Boy watching logging truck in his forest village, in Cameroon. © Global Witness.
Global Witness forest campaigners working with Ecosystems Climate Alliance colleagues at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun (November/December 2010). © Global Witness
In 2010/11, The Rufford Foundation provided a grant of £30,000 to Global Witness.
For 15 years, Global Witness has run pioneering campaigns against natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses. From Cambodia to Congo, Sierra Leone to Angola, we have exposed the brutality and injustice that results from the fight to access and control natural resource wealth, and sought to bring the perpetrators to book.
Equitable Forest Policy Project
In 2010/11, The Rufford Foundation’s grant helped us reach a major goal in our work to combat deforestation, particularly illegal logging, and preserve remaining forests for the benefit of forest peoples and for the planet and to help fight climate change. We are very pleased to report that, after lengthy negotiations, we now have a basis for combating deforestation integrated into the international REDD agreement on climate which emerged from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit in Mexico in late 2010. Our promotion of better governance, social and environmental safeguards, and independent monitoring of REDD on the ground also increased the attention these issues received in the design and review of national REDD strategies by the two major multilateral REDD+ processes – the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and the UN-REDD Programme.
Our next major challenge is to ensure: countries take their obligations in the Cancun text seriously, particularly governance, social and environmental safeguards; meaningful implementation of these safeguards and adequate finance to implement and monitor them; that heavily forested countries’ national strategies contain adequate safeguards especially regarding governance, to allow REDD+ to deliver on its promises.
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