The Centre for Climate Crime and Justice at Queen Mary University of London will host a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on State and Environmental Violence in West Papua later this month.

A panel of eight tribunal judges will hear evidence on June 27-29 from many international NGOs and local civil society organisations, as well as testimonies from individuals who have witnessed human rights violations and environmental destruction, said a statement from the centre.

West Papua is home to the world’s third-largest rainforest, currently under threat from industrial development. Due to its global significance, the ongoing state repression and environmental degradation in the region have far-reaching impacts.

This tribunal aims to bring global attention to the need to protect this crucial rainforest by exploring the deep connection between democracy, state violence, and environmental sustainability in West Papua, said the statement.

“There are good reasons to host this important event in London. London-based companies are key beneficiaries of gas, mining and industrial agriculture in West Papua, and its huge gold and other metal reserves are traded in London,” said Professor David Whyte, director of the Centre for Climate Crime and Justice.

“The tribunal will expose the close links between state violence, environmental degradation, and profiteering by transnational corporations and other institutions.”

The prosecution will be led by Dutch Bar-registered lawyer Fadjar Schouten Korwa, who said: “With a ruling by the eminent Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on the crimes against the Indigenous Papuan people of West Papua and the failure of the state of Indonesia to protect them from human rights violations and impunity, we hope for a future without injustice for West Papua.”

‘Long history of destruction’
A leading West Papuan lawyer, Gustaf Kawer, said: “The annexation of West Papua into the State of Indonesia is part of a long history of environmental destruction and state violence against Papua’s people and its natural resources.

“Our hope is that after this trial examines the evidence and hears the statements of witnesses and experts, the international community and the UN will respond to the situation in West Papua and evaluate the Indonesian state so that there can be recovery for natural resources and the Papuan people.”

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on State and Environmental Violence in West Papua seeks to initiate a series of events and discussions throughout 2024 and 2025, aiming to engage the UN Human Rights Council and international civil society organisations.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on West Papua will take place on Thursday, June 27 – Saturday, 29 June 2024, at Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus.

The panel of judges comprises: Teresa Almeida Cravo (Portugal), Donna Andrews (South Africa), Daniel Feierstein (Argentina), Marina Forti (Italy), Larry Lohmann (UK), Nello Rossi (Italy), and Solomon Yeo (Solomon Islands).

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Illegal palm oil plantations are destroying protected Indonesian rainforests and other habitats — and New Zealand’s industrial dairy sector is a major beneficiary, says a new environmental report.

The daming report, released yesterday by Greenpeace Indonesia, “Deceased Estate: Illegal palm oil wiping out Indonesia’s national forest”, finds palm oil plantation expansion in national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and even UNESCO sites, across Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua.

Palm oil expansion is the largest single cause of destruction of critical Indonesian rainforests over the past two decades.

The Deceased Estate has report found that there are four palm oil producers with at least 50,000ha of oil palm plantations illegally established inside the protected forest estate.

These producers include Wilmar International which imports palm kernel expeller (PKE) to New Zealand.

PKE is a product of the palm oil industry used as supplementary feed in New Zealand’s industrial dairying.

“Back in 2020, when Fonterra handed control of its PKE imports to Wilmar International, Greenpeace warned of trouble to come,” Greenpeace Aotearoa agriculture campaigner Christine Rose said last night.

‘Illegal deforestation’
“Sadly we’re now seeing evidence of New Zealand agriculture benefiting from illegal deforestation for palm oil and PKE.”

New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of PKE, importing an estimated two million tonnes a year which is used to feed the dairy herd because there are too many cows for grass growth alone to sustain.

“New Zealand’s industrial dairying is cashing in on the destruction of endangered species, critical rainforest habitat and indigenous livelihoods in Indonesia,” said Rose.

“New Zealand’s intensive dairying benefits from ecological destruction in Indonesia while polluting rivers, the climate and drinking water at home.

“The New Zealand dairy sector’s use of PKE to support herd intensification and expansion, effectively outsources environmental costs onto some of the most diverse remaining forests and species in the world, and it has to stop.

“It’s unconscionable that New Zealand is complicit in the illegal expansion of palm oil plantations that undermine indigenous community land use and destroy the habitat of rare and endangered species such as Sumatran orangutans, tigers and elephants.”

‘Highly polluting’
Greenpeace Aotearoa is calling for an end to the importation of supplementary feed like PKE, “because it drives highly polluting dairy intensification in Aotearoa, contributes to rainforest destruction and increases climate emissions both here and in Indonesia.”

