Malaysia's Penan tribe ups anti-logging campaign

Hundreds of Penan tribes people armed with spears and blowpipes have set up new blockades deep in the Borneo jungles, escalating their campaign against logging and palm oil plantations.

Three new barricades, guarded by Penan men and women who challenged approaching timber trucks, have been established in recent days. There are now seven in the interior of Malaysia's Sarawak state.

"They are staging this protest now because most of their land is already gone, destroyed by logging and grabbed by the plantation companies," said Jok Jau Evong from Friends of the Earth in Sarawak.

Indigenous peoples protect the rainforest with hi-tech tools

The lush green of the rain forest offers rich natural resources which the Ashaninka Indians have lived on for centuries. At the Yoreka Atame school of primeval forestry in Brazil, young indigenous and non-indigenous people have been learning how to make use of them in a sustainable way.

Since 2007, the school has taught more than 2,000 participants skills like the cultivating fruit trees, keeping bees, and erecting dams in creeks and lakes to enhance spawning grounds for fish.

"That's how we Ashaninka Indians here in the border region between Brazil and Peru want to pass on our traditional knowledge," said Moises Piyako. He cofounded the Yoreka Atame school together with his brother Benki in 2007.

Brazilain Amazon is seeing REDD

Can carbon credits from REDD compete with palm oil?

Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) is increasingly seen as a compelling way to conserve tropical forests while simultaneously helping mitigate climate change, preserving biodiversity, and providing sustainable livelihoods for rural people. But to become a reality REDD still faces a number of challenges, not least of which is economic competition from other forms of land use. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the biggest competitor is likely oil palm, which is presently one of the most profitable forms of land use. Oil palm is also spreading to other tropical forest areas including the Brazilian Amazon.

To compare how REDD stacks up with oil palm, ETH Zürich ecologists Lian Pin Koh and Jaboury Ghazoul and I devised economic models to evaluate returns from each land use under different price scenarios. We found that as long as carbon credits from avoided deforestation is limited to voluntary markets where it fetches 10-20 percent of the price in compliance markets like the European Union's Emission Trading System, REDD will fail to be competitive with palm oil.