
Africa: up for grabs
Friends of the Earth Europe and Africa, August 2010: The African continent is increasingly being seen as a source of agricultural land and natural resources for the rest of the world. National governments and private companies are obtaining access to land across the continent to grow crops for food and fuel to meet growing demand from mainly overseas countries. This report discusses the scale and impact of land grabbing for agrofuels.
What is environmental justice?
Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, August 2010: Friends of the Earth believes that tackling environmental injustice will not only protect people, but also the natural world. If you have healthy people, you get a healthy planet. But to do this we have to get to grips with some big problems.
friends of the earth internationalal's biodiversity agenda
Friends of the Earth International, July 2010: FoEI has developed a great amount of work in terms of biodiversity: one way or another, it has always been present. At times, we have struggled in specific campaigns, such as against biopiracy, and other times we have protected biodiversity from the destruction caused by mining or policies that promote false solutions, for instance. For some years, FoEI had a Biodiversity Project and now a Program on Forest and Biodiversity. Today, FoEI has clear political positions around biodiversity.
Background paper: free trade and plantations
Friends of the Earth International, July 2010: Bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements have been signed or are being negotiated in many countries. All these agreements have impacts on the peoples, nature and the society. At the same time, they represent legal frameworks that perpetuate a development model that promotes exploitation, unfairness and inequality, while securing rights for corporations.
Position paper: plantations are not forests
Friends of the Earth International, July 2010: Tree plantations are not forests. They are a monoculture which causes huge impacts throughout the world. Plantations are a huge number of very rapidly growing single species of trees of the same age that are sawn to occupy considerable land areas, with very high consumption of soil nutrients and water. When they reach their reproductive cycle, they are all cut down to the ground.
Position paper: destructive logging
Friends of the Earth International, 2009: At Friends of the Earth International we believe that we must fight against destructive logging, which we conceive as the process or activities of forest exploitation that threaten and/or negatively impact the health of the ecosystem and the livelihood and rights of the forest peoples and the local communities, from a social, economic, cultural and spiritual point of view.
Position paper: community rights
Friends of the Earth International, 2008: Community rights are the rights of local communities and Indigenous Peoples. These are ancestral and collective rights that can contribute to secure their traditional way of life, and are based on their collective management of Nature (keeping balanced relations in the ecosystems through the sustainable use and conservation of its elements, and improving and discovering the uses of biodiversity); based also in the diversity within the different countries and established as an act of justice and fairness in compensation for the oppression they have been subjected to.
Position paper: community based forest governance
Friends of the Earth International, 2008: Community-based forest governance (CFG) refers to the regulations and practices used by many communities for the conservation and sustainable use of the forests with which they coexist. This type of governance is collective-communal, and by tradition identifies with the protection of the forests with regard to their industrial and commercial use. It also identifies itself with traditional knowledge as an alternative to the classic "forest science".
the jatropha trap? the realities of farming jatropha in mozambique
Friends of the Earth International, June 2010: In Mozambique, the debate on agrofuels has advanced steadily over the last five years, fueled by industry speculation and demand, grand promises, and foreign interests. Meanwhile the Mozambican government is rushing to create favourable conditions for investors in the industry as quickly as possible, at the expense of Mozambicans' civil rights. This study evaluates jatropha production in Mozambique and highlights the significant gap between the rhetoric and reality.
Losing the plot: Jatropha in India
Friends of the Earth Europe, January 2010: As India’s economy has grown, its energy demand has increased rapidly and the Indian government has looked to alternative supplies, including biofuels. The jatropha plant – a bush native to South America which grows in dry areas and can produce oil-rich seeds – has been identified as an ideal source of biodiesel, with a target set to replace 20% of diesel consumption by 2017. However, evidence suggests that jatropha grown in its present form is unlikely to deliver the benefits its supporters have promised.
Calling the EU's bluff: who are the real champions of biodiversity?
Friends of the Earth Europe and Latin American, December 2009: Global Europe and the EU's Raw Materials Initiative are designed to bolster the EU's economic position – whatever the cost – in the face of fierce global competition for both markets and resources, especially from emerging economies such as China and India. The EU also fears losing trade to the US, which has already secured trade and investment concessions from countries in the Western hemisphere, through the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and other bilateral trade agreements.
Europe's demand for palm oil driving deforestation and land-grabbing
Friends of the Earth Europe/Netherlands, March 2010: One of the leading suppliers of "green" palm oil to Europe is causing illegal encroachment upon Indonesian forest and peat land, according to a report published by Friends of the Earth Europe. This report exposes the illegal activities of the Malaysian showcase company IOI Group and shows that the increasing demand in Europe for palm oil in food and biofuels is leading to deforestation, breaches of environmental law and land conflicts in Asia.
Cana Bois: plundering protected areas in Cameroon for the European market
Friends of the Earth Netherlands/Friends of the Earth Cameroon, June 2009: Report providing evidence that the Cameroon-based logging company Cana Bois has been illegally logging timber on a large scale for the European market.
Climate justice times
Friends of the Earth International, Copenhagen 2009: Newspaper released by FoEI during the UN climate talks in Copenhagen highlighting our positions on issues such as carbon offsetting and agrofuels.
REDD Myths: executive summary
Friends of the Earth International, December 2009: A critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries.
