Open Letter

We, teachers, scholars, activists, scientists, students,
Indigenous peoples, landless people, peasants, NGOs, and
others from the North and South, do not recognise the
legitimacy of the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF).
PCF projects would both be climatically ineffective and
disrespect principles of economic, social and
environmental justice.

The PCF was born out of the World Bank's efforts to promote
neoliberalism. It is an instrument to commodify the
atmosphere, promote privatisation and concentrate resources
in the hands of a few, taking away the rights of the many
to live with dignity.

The PCF is not a mechanism for mitigating climate change:
o It allows the industrialised North to continue business
as usual, thus impacting the planet's climate.
o It obstructs the necessary change from fossil fuels to
climate-friendly and socially-just energy sources.
o It creates a new market niche into which polluters can
spread risk, expand their business and ensure institutional
survival.
o It legitimises a market for an indefinable "commodity"
which claims to consist of greenhouse gases or pollution,
but in fact cannot be reliably described, quantified or
verified.
o It generates further negative impacts on local peoples,
particularly in the case of carbon "sink" tree plantations.

The PCF says that it offers a "learning-by-doing"
opportunity to its stakeholders:

Participants in the Fund agreed on a set of project
selection and portfolio development criteria designed to
serve the "learning-by-doing" objective of the PCF while
reducing project risk through portfolio diversity.
(www.prototypecarbonfund.org).

However, having followed the PCF's activities and projects
to date, we have learned-by-its-doings that it does not
avert dangerous climate change but instead increases
hardship for local communities. This exposes inherent flaws
not only in its own projects, but in project-based "carbon
trading" as a whole and the offset culture underpinning it.
Any other similar fund or trading regime will
systematically replicate these flaws.

The World Bank has shown itself to be an undemocratic
institution, dogmatically enforcing "free-market" ideology
and promoting corporate interests. More than half a century
of its activities have persistently failed to implement
even the Bank's own environmental and social standards.
World Bank policy has had a profound negative impact on the
South, alienating, excluding and indebting communities
which cannot afford to participate in, or defend themselves
from, a neo-liberal globalised economy.

The PCF extends the World Bank's unacceptable political
activities into a new sphere with its own special technical
impossibilities. The PCF accordingly must be closed down as
a first step in the right direction. It is
neither "carbon" nor pollution that is being traded, but
people's lives and paper certificates claiming to be carbon
credits. Offset culture and pollution trading must be
rejected as false solutions to climate change.

We are committed to reclaiming space from the neo-liberal
institutions for community led solutions towards
environmental justice.

Patrick Bond
Larry Lohmann
The Cornerhouse
Landless Peoples Movement of South Africa
Kanya College
Dudu Mphenyeke
CUT - Central Unica dos Trabadores, Brasil
Dr. Klemens Laschefski -- Friends of the Earth, Germany
RisingTide Oxford
Concrete-Dok
Transnational Institute
Carbon Trade Watch