Project: Mount Elgon
Action:

Alert! Human RIghts violation and local conflicts well documented
Category:
Carbon sinks
Subcategory:
 Carbon sequestration
Location:
 Uganda
Title:
 Face Foundation's Mount Elgon project
Project description:
 The controversial project in Mount Elgon, Uganda, involves the planting of eucalyptus trees along the disputed boundary area of Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda. Serious human rights abuses and local conflict have been documented and almost 500,000 trees planted as part of the offset project were cut down by villagers following a successful court challenge by villagers over land title and land access.
Participants: (including financial assistance)

Face Foundation, The Netherlands

Uganda Wildlife Authority
Gas reduced/sequestered
 CO2
Status:
 Voluntary carbon offset proejct
Further Information:

"Human rights abuses, land conflicts, broken promises – the reality of carbon ‘offset’ projects in Uganda: A funny place to store carbon’

A new World Rainforest Movement report ‘documents human rights abuses at Mount Elgon National Park in east Uganda, where the Dutch FACE Foundation has been planting carbon ‘offset’ trees since 1994. The report exposes how villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, have been barred from their land and have seen their livestock confiscated by armed park rangers guarding the ‘carbon trees’ inside the National Park.

The ‘offset’ project sells carbon credits to Greenseat, a Dutch company with clients including Amnesty International, the British Council and the Body Shop.

In Britain, ‘offset’ company Climate Care buys carbon credits from the FACE Foundation’s Kibale ‘offset’ project, in west Uganda. A report on 12 January on BBC1’s Inside Out programme exposed how villagers around Kibale National Park are paying a high price for living next to the FACE Foundation carbon ‘offset’ project and how workers are paid well below subsistence rates for tending the ‘carbon trees’.

“No-one is starving but it’s not enough anymore for luxuries such as milk” commented a former local council member at Kibale in a meeting with FERN’s climate campaigner Jutta Kill.
To read the full press release, click here
To download the WRM report, click here

For information on the Face Foundation project in Ecuador, see the World Rainforest Movement report Carbon Sink Plantations in the Ecuadorian Andes on the Dutch FACE Foundation project in Ecuador which concludes that "while FACE maintains that it provides thousands of jobs or daily wages to the indigenous communities in Ecuador, in no way are these jobs real or decent. They are rather tasks that the communities find themselves obliged to take on, through contracts signed between FACE and the indigenous communities, whereby these take on a debt that converts the contract into a tool of coercive hiring, obliging the communities to serve the interests of the company, because their only option to comply with their contractual commitments is to provide work in a non-remunerated way."