Equally important for them was news emphasizing proactive community efforts against deforestation, including the news covering communities’ view of the world, their access to information, aspects of environmental justice and human rights, forest community management, traditional knowledge, gender equity as well as research on fair trade, land tenure , empowerment, participation in democracy, self-determination in REDD projects, among others.
These news items are a call to “governments and investors about the reality in the forest and the importance of taking into account the self determination of forest people, if they want to advance and reach funding schemes for a sustainable development model in a globalized economy” said Fraser.
Fraser also highlighted the ongoing issues with the carbon market in Latin America: “Stories in the past year ranged from examples of communities that were benefiting from carbon offset schemes to cases that referred to the architects of local plans as “carbon cowboys” and claimed they were only benefiting themselves”.
Journalists in the Latin American region are closely following news related to indigenous and local communities defending their resources as well those about international schemes aimed at deriving and distributing benefits from forests in developing countries, which they anticipate will will make headlines during 2012.