Massive Protests against Barro Blanco Hydropower Project in Panama

Guest article by Oscar Sogandares, Asociacion Ambientalista de Chiriqui (ASAMCHI) My t-shirt still smells from the firewood of the protest camp, where I spent several nights accompanying their cause.  The beginning of the day would start with group prayers in Ngobe and in Spanish requesting the help from the Almighty in this unequal struggle[1].  The …

Suppressed Demand

Scroll down for French and Spanish The very poor have such small carbon footprints that it is difficult to implement CDM projects that target them, since there are practically no emissions to reduce. The concept of ‘suppressed demand’ tries to take into account the fact that their per-capita emissions would be much higher if the …

Standardised Baselines

Scroll down for French and Spanish In Cancun in 2010 and in Durban in 2011, Parties asked for increased standardisation of CDM crediting rules (called methodologies) that are used for CDM projects, in an effort to simplify and streamline the CDM. Such simplifications reduce costs and risks for project developers. Yet standardisation also runs the …

Harmful CDM projects

Designated National Authority (DNA) Search To get in contact with Designated National Authorities follow the link below to search by a country (Annex 1/Non-annex 1): http://cdm.unfccc.int/DNA/index.html Despite the CDM’s aim to contribute to sustainable development, CDM projects often have serious negative impacts on local communities. A majority of projects are industrial scale projects such as …

Offsetting in the EU

Scroll down for French and Spanish The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) is a cap-and-trade system which came into force in 2005. The EU-ETS is the largest mandatory cap-and-trade scheme to date and includes 30 European countries. Up to 50% of the EU-wide reductions over the period 2008-2020 can be achieved by buying CDM and …

New Market Mechanisms

Scroll down for French and Spanish In Durban at the COP-17 in December 2011, Parties decided that a new international market mechanism (NMM) should be established under the UNFCCC that will complement the CDM and JI. The details of how a NMM will work will be developed and negotiated in the coming months and years. …

Materiality

Scroll down for French and Spanish Materiality standards define which errors have to be corrected and which can be ignored because they are too insignificant when calculating the amount of offset credits a project receives. In principle CDM Watch agrees with having rules on materiality because it does not make sense for projects to spend …

Liability of Designated Operational Entities

Scroll down for French and Spanish Designated Operational Entities (DOEs) validate CDM projects and verify the offsets that are issued to a project. The CDM is an offsetting mechanism. This means that the emission reductions credited under the CDM entitle the buyers of the CERs to increase their domestic emissions correspondingly. The CDM in itself …

Landfills and Incinerators

Scroll down for French and Spanish CDM municipal waste management projects can be problematic for three main reasons: They help perpetuate waste management strategies that prevent the use of other, more sustainable options They may threaten the livelihoods of waste pickers – some of the poorest people in developing countries’ cities They may overestimate the …