ENVIRONMENTAL rights advocacy groups in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s main oil and gas region, have joined Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) in expressing strong concerns over the stated agenda of the United States and a number of other developed countries at the forthcoming United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9.

Co-ordinator of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), Mr. Patrick Naagbanton, told AkanimoReports in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, yesterday that the global grassroots environmental federation is calling on other governments to stop these countries from undermining the globally-agreed framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure stronger targets for legally binding emissions cuts in line with science and equity.

The climate talks have been deadlocked since the beginning of the decade because of the failure of developed countries – those historically responsible for the bulk of the climate-changing emissions – to deliver on their moral and legal obligations for climate action.

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photo credit: Kendra E. Thornbury
http://www.sweetcrudemovie.com/photoGallery.php?SECTION=1&SHOW_GALLERY=YES&DB_OFFSET=15

by Global Justice Ecology Project | November 17, 2011

“No REDD Papers, Volume I is a must read for all who seek to know the truth about this mercantilist tool called REDD. It is also highly recommended for those who believe that policies to fight the current climate chaos must see the people and Mother Earth, and not merely see trees as commodities for cash and carbon speculation.”

—Nnimmo Bassey, Alternative Nobel Prize Laureate, Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), Chair of Friends of the Earth International and poet

NoReddPapers_Download

NoReddPapers_Download_spreads

Global Justice Ecology Project has just published the No REDD Papers, Volume 1. To download it, click on one of the links above. The top link will download the booklet with one page per sheet of paper; the bottom link will download the booklet with 2 pages, side by side, per piece of paper.

To download the beautiful poster, click here: NO REDD_Poster-Cartel

Your future, our climate and Indigenous Peoples are threatened by a devious false solution to climate change called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Unfortunately, industrialized countries, oil companies and other climate criminals that are trashing the planet have absolutely no intention of drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions which is necessary to truly address climate change.
Instead, along with the World Bank and the United Nations, they are concocting this REDD scheme to take over the forests of the world as supposed sponges for their pollution. In the process, they are evicting the very people who have conserved those forests for millennia. REDD may be the biggest land grab of all time, cause genocide and replace real forests with massive industrial tree plantations that could even include genetically engineered trees. Read this book so together we can resist this new form of colonialism and privatization of the air we breathe, and defend the trees and forests that we love.

image: poster art by Santiago Amengod, design by Melanie Cervantes
image source: Climate Connections, Global Justice Equality Project

FRIENDS of the Earth International (FOEI), a global federation of environmental rights advocacy groups, has said that they will stand by the Nigerian people to protest against any form of continued socio-economic, political and environmental injustice inline with the Occupy protests in some parts of the world. The global group which is Chaired by Nigeria’s Nnimmo Bassey, told AkanimoReports on Thursday in a telephone interview that they will rally around citizen groups anywhere in the world rising against any form of injustice. He was spoke just as the group in a statement pointed out that they were in support of the Occupy protests and called for environmental activists and organizations around the world to join the movement to demand radical system change.

FoEI with member groups in 76 countries, said at a time when many of the camps are being shut down by police, ”we offer our solidarity and our support, and we join this movement wholeheartedly”, adding, ”to save our communities and our environment, we stand united in calling for a profound transformation of the current globalized political economic system”.

The grassroots organization believes that tackling excessive corporate power and promoting economic justice are key to solving the environmental crisis, including the climate crisis.

According to Bassey, ”we are one with those who are raising and will raise their voices against corporate greed and who are speaking and will speak out for social equity and real solutions to the crises we face”

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photo: Nnimmo Bassey, Chair Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth International from Radio Nederland Wereldomroep’s photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rnw/4190503174/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Re-posted from LINKS

November 2, 2011 — It’s unlikely there will be “an equitable outcome” from the COP17 climate talks, to be held in Durban in December 2011, but it will be “a great moment to intensify campaigns against the business-as-usual manner” in which climate negotiations have been conducted so far, Friends of the Earth International’s Nnimmo Bassey told Pambazuka News.

* * *

Pambazuka News: What role will Environmental Rights Action (ERA) and Friends of the Earth International be playing at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban? What will you be pushing for?

Nnimmo Bassey: While there is a generally low level of expectation from the Durban Conference of the Parties (COP17), we see it as a great moment to stand with impacted peoples and the environmental justice movement and call for a climate tackling regime that understands the depth of the crises and the fact that the impacts are already manifesting. We will push for polluting countries to cut emissions at the source and not through offsets and related market mechanisms that help polluters profit from the damage they do. We will push for legally binding emissions reduction targets to ensure that temperature increase is kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. ERA will demand the recognition and payment of the accumulated climate debt due to centuries of exploitation and colonisation of the atmosphere.

