Carbon Trading & the CDM / Press Releases

Contacts: Bali: Barbara Haya. California: Patrick McCully.

(Bali) The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is set to provide massive subsidies to hydropower developers while increasing greenhouse gas emissions, according to an investigation by International Rivers. As of November 1, 2007, 654 hydro projects had received or applied to receive carbon credits from the CDM. If approved, these credits would provide hydro developers with a windfall of around a billion dollars each year. Hydro is now the most common technology in the CDM, representing a quarter of all projects in the project pipeline.

International Rivers' report, "Failed Mechanism: How the CDM is subsidizing hydro developers and harming the Kyoto Protocol," is being released today at the UN climate negotiations in Bali. "The CDM is blindly subsidizing the destruction of rivers, while the dams it supports are helping destroy the environmental integrity of the CDM," says report author Barbara Haya, a consultant for International Rivers.

The controversial 626–foot (202–meter) tall Campos Novos Dam in Southern Brazil suffered an uncontrolled release of water last week, completely emptying the reservoir of the recently completed dam. Aerial photographs released yesterday by Friends of the Earth Brazil show major cracks at the base of the dam, suggesting potentially irreparable damage.

Berkeley, California – The two biggest public banks in Europe, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), have announced that they will take into account the international standards for dam-building set by the World Commission on Dams (WCD).

European Parliament Urged to Safeguard Climate Policy

Greenpeace and International Rivers Network (IRN) held a briefing today at the European Parliament on the proposed directive¹ linking EU emissions trading with credits from the Kyoto Protocol project mechanisms" Joint Implementation (JI) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). They warned that if rules are not set, the EU greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme will be flooded with credits from destructive hydroelectric projects, compromising the effectiveness of the scheme² and undermining previous EU positions on sustainable development. Greenpeace and IRN called for the exclusion of credits from large hydroelectric projects and from any project that does not meet the recommendations of the World Commission on Dams (WCD). The Parliament is due to start debating this issue within the next two months.