High profile brands in the fashion industry, which accounts for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, collaborated to create a network of organisations which set the industry’s sustainable practices, resulting in superficial goals that appease consumers without affecting the bottom line. The majority of the companies that sit on the boards of these self-funded organisations see an increase in gross emissions every year, but are awarded A ratings by one of these “independent” bodies for allegedly decoupling emissions and growth.

I investigated this seeming collusion some years ago, highlighting that the practices and policies suggested by this network of brands were, through the independent bodies they fund, making their way into law in the USA and the EU. Since my investigation and a similar exposé in the New York Times later that week, not much has changed, apart from a swift rebranding of the key players. Despite the links between these brands, independent organisations, philanthropic organisations and even the oil and gas industry, this network is still heavily advising sustainability policy in the EU and the USA.

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The Network

Fashion’s bid to rescue its image began in 2009 when Patagonia and Walmart wrote a joint letter “inviting CEOs of leading global companies to come together to develop an index that would measure the environmental impact of their products.” The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (now Cascale) was formed in 2010 and together they produced their measurement tool, The Higg Index.

Cascale is based in California but was only registered in 2012 as a foreign company under the jurisdiction of Delaware, a state notorious for legal opacity that enable companies and individuals to hide finances and intent. The nonprofit was the brainchild of Patagonia’s Rick Ridgeway and Walmart’s Ken Lanshe, but it was CEO, Jason Kibbey, after an internship at Patatgonia, who signed the company documents in 2012. Kibbey also created The Sustainable Apparel Foundation in California’s jurisdiction that same year, which was renamed the Apparel Impact Institute in 2017 as a collaboration between “the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, The Sustainable Trade Initiative, and Target Corporation to strategically drive sustainability improvements”. (The chair of The Sustainable Trade Initiative is Magdi Batato, Executive VP and Head of Operations for Nestlé, a company notorious for its unsustainable and unethical practices.) In 2019, Kibbey founded Higg Co (now Worldly) with a Californian address but under the jurisdiction of Delaware.

The relationship between the Cascale, Aii and Worldly is obvious, but fashion’s network spreads much further afield, specifically to The Netherlands. Cascale collaborates with the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals, another initiative started in 2011 which peddles a roadmap to zero and certification programs. The ZDHC in turn endorses the Higg Index and corroborates the Cascale’s sustainability claims. This is unsurprising as Cascale and ZDHC shared a number of board members, including Directors of major fashion brands like H&M.

Another board member of the ZDHC is Nike who in turn was one of the core funders of the Science Based Targets initiative which “drives ambitious climate action in the private sector by enabling companies to set science-based emissions reduction targets.” The SBTi sets more benchmarks for companies to greenwash their initiatives, and was part founded by CDP, the independent body which awarded gold stars to fashion brands despite their increasing emissions. SBTi is recommended by Policy Hub, the EU think tank launched in 2019 by Cascale to influence European policy, as stated clearly in their 5 year progress report:

“We provide institutional decision-makers with unique technical expertise throughout the legislative process. As a registered entity in the EU Transparency Register, the Policy Hub participates in all consultation processes initiated by the EU institutions regarding legislative proposals related to sustainable development in the textile and footwear sector. Therefore, we engage with the European Commission, the European Parliament, and Member States to provide them with data, recommendations and proposals for amendments.”

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The Oil Industry

As explained in depth by last week’s podcast guest, independent fashion analyst Veronica Bates Kassatly, the Higg Index created by Cascale and then sold through for-profit company Worldly, has been deeply criticised for its lack of transparency with regards to measuring the sustainability of fibres. The Higg Index (or MSI) uses secondary data to score different fibres, from silk to polyester, on their overall sustainability, often without explaining how they come to these results. By their opaque logic, polyester, derived from oil, comes out as the most sustainable fibre, largely in part due to cherry-picking a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)—which measures environmental impact—of polyester produced in Europe, which has more stringent regulation than the rest of the world. Yet, 92% of polyester is produced in Asia, rendering this figure almost meaningless. But not to the fashion industry, who benefit hugely from the cheapest fibre being ranked as the most sustainable, outstripping organic-based fibres like cotton and silk.

The Higg Index reads as a list of least to most expensive fibres, claiming pricey silk is relatively unsustainable compared to fossil fuel-derived fibres. This fails to take into consideration the social aspect of sustainability and the subsistence farmers across the majority world who supply organic-based fibres to the fashion industry and depend on those supply chains to survive. Painting polyester as sustainable shrinks the dependence on networks of farmers and deepens ties with huge players in the oil and gas industry.

This could be because one of those players is the Brenninkmeijer family who made their fortune with retail giant C&A, a subsidiary of Cofra Holdings (which boasts of its commitment to renewable energy) and which, in turn, through another subsidiary Bregal Investment, invests in oil and gas in North America. The Brenninkmeijer family launched The Laudes Foundation in 2020 which now funds the SBTi.

Cascale, ZDHC and The Laudes Foundation all shared the same roof on Rokin Street in Amsterdam until recently. Laudes has since relocated.

