Tag Archives: Rio+20

Ask Nestle, Unilever & Neste Oil to stop buying illegal palm oil -& write to Nick Clegg while you’re about it

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Please sign this Rainforest Rescue-drafted email and send it to the management of Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil, asking them to cancel their business relationship with the corporate group IOI.

Illegal rainforest clearance to make way for palm oil plantations

Rainforest Rescue reports that:

“one thousand people on the Indonesian island of Borneo have lost their forest. It was illegally cleared by the corporate group IOI that supplies Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil with palm oil. All three companies publicly pride themselves for their so-called “sustainability”.

Rainforest Rescue partner Nordin, head of the organization Save Our Borneo (SOB), has collected plenty of watertight evidence against the criminals. He is preparing to file a case and the local government is backing him. However, to prevent more damage elsewhere, the palm oil Mafia’s profit stream has to be cut off. This is where Nordin needs our support. 

Please call on Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil to cancel their business relationship with IOI.”

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UK delegation to Rio+20 – government, NGOs, Unilever & Aviva

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The ever-wonderful Otesha project is blogging about who’s who on the official UK delegation to Rio +20 (not hug-a-husky David Cameron, though).

In brief:

There is Non-Government Organisation (NGO) and Business representation on the delegation, something which has not previously happened at the The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Otesha Project blog asks:

” Is it good that Oxfam and WWF have close access to the delegation? Maybe, although it brings up interesting questions about how entrenched NGOs have become in the UN processes. Is it good that Unilever and Aviva do? I don’t think so…at the end of the day they are representing their shareholders… Because companies’ sole obligation to their shareholders is to turn a tidy profit.

And… if NGOs and Business get to have an official voice on the delegation… where the eff is the youth representation? Some of the other countries have official youth delegates, and rightly so. Because there are no other stakeholders who are going to be more affected by what happens here at Rio+20 than young people. Last night, we found out that any mention to a potential High Commissioner for Future Generations has been deleted from the text. This is not good enough. “

For the full list of our democratic representatives at Rio +20, see the blog.

 

Rio +20 – tell Nick Clegg we want environmental justice, not financial markets for natural resources

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The World Development Movement has organised an email petition to Nick Clegg, who is the UK representative at Rio+20 in June. It asks him to make sure that the Rio+20 agenda focusses on environmental justice – not, as the rich G8 countries want, on creating financial markets for natural resources.

You can find out a bit about this idea of treating the environment as a source of “environmental services”  that can be monetarised and traded, in the environmental services section of the Energy Royd Land page.

You can find out more about the issues and sign the petition here.

Source: World Development Movement

From www.bollier.org

Commons-based law – instead of marketisation of “environmental services”

Instead of extending the market into environmental resources which are basically priceless because nothing else can exchange or substitute for them, a new system of Commons-based law  would provide practical, democratic ways of protecting value that the market can’t achieve, because the market is essentially about consuming and profiting from natural resources.

Commons-based law would start from the premise that the environment is a common good that exists on its own terms. It would require us to adopt a biocentric rather than anthropocentric (human-centred) view of the environment.

According to the founders of the Commons Law Project,  Commons-based law

“…asks questions such as: How can appropriate limits be set on the market exploitation of nature? What legal principles, institutions and procedures can help manage a shared resource fairly and sustainably over time, sensitive to the ecological rights of future as well as present generations?”

If you’re interested in the idea of Commons Law, you might also like to read about the proposal to create a law prohibiting Ecocide – the destruction of ecologies.