Coinciding with Earth Day (April 22), Bolivian President Evo Morales closed the historic First Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights in Cochabamba. Attended by indigenous peoples from the Americas, the conference was called in the wake of the UNFCCC COP in Copenhagen, which has been largely panned as a global failure. In Cochabamba, indigenous delegates notably rejected “predatory” policies like the UN Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). Based on the draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, the conference’s final declaration on forests states, “We condemn the mechanisms of the neoliberal market, such as the REDD mechanism and its versions REDD+ and REDD++, which are violating the sovereignty of our Peoples and their rights to free, prior and informed consent and self-determination.” The full article can be found here.
