Climate plan ‘rewards polluters’ – study

A UNITED NATIONS scheme in the Philippines to curb the effects of global warming is in fact doing the opposite by helping big industrial polluters continue their activities, a report by an international think-thank says.

The Focus on the Global South says millions of dollars from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is flowing to some of the Philippines’ largest corporations involved in extractive, fossil fuel-intensive industries that contribute heavily to climate change.

The scheme allows industrialized countries to overshoot their emission limits as long as they buy so-called “emission reductions units” from the UN’s CDM projects that supposedly reduce emissions in developing countries.

The study, however, says that most of the CDM cash finances some of the very practices that contribute to global warming, including land filling, factory farming and incineration.

According to the UN CDM board, 32 such CDM projects are registered in the Philippines with 45 further projects undergoing the registration process.

A basic flaw in the scheme is that it allows countries with inadequate and poorly enforced environmental laws to earn more than those with better mechanisms in place, the report says.

This leads to contradictory incentives as highlighted by a landfill gas-to-energy project in Montalban (Rodriguez), in Rizal province the largest-earning CDM project to date, the report adds.

The Philippines’ 2001 Solid Waste Management Act requires local governments to enforce garbage segregation, recycling and composting.

As a waste-to-energy project, however, the Montalban landfill gas project requires huge amounts of garbage in order to operate – something that can only be guaranteed by not segregating, recycling or composting garbage. In other words, the only way the project can earn CDM revenues is for the government not to enforce the law.

Report from ucanews.com