Clearance of Indonesian rainforest for palm oil released an estimated 104 Tg (million metric tons) of primary forest carbon from Indonesia’s forest estate between 2001-2019. This is equal to 60 percent of the annual emissions of international aviation.

Greenhouse gas emissions from NZ’s intensive dairy sector, supported by this illegal PKE, are 48 percent of this country’s total.

“With industrial agriculture being New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter, we need an urgent shift away from this high-input, industrial agribusiness model towards regenerative organic farming that works within the limits of nature,” said Rose.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Political uncertainty hangs over large swathes of the world’s tropical forests this year, raising the risk of more destruction and carbon emissions.

Recent leadership changes in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and presidential elections in Indonesia in April, are fuelling concerns that politics could side with industries such as palm oil, timber, mining and agriculture in the world’s three biggest rainforest countries.

Brazil’s new right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro campaigned on promises to open the Amazon up to development. In his first foray on the international stage last week, he called on international businesses to invest in the country’s natural resources.

READ MORE: France aims to ban deforestation imports by 2030

The DRC’s peaceful presidential election of Felix Tshisekedi last month was the first democratic transfer of power since independence in 1960 – although the African Union and European Union questioned the results and The Financial Times reported “massive electoral fraud”.

It now remains to be seen whether Tshisekedi’s government curbs forest clearing and cracks down on the corruption that undermines conservation efforts. He gave little indication during the campaign.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, the two presidential candidates – incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo  and ex-army officer Prabowo Subianto – have given vague promises of environmental protection but few details. That said, Jokowi, who won as an outsider populist in 2014, has done more than some expected to tackle deforestation.

As of 2015, Brazil was home to 12 percent of total forest global cover, the DRC nearly 4 percent and Indonesia 2 percent, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. But tree cover in all three nations continues to shrink.

Worst effects
The actions of the new governments could determine the world’s ability to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change.

“Forests could provide about a third of the solution to climate change, but at the moment they’re more part of the problem because of deforestation,” said Tim Christophersen, head of UN Environment’s freshwater, land and climate branch in Kenya.

“If that was stopped and we could restore forests at a large scale, we could probably close about a third of the current emissions gap.”

For now, efforts to stem deforestation have mostly failed to make a dent. The tropics lost an area the size of Vietnam over 2016 and 2017, when tree cover shrunk by record levels, according to the data and monitoring website Global Forest Watch.

Brazil’s deforestation in 2017 was equivalent to 365 million tonnes of CO2 and jumped by almost 50 percent over the three months of campaigning before Bolsonaro was elected last year. The DRC’s tree cover loss was equivalent to 158Mt last year and Indonesia’s to 125Mt.

Environmentalists are particularly concerned about Brazil. In his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Bolsonaro stressed Brazil’s history of environmental protection while touting its economic opportunities.

But the “wave of forest destruction and violence” started when Bolsonaro immediately removed environmental and human rights safeguards, said Christian Poirier, programme director at the NGO Amazon Watch.

Reckless moves
“These reckless moves, tailored to serve Brazil’s agribusiness and extractive industries, undermine fundamental constitutional protections that preserve forests and assure the safety of the indigenous and traditional communities who call them home,” he said.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, deforestation remains relatively high and driven by clearing for agriculture, the use of wood for energy, timber and mining, said Christophersen.

The UN’s REDD+ programme, which pays developing countries to reduce their deforestation, is starting to work in some places. But it was forced to freeze payments to the government last year amid concerns over the awarding of new logging concessions to Chinese companies. Peatlands across the Congo Basin could release huge stocks of carbon if developed for mining and fossil fuels, Christophersen added.

There is more optimism around Indonesia, although environmentalists are still wary.

Jokowi initially raised concerns that he would not follow through on his predecessor’s commitments on forestry, but then made progressive moves such as creating a new peatland restoration agency and extending a 2011 moratorium on licenses in forest and peatland, said Frances Seymour, distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

Still, it will be up to the next president to cement that ban and push Indonesia’s large palm oil industry to become more sustainable, said Panut Hadisiswoyo, founding director of the Orangutan Information Centre in Indonesia. The country has around 69 percent of its natural forest intact, he said.

