CARBON CREDITS FOR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA - lumes

of human rights, uniqueness of indigenous people, involuntary resettlement, culturalheritage, freedoms of associations and rights to collective bargaining of employees,forced or compulsory labor, child labor, any sort of discrimination, workenvironments, precautionary approach, conversion or degradation of critical naturalhabitats and corruption (GS, 2008). The GS sustainability matrix serves as guidancefor project developers and includes a set of 12 indicators that cover three dimensionsof SD: environment, social development, economic and technological development(GS, 2008). Stakeholder participation and EIA are required. As one can see from thesummary of the results presented in the Table 2 the elements constituting twodiscourses can be seen in a way GS frames sustainable development. It scores themost under SDD, and covers the elements that SEMD and SDD share. However in itsnature it is instrumental, since it is rather based on idea of cost-effectiveness and otheraspect serves the purpose of cost-effectiveness. Impact assessment can be considereda good example of its instrumental approach towards sustainability. SD impact isevaluated based on a sum of ‘positive, neutral, and negative impacts’ and the projecthas to contribute positively at least to two categories and can be neutral to the thirdone to be judged as beneficial for sustainable development In this way it allows acertain trade-off and can not be consider ed to have truly systems perspective view.Thus, I have categorized it as belonging to the SEMD. However, there is no evidenceof truly system perspective essential for sustainable development discourse.Likewise, Plan Vivo demonstrates elements of both SDD and SEMD and has avery strong emphasizes on delivering community benefits. Plan Vivo address theissue of land tenure and user right and implicitly emphasizes, that they must be secure‘so that there can be clear ownership, traceability and accountability for carbonreduction or sequestration benefits’ (Plan Vivo, 2008). Plan Vivo Certificates canonly be generated through activities where communities or individuals haveownership of the carbon credits, therefore, the community participation is seen as keyat all project stages (Plan Vivo, 2008). Plan Vivo provides list of standards andindicators that projects must employ to provide evidence of positive environmentaland community benefits through a participatory community approach (Plan Vivo,2008). Therefore, based on these factors among others I classified it as sharing theviews of SEMD with a strong emphasis on a social pillar in an interpretation morecommon for SDD.Carbon Fix Standard focuses exclusively on projects on ‘land-use changewhich converts from “no forest” to “forest”’ (Carbon Fix, 2008). Projects aiming forthe CFS should be able to concurrently deliver real and traceable CO 2 certificates tothe carbon market. Projects under the CFS must evidence positive impactsconsidering the environmental and socioeconomic parameters established within thestandard framework (Carbon Fix, 2008). Even though it is claimed by the standardthat ‘only through the successful integration of ecological, social, and economicalvalues is it possible to set-up and maintain a climate forestation project certified bythe CFS’ and it shows strong evidence of ecological elements, it was found to belongto WEMD.Carbon Neutral Protocol is not an offsetting standard, but rather a type of ecolabelingand is focused on small-scale community type offset projects. Neither33