GAIA Interventions at the CDM’s 55th Exective Board Meeting

Bonn, Germany, 30 July 2010

Webcast

My name is Mariel Vilella and I represent the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a worldwide network of more than 600 organizations in 89 countries working for a just, toxics-free world without incineration. Some of our member groups are wastepickers organizations; you may remember meeting a few of them in Copenhagen, where they raised questions about the CDM’s waste sector projects. Wastepickers are concerned about the CDM’s support for incinerators and landfill gas systems, which have had the effect of displacing wastepickers from their livelihoods. It has also create a perverse incentive to increase waste disposal and therefore, increasing as well adverse effects on climate emissions.

In GAIA we are focusing now in CDM projects as we want to make sure that CDM projects take into account wastepickers reality.

Now, when it comes to the process for the registration and approval of the CDM project, we need to make sure that we don’t miss the public calls to make inputs. Indeed, we believe it is our common interest that stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute and improve the transparency of the process for registration and approval of CDM projects.

We’ve learned that some time in the past there was an e-mail list for notifications, which eventually stopped without a reason. Generally, calls for inputs are expected to be posted on the website but this month we have also found a call for input in the CDM Newsletter page, with some contradictory information in relation to what was said on the main page. As you can imagine, following different websites, newsletters and unclear procedures is a waste of our time and resources and we’d rather have some transparency on how these modalities are meant to work.

On the light of this situation, I’d like to raise few questions:

Could the Board clarify which are the modalities for the notifications of public calls for inputs? How can we know that the project is open to public comment? Moreover, once we have been notified that it is time to make our input, what procedure shall we follow? Since this question has been raised several times by CDM Watch and actually, there has been a letter from the Secretariat to CDM Watch acknowledging this issue, what are the next steps? Could you give us a timescale as to when we can expect to receive a clear modality that makes sure that notifications for public comment are effective and that we know then how to proceed?

Thank you very much.