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The Impact

After my investigation was published in The Intercept, followed by New York Times’ own, I was told emergency meetings were held by the then-SAC (now Cascale) and Higg (now Worldly). Many brands were outraged to find out they had stumped up big sums of money to support questionable initiatives and buy tools that could easily be accused of fudging the data. Yet, the organisations and think tanks these tools and companies were linked to continue to function and advise policy. Thankfully, Norway is taking H&M to court over false sustainability claims, after Norwegian authorities concluded that H&M and other brands would be “breaking the law” for using the Higg Index to market their products as more environmentally sustainable. It was after this lawsuit that the SAC and Higg rebranded—choosing greenwashing again over substantial change.

This is precisely why, when founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard decided to give his company away, I criticised the media’s response. The New York Times published a glowing profile of the billionaire and uncritically reported that the company’s fortune would be put into trust to support green initiatives, without questioning how such initiatives would be governed, given Patagonia’s failure to hold itself, let alone its own industry, to account.

Patagonia’s Director of Philosophy, Vincent Stanley, got in touch after reading my piece. After a back-and-forth over email, Vincent graciously invited me to a meeting with one of the company’s scientists and a representative from the PR department. I was thrilled and quite moved by their willingness to engage with a minnow of journalism, and thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. However, the PR representative became increasingly agitated during the call by the scientist’s enthused agreement that calling any growth-based business sustainable was itself questionable. Towards the end of the meeting, the PR rep burst out that it was unfair for me to go after Patagonia, who had, arguably, done so much more than any other company in fashion, who was genuinely trying to do good where others didn’t care:

“Why us?!”

“Because if I hold your feet to the fire, maybe you’ll do even better,” I responded.

The United Arab Emirates, in exchange for access to Sudan’s gold, gas and ports, has been supporting the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) bid for power, supplying the group with arms, holding their bank accounts, and washing conflict goods onto the international financial network.

And which powerful nation decried the situation as the “haunting echoes of the genocide that began almost 20 years ago in Darfur”?

The United States of America, in a statement branded “a political decision” by Human Rights Watch.

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Over 12,000 people have been killed in Darfur since April 2023, and 5.8 million displaced, at the hands of the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemetti). Human Rights Watch claim the UAE’s involvement is an open secret, with “senior diplomats raising the issue” with the Gulf state.

“It’s a problem,” said Nicole Widdersheim, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch. “We have asked the U.S. administration, as a security council member, to push for the full implementation of the arms embargo that's been in place on Darfur since the first Darfur genocide.

“We're not clear that the security council was doing everything they could to push for that enforcement and then sanction those that were violating it. The UAE has been on the council this whole last year, so it was almost a political non-starter, which is the hypocrisy of the council.”

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RSF now controls more than half of Sudan, and civil society groups warn the UAE plans to exploit the vastly underutilised reserves of gold, other minerals, and Liquified Natural Gas off the Sudanese coast. Through its proxy forces, the UAE has also seized control of two ports on the Red Sea in an area critical to the movement of goods around the world, as evidenced by the United States and United Kingdom’s full-throated attack on Yemen in January. Port Sudan and its Qatari-funded LNG terminal is the last major stronghold of the the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

Not only is the Red Sea a strategic passage, accounting for 12% of the world’s shipping traffic, the Sudanese coast is the entry-point for East African fossil fuels to the rest of the world. Yet, while the region is known for its vast reserves, it is equally lacking in processing and refining capacity for both oil and LNG. The UEA is in the planning stage of building a third port on the Sudanese coast, complete with a massive LNG processing facility, ensuring its control over East Africa’s supply to shore up capital and bargaining power in an increasingly unstable world.

“The party's coming to an end,” said Jason Wojciechowski, a Senior Media Fellow at the Center for Impact Communications. “Whether the party's coming to an end because of climate change or just because of running out of resources, there's a mad dash. Strongly dependent fossil fuel countries like Brazil, UAE, Saudi Arabia, they need capital now to put them in a position to transition.”

Welcome to the genocidal energy transition.

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The RSF, Favoured by Autocrats

The RSF’s violence began in April 2023, but the group’s roots were created in the genocide mandated by Sudan’s former dictator, Omar Bashir. Losing his grip on power, Bashir empowered groups of militias to kill non-Arab citizens in the Darfur region. One of these militias, Janjaweed, which loosely translates to “terror on horseback” committed genocide against the ethnically African people in Darfur. The international community was in uproar, with major celebrities getting involved in the Save Darfur campaign. But, gradually, the world forgot, and Bashir was only ousted in a coup d’état in 2019 after months of civilian uprising. He was removed from his post by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the official military of Sudan, who, for the first time in history, were working with the Rapid Support Forces, which had grown out of the Janjaweed.

The RSF and SAF collaboration was due to the children of the RSF fighters, who placed their bodies on the line with the civilian protestors. Unwilling to harm their own children, the RSF agreed to collaborate with the SAF. After Bashir’s removal, it seemed Sudan was on the cusp of peace, given the peace between the two armed groups. However, the military leaders decided to collaborate against the civilians and share military junta power. The RSF massacred protestors. Finally, though, the military leaders turned on one another, exploding the country into endless cycles of violence and conflict, culminating in the outbreak of war in spring 2023.

The UAE had already developed a relationship with the RSF, having hired the mercenaries to fight during the Saudi-Emirati war in Yemen, which enriched the militia group with finances and power. A 2019 report by Global Witness found the UAE was funding the RSF and holding bank accounts for them, giving them access to the global financial markets.

The war in Yemen also introduced the RSF to the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary army. This relationships stands in the