“I worry that with the current visions of the presidential candidates, they have no specific calls for the protection of this remaining forest,” Hadisiswoyo said. “This natural forest is the last limit for sustaining our biodiversity. I worry that this forest will have no guarantee to strive, to be kept as forest.”

Good signs
There are some good signs. Costa Rica’s tree cover grew from 20 perecent to around 50 percent over 30 years, Christophersen noted. And Indonesia’s loss dropped by 60 percent year-on-year in 2017, which Global Forest Watch attributed in part to a 2016 moratorium on peat drainage, educational campaigns and stronger enforcement.

“Without political leadership, we would not see with those kinds of successes,” Christophersen said.

However the potential for more damage remains strong – especially at a time of more nationalistic populist leaders such as Bolsonaro.

“A cross-cutting issue is how this global wave of populism plays out in the climate change debate, and in these countries how it plays out with respect to land use in particular,” said Seymour.

• France intends to stop importing soy, palm oil, beef, wood and other products linked to deforestation and unsustainable agriculture by 2030, shooting ahead of the rest of the European Union, reports Climate Change News.

The new national strategy to combat imported deforestation, released by the environment ministry late last year, will use trade to help decouple economic development from tree-cutting and unsustainable agriculture in poorer countries.

Sara Stefanini is a senior journalist with Climate Change News.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk

A palm oil supplier to Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever is destroying rainforests in the Indonesian-ruled Papua region, a new investigation by Greenpeace International has revealed.

Satellite analysis suggests that around 4000ha of rainforest were cleared in PT Megakarya Jaya Raya concession between May 2015 and April 2017 – an area almost half the size of Paris.

The findings come as a delegation from the Indonesian government arrived in Europe last week to defend the palm oil industry, in response to moves by European Parliament to discourage the use of palm oil in biofuels on environmental grounds, Greenpeace International reports.

Luhut Panjaitan, the Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs of Indonesia, is visiting several European cities, including Brussels and Berlin.

“After destroying much of the rainforests of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the palm oil industry is now pushing into new frontiers like Papua, said Richard George, forests campaigner at Greenpeace UK.

“If the Indonesian government wants to defend this industry, the best thing it can do is to force it to clean up its act, not threaten to start a trade war.”

-Partners-

Photos and video taken in March and April 2018 show massive deforestation in PT MJR, a palm oil concession controlled by the Hayel Saeed Anam Group (HSA), including in an area zoned for protection by the Indonesian government in response to the devastating forest fires in 2015. Development is prohibited in these areas.

Supply chain
Although PT MJR is not yet producing palm oil, two other HSA subsidiary companies – Arma Group and Pacific Oils & Fats – supplied palm oil to Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever, according to supply chain information released by the brands earlier this year.

Each of these consumer companies has published a “no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation” policy that should prohibit sourcing from rainforest destroyers.

“Brands have been talking about cleaning up their palm oil for over a decade. Companies like Unilever and Nestlé claim to be industry leaders,” said George.

“So why are they still buying from forest destroyers like the HSA group? What are their customers supposed to think? What will it take to get them to act?”

This case also raises serious questions for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Many HSA Group palm oil companies are members of the RSPO, although PT MJR and the other HSA Group concessions in this district are not.

Members of the RSPO are not allowed to have unaffiliated palm oil divisions, and the development witnessed in PT MJR would also violate several of the RSPO’s Principles and Criteria.

Sourced from a Greenpeace International media release.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Astari Pinasthika Sarosa in Jakarta

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is sailing throughout Indonesia – including West Papua – as a vehicle for environmental campaigns.

Rainbow Warrior has often sailed to remote areas to directly see the environmental issues in the region and immediately act against its destruction.

Recently in the Philippines, this is the first visit to Indonesia since 2013. The Rainbow Warrior will be sailing in the archipelago from this week until next month.

The visit themed Jelajah Harmoni Nusantara will be the longest tour of the Rainbow Warrior.

Its first destination is Papua to witness the natural beauty of Papuan rainforest. The ship’s crew will also see the underwater life of Raja Ampat.

After leaving Papua, the Rainbow Warrior will head to Bali, sampling a rich culture which holds local wisdom, and its beliefs that the best source of energy comes from nature.

The last destination is Jakarta. As the capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta has many issues including pollution and waste.

‘Eco-friendly’ city goal
The Rainbow Warrior aims to help Jakarta to be a more comfortable and eco-friendly city.

“The main point of this tour is to create harmony in protecting the Indonesian environment,” Greenpeace said in a press release.

The name Rainbow Warrior was based on the prophecy of a native American tribe Cree in saying, “When the earth becomes sick and dying, there will come a day when people from all over the world will rise up as the Rainbow Warrior.”

The Rainbow Warrior is the third-generation version of the campaign ship.

The first generation vessel was destroyed by limpet mines. On 10 July 1985, French secret agents planted two bombs and sank the Rainbow Warrior, killing photojournalist Fernando Pereira.

After the bombing, the original Rainbow Warrior ship was towed to Matauri Bay, in New Zealand’s Cavalli Islands, and was submerged as an “alive reef” attracted marine life and recreational divers.

The second Rainbow Warrior sailed for 22 years until 2011 when she was replaced with the third generation Rainbow Warrior.

Like its predecessor, this ship carries out green and peaceful campaigns for the future of the planet.

• Rainbow Warrior – 30 years on … a multimedia microsite
• More Indonesian stories

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Rapacious logging cartels feature in PNG’s Northern Province Governor Gary Juffa’s speech. Video: Café Pacific

By David Robie at Te Papa

Northern Province Governor Gary Juffa made a blistering attack on politicians who are “selling out” Papua New Guinea to foreign cartels with an open door policy over extraction industries, but offered some good news too.

Speaking at the Second Pacific Ocean Climate Conference at Te Papa Museum in Wellington this week, he cited the 3600 sq km Managalas Conservation Area collaborative project between the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RNF) and local landowners as an encouraging pointer to the future.

It has taken more than three decades for the area to be declared at Itokama village last November 29 by Juffa and the Environment and Climate Minister John Pandari.

The conservation region, known as the Managalas Plateau, in Juffa’s home province is the largest to be declared in the country and has expansive tracts of primary rainforest.

The conservation area will protect the plateau from large-scale encroachment from the logging, oil palm and mining cartels while protecting the sustainable and traditional forest lifestyles of the 21,000 local people, said Juffa.

However, as one of just five opposition MPs in PNG’s 111-seat National Parliament, Juffa was highly critical at the conference about the current political system and rampant corruption in the country.

He said most Papua New Guinean politicians, once they were elected to Parliament, no longer represented the interests of the people who had voted for them.

Jumped sides
An example was how quickly opposition MPs, such as the Pangu Pati, jumped to the Prime Minister Peter O’Neill government’s side after the general election last July.

O’Neill was reelected as prime minister by 64-40 votes in August and his ruling People’s National Congress has now decimated the opposition. Twenty one parties are represented in Parliament.

The logging cartels did their best to unseat Juffa and put up six candidates against him because of his outspoken opposition to the extraction industries.

“When I was a customs officer I had some amazing experiences combating this particular group of characters,” he said.

“Papua New Guinea had introduced a new policy in 1995 as a shift away from the West towards Asia. But really it was an effort to try to open the doors to the cartels that were hell bent on coming in to rape our rainforests.”

Governor Juffa on the opening up of Papua New Guinea to the Asian logging cartels and mining companies. Video: Café Pacific

Juffa has currently turned to working more closely with local politicians and landowners in an effort to educate leaders in a more productive way of helping their people life a sustainable lifestyle.

The governor is a prolific user of social media in Papua New Guinea to get his message across to the public and in a Facebook posting this week he said:

Land PNG’s security
“Land is Papua New Guinea’s only true security [and] is once more for sale.

“Sadly the colonised mindset is enthusiastically embracing the scam … forgetting the terrible record of the government in protecting state land from theft and fraud.

“The corporate pirates are now attacking your future. You will be owned – and a landless people.”

Juffa criticised the lack of media – and coverage – at the conference, and also the shortage of climate activists and absence of West Papuan human rights advocates.

He suggested the organisers might prioritise such “frontline” activists for the next conference in two years time.

Governor Gary Juffa on the “absence” of the media. Video: Café Pacific

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

This undercover footage by Greenpeace shows bulldozers destroying Indonesian rainforest. HSBC, one of the biggest banks in the world, is accused of lending millions to palm oil companies in the Salim group, which is claimed to be behind this destruction.

British-based group HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, has been accused of being a “dirty banker” by funding companies alleged to be destroying forests in a new Greenpeace report.

HSBC is currently one of the largest providers of financial services to the palm oil industry, according to the report.

HSBC has detailed policies on forestry and agricultural commodities (including specific sections on palm oil), Greenpeace says.