Friends of the Earth International will particularly bring to light the negative impacts of carbon markets, dirty energy, dams, agrofuels, plantations/industrial agriculture – all funded or potentially fundable through the carbon markets. We will also highlight land grabs and related issues. Details of our full focus are still being fine-tuned. As you know, we have member groups in 76 countries and each of these is autonomous so we invest time and energy in consultations. You will hear of our detailed plans once they are ready.

Judging from the outcome of the COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico, obtaining a multilateral agreement through which those most to blame for causing climate change take responsibility for the damage they are causing to those most affected by climate change, is unlikely to happen at COP17 in Durban, South Africa. But even though this is expected to be the case, why is the Durban event still important for climate justice activists?

You are right to say that we may not expect an equitable outcome from Durban. Nevertheless, Durban will be a great moment to intensify campaigns against the business-as-usual manner [in which] the negotiations have been conducted. Durban has a rich history that will inspire the climate justice movement to get stronger. Remember that Gandhi’s non-violent resistance was more or less birthed in Durban. Some of the most intense organising against apartheid also occurred in Durban. Currently, Durban is the hub of the environmental justice activism in South Africa. This has not occurred accidentally. Durban has some of the most polluted neighbourhoods in the country, with highly polluting refineries and chemical factories located there.

The building rage on the streets of Durban will inspire the climate justice movement. For me, the need to resist the planned offshore exploration for crude oil off the coast of Durban, an act that is bound to rub salt in raw injuries, holds an additional pull.

Hypothetically speaking, what in your mind would be the key aspects of a just global climate deal and why?

Getting polluters to accept to cut emissions at source and to the extent required by science to keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. A regime of voluntary targets would simply translate to roasting Africa and sinking the small island states.

Full article

image: Nnimmo Bassey (centre). Photo: Right Livelihood Award Foundation.

YENAGOA, Nigeria — A Nigerian environmental group on Monday claimed an oil spill from a pipeline operated by Italian firm ENI had badly polluted an area in the south of Africa’s largest oil producer.

The spill which reportedly occurred on September 27 is said to have polluted the swamps of the Ikeinghenbiri area of Bayelsa state in the main oil-producing Niger Delta region.

“The volume of the spill is very high and in some cases it is difficult to separate the crude from the water,” Environmental Rights Action field monitor Morris Alagoa told AFP a day after he visited the village.

The group’s executive director, who is also chairman of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, said, “I understand it’s a very severe spill.”

Alagoa said he found that “in some places the whole length of the swamp is black (with oil).”

Full article

Re-posted from Deutsche Welle

 Nnimmo Bassey (right) with Johannes Beck, DW’s head of the Portuguese for Africa department

10/12/11

International head of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, is a special guest at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. The Nigerian campaigner spoke to DW about the link between literacy and environmental protection.

For years, Nnimmo Bassey has been fighting against the oil industry’s pollution in the Nile Delta. Broken pipelines, illegal small refineries and the burning of excess gas have caused an ecological disaster. According to Bassey’s organization “Environmental Rights Action,” the Nigerian chapter of Friends of the Earth, a proper cleanup would cost $100 million.

Bassey, a laureate of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize), spoke to the head of DW’s Portuguese for Africa department, Johannes Beck, at the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LitCam conference. This year’s focus is on how education can contribute to sustainable economic growth. To hear the full interview, click the link below.

Deutsche Welle: Today we’ve heard how literacy can contribute to climate protection. Yet if we look at industrialized countries, we see that many have a high literacy level – for example Germany – but we still cause a lot of carbon dioxide emissions. What do we need?

Nnimmo Bassey: The industrialized world has to a large extent – and I say this with due respect – lost the connection with nature. I mean, when was the last time you looked at a night sky to see the stars? If you are in a city with so much electric light everywhere you almost don’t know what a beautiful night sky looks like. And this is [just] a small thing.

We actually require taking this literacy to the popular level. Our scientists have to be retrained to communicate their work in a popular way, to speak the language that the people on the street can understand. Because when you keep on producing statistics and things that sound like flying above people’s heads, this is okay as a scientific finding, but is has nothing to do with me. People want what they can relate to, what they can understand.

You said industrialized countries have lost their connection to nature. But when I travel to Latin America, Africa or Asia, I feel that at least in the big cities of the developing world, people also have a very fragile connection to nature. Is it really only a problem for industrialized countries?

I would agree with this. We need a worldwide reconnection, but we must also not forget the historical basis of the conflict and challenge we are facing. When scientists tell us that 80 percent of the atmospheric space for carbon has been taken, this was not done by the developing countries.

