Earth First! and Rising Tide North America took to the high seas today to protest monoculture industrial timber plantations and demanding a ban on genetically engineered trees.
Image: Boat Protest in Charleston, SC (U.S.) Against Timber
Stakeholder groups demonstrated against timber plantations and forest biotechnology during the kick-off event for a conference on fast growing plantations in South Carolina. Banners read “ArborGen: No GE Trees or Plantations in US South or Brazil” , and, in Portuguese, another read “Eucalyptus Plantations Are Not Forests.” A third Spanish banner read “We demand protection for native forests and respect for the Mapuche people.”
Dont be deceived, tree plantations to offset emissions are not a win-win solution to climate change.
Some biotech plantations have displaced communities and wildlife and fauna as projects of the Clean Development Mechanism -a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions under the Kyoto Protocol- projects aim to obtain carbon credits for the world largest emitters of greenhouse gasses.Countries offset their emission funding plantations in the developing world, though Normal tree plantations hold up to 90 percent less specie diversity than the native forests they replaced, leading many to label them as “green deserts.”
Moreover, a plantation containing genetically engineered trees poses the high risk of genetic contamination of the surrounding natural forest with traits such as weakened structural integrity and cellular pesticide production.
Popular industry theories claim plantations will help address climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This ignores the fact that tree plantations absorb a quarter of the CO2 as intact natural forest. Furthermore, tree plantations are logged at an early age thereby releasing the stored CO2. Offseting carbon emissions through forest is a tricky business, and not as sound as growing carbon business would like us to believe. The additionality and leakage of reforestation poses questions, specially as many of the forest, or carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol, can be monitored and there is little understanding of the details of the carbon cycle.
