A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 223– more than enough, it was claimed, to cover the 14.1 million tonnesthe Connecticut plant would emit over its 40-year lifetime. 4Did it work?No. In 1999, an external evaluation of the AES-CARE projectshowed that, even by its own carbon-accounting standards, it wasfalling far short of the 1 million tonnes of carbon it was supposed tohave ‘offset’ to date. 5Three scenes from theWestern Highlands.What happened?The project was built around the assumption that using the area forcarbon production would be compatible with improving local qualityof life through increasing agricultural productivity, watershed protection,and improved fuelwood access. But the designers didn’t sufficientlygrasp what the project would mean for farmers in their localpolitical context.First, many of the mainly indigenous subsistence farmers in theproject area in the Western Highlands had been pushed to the edgeof the agri cultural frontier as land in the fertile lowlands became concentratedin the agribusiness sector. The Western Highlands encompassthe country’s poorest communities and most environmentallydegraded areas. More than 90 per cent of rural households live in absolutepoverty, 6 and with population densities exceeding 100 peopleper square kilometre and a deforestation rate of 90,000 hectares peryear, erosion and land degradation have led to an intensification ofrural land use even as poverty rates increase. The average family inthe Western Highlands has access to less than one hectare of land forfarming.Yet at the same time, land with official forest status was often declaredoff-limits to continued agricultural use under Guatemala’s 1996 forestlaw. The government was trying to re-locate control over communalforests into the hands of municipal authorities, and the law criminalisedsubsistence activities such as fuelwood gathering.Well, wasn’t that a good thing? It helped protect the carbon stored in the trees.What it did first and foremost was to take access to the trees out of thehands of ordinary people. One result was that confl ict grew betweenmunicipal and village authorities and individual landowners. Anotherwas that reforestation looked less attractive. Who wants to plant treesif by doing so you deprive yourself of daily necessities? A third resultwas increasing distrust of government forest offices, some of whichwere partly funded by the CARE/AES Agroforestry Project. Not a