We know some really rich polluting entities of the world, which have taken off and colonized the atmosphere by themselves. They don’t want to negotiate how the remaining 20 percent can be shared.

They don’t really care what happens the day after, because they have better resilience and better capability to withstand the storms of life that most inevitably will confront all of us.

But again, when we make some broad statements, we have to look at details. We have the global north in the south; we have the global south in the north. Because there are very rich people in poor countries who live very wasteful lives and who are creating as much damage as anybody else.

I’m personally engaged and committed to engage in joining people across the world to confront power, because corporate power has captured public structures across the world.

Full text interview

Full audio interview

By Ben Ezeamalu
September 4, 2011

Re-posted from NEXT

Sunny Ofehe

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has asked the Dutch authorities to give detained environmental campaigner and founder of Hope for Niger-Delta Campaign, Sunny Ofehe, a fair hearing when his case comes up for hearing on September 5.

ERA/FoEN’s call is predicated on the manner the Dutch authorities have so far handled the matter after Mr. Ofehe’s arrest and detention for unstated reasons.

Mr. Ofehe was arrested by Dutch authorities in Rotterdam on 22 February, 2011, and has been kept in detention since. The Dutch authorities initially kept mum over the reason for Mr. Ofehe’s arrest and denied anyone access to him except his lawyer who was barred from speaking to anyone on the matter.

Earlier reports from his clients indicated that the charge against Mr. Ofehe was based on people smuggling and forgery. This was subsequently substituted with terrorism which was hinged on tapped phone calls between him and an acquaintance in Nigeria in which Mr. Ofehe was said to have tried to come to an agreement to record bunkering of oil pipelines in the Niger Delta-region.

The questioned phone calls were said to have been intercepted during a massive investigation against the activist which was said to have started more than a year before his February arrest. Subsequently, his phones and computers were allegedly tapped and a camera placed in front of his office for three weeks.

“While we believe an accused is deemed innocent until otherwise proven, it is suspicious that what Ofehe was arrested for is not what he is now standing trial for,” said Nnimmo Bassey, ERA/FoEN’s Executive Director.

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UN says clean-up operation following two massive oil spills in the Niger Delta could benefit other African countries developing their oil reserves

By John Vidal
Reposted from  guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 August 2011

Ogoniland is one of the most oil-polluted places on earth but it could become a model for other countries wanting to clean up their environments or avoid making the same mistakes, the UN has said.

“This could be the world’s biggest oil contamination clean-up,” said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN’s environment programme (UNEP) director, Achim Steiner. “It is up to the government of Nigeria what happens now, but [from talks with President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja this week] there appears to be a willingness to act,” he said while in London.

Preliminary cost estimates to decontaminate and restore the devastated ecology of the 1,000 sq km of land and water are nearly $1bn for the first five years, with much more money possibly needed over the full 30 years it will take to clean up the region, said UNEP chief scientist Joseph Alcamo in London.

But he said that if governments and oil companies were prepared to put up the money to act, it could provide work to train tens of thousands of Ogonis, leave the area “pristine” and help many other African countries that were on the point of commercially developing their oil reserves.

São Tomé, Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia all expect to produce oil in the next 10 years. “One in 10 barrels of oil in the world presently comes from Africa. It is very likely that oil production will increase on the continent. Countries can learn from this painful experience,” said Alcamo.

As well as immediate measures, such as warning Ogoni people if they are drinking from polluted wells and proposing that the oil companies rethink their clean-up procedures, the UN recommended that a global centre for excellence for environmental restoration be set up in Ogoniland.

Full article

image: UNEP Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland

Despite promises made by Shell since the 1990s to stop flaring the ‘associated’ gas released in oil production in Nigeria, the oil concern flared more gas in 2010 than it did in 2009 in the West African country. This has come to light from the sustainability report brought out by Shell last week.

According to its own figures, Shell flared over 30 per cent more gas in 2010 than in 2009. This, according to them, was mainly due to increased production in Nigeria and new activities in Iraq.

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International, said:

“Shell has been flaring gas in Nigeria since 1958. Though gas flaring has been illegal, to them it is a standard industry practice. They continue to reap obscene profits from the oil fields of Nigeria at the expense of the lives and the livelihoods of the poor people. While they speak from both sides of their mouths we see that they are increasing the volume of gas flared and are thus intensifying their poisoning of the environment and the peoples of the region. They engage in this unacceptable and illegal activity just for the maximisation of their profits. Gas flaring is an act of ecocide and everyone should join us to demand that Shell stops this madness.”

