Ugandan farmers displaced for Scandanavian carbon trading

The new colonialism in the name of climate action

Evicted for Carbon Credits: 

Norway, Sweden, and 

Finland Displace Ugandan 

Farmers for Carbon Trading

Oakland Institute,
29 August, 2019

Evicted for Carbon Credits: Norway, Sweden, and Finland Displace Ugandan Farmers for Carbon Trading, brings forward irrefutable evidence that the Norwegian forestry and carbon credit company, Green Resources, forcibly evicted villagers around their plantation in Kachung, Uganda. The establishment of the plantation on land previously used by subsistence farmers precipitated an on-going food security crisis that has not been addressed by the company, its financiers, nor the Ugandan government.

Green Resources has been the subject of two reports published by the Institute in 2014 and 2017. The exposés documented the plantation’s destructive impact on the local population as well as the misleading audit commissioned in 2017 by the Swedish Energy Agency—Green Resources only carbon credit buyer. Company documents released with the briefing paper—including letters threatening the local villagers, corroborate the Institute’s previous findings.

Evicted for Carbon Credits implicates Green Resources’ new majority shareholders, the public development institutions of Norway and Finland—Norfund and Finnfund—which rescued it from bankruptcy in July 2018. These institutions are aware of the land grab, yet continue to finance the project despite Green Resources’ abuse against the communities at Kachung.

The report also exposes the complicity of three prominent international certification bodies—the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), The United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA)—that are supposed to verify the company’s compliance with environmental and social standards. Evicted for Carbon Credits analyses how several of their monitoring and assessment reports omitted or downplayed the impacts of the land grab.

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/forced-evictions-green-resources-forestry-plantation-uganda