Gas flaring has serious negative impacts on the health of local residents and on the environment – while the flared gas could simply be captured and used as natural gas, to the benefit of local people who often do not even have electricity in their houses.  In 2007 Shell promised that it would stop flaring gas in Nigeria in 2009.

The meaningless promises and violations of environmental and human rights by the Dutch oil giant are a concern of the Dutch Parliament as well. In January of this year, it held a hearing on the conduct of Shell in Nigeria, were parliamentarians criticised the needless practice of flaring.

Shell’s sustainability report is available here.
An overview of the promises made by Shell to stop flaring gas is available here.

DAKAR and LAGOS, Feb 11 (IPS) – Nigerian environmental rights groups have been making the case for the expulsion of oil companies from the Niger Delta in the southeastern part of the country at the World Social Forum in Dakar.

Speaking at a meeting organised by a group of Nigerian women’s environmental rights activists, Goodison Jim Dorgu, the Executive Director of the NGO Environmental Health and Safety Network, based in the oil-producing state of Bayelsa, said Nigerian civil society has come to the united conclusion that oil companies responsible for severe environmental degradation should leave without delay.

“We feel that the oil companies should leave the shores of the Niger Delta. There have to be fresh negotiations if there has to be oil extraction and communities should be at the dialogue to represent themselves in the negotiations,” said Dorgu.

Dorgu was speaking at a Feb. 9 session at the World Social Forum in Dakar, organised by Nigerian environmental justice activists, mostly women from the oil-rich Niger Delta. Other speakers outlined how the oil industry has provoked violence in the Delta, with women bearing the brunt of the assault.

Emem Okon, the head of the Women’s Development and Resource Centre in the city of Port Harcourt, alleged that the oil companies’ own security personnel have been involved in attacks on women. She also said the Nigerian army had committed grave violations of human rights.

“There are specific cases in Akwa-Ibom State, where Shell brought in a Shell crew and they attacked women. A pregnant woman was shot dead. There are also cases in Ogoniland where the government set up Rivers State Internal Security Task Force, and what these soldiers did was to use women as a weapon of war,” said Okon.

“A lot of women were raped, a lot of young girls were taken into sexual slavery.”

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

The Nigerian army’s operations in Ogoni peaked in the mid-1990s, in a brutal response to powerful mobilisation of people which had attracted international attention. Hundreds were killed and tens of thousands displaced; charismatic Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were arrested and later executed by the government. The army carried out similar attacks elsewhere in the oil-rich southeast of the country.

The military campaign shattered non-violent resistance, but gave rise to armed groups whose activities – a mixture of progressive demands and profiteering from kidnapping oil workers and the sale of stolen crude – badly disrupted the country’s oil output.

Speaking to TerraViva from her home in Port Harcourt, Debbie Effiong of the NGO Gender and Development Action, said environmental degradation, poverty, activism and violence are intertwined.

“The environment is part of the livelihood of women; the land sustains them as farmers. Their farmlands are destroyed through oil pollution. So the violence by the military to suppress the people’s cause for environmental justice has prompted a lot of awareness among the women.”

She said that women are keen to take part in the struggle for environmental justice. But the growing role played by armed groups in the Niger Delta complicates matters.

“The violence by militants [the armed groups] affected women’s participation in the struggle for environmental justice at the stage when criminality took over the activities of the militants. The criminal aspect of it did not favour the struggle of women. Some of them lost their husbands, some lost their children, and it affected them emotionally in their quest to continue the struggle.”

The Nigerian government offered a peace deal and amnesty to Delta militants in 2009; most groups accepted. Despite complaints that the government has not held up its end of the bargain – militants again carried out several attacks on oil installations at the end of 2010 – nearly 27,000 young men are now undergoing skills acquisition courses and transformational training on non-violence.

Activists undaunted

It’s too soon to assess the long-term effects of ten years of anarchic violence in the Niger Delta; the call for oil companies to leave indicates that the population has not been intimidated. Effiong says that women too are ready to reclaim a place region’s political life.

“With an increase in the number of women aspiring for political positions – if women are given that chance in the coming elections, I believe there will be a major change positively in the way leadership is run in this country,” she said. “If women are given the opportunity to occupy elected positions, it will definitely enhance the struggle.”

In Dakar, Nnimmo Bassey, the head of Friends of the Earth International, told WSF participants that the struggle for environmental justice in the Niger Delta will be a long one.

“We are doing a lot of grassroots training and mobilisation and there are a lot of new groups coming up,” said Bassey, who is himself from the Niger Delta.

“The regime of responsibility has been so well entrenched and there’s the military backing for what the oil companies are doing, the govenment is behind them.”

Bassey says there are many restrictions. “A lot more work is still going to be done, but one day, when nobody expects it… the people will prevail.”

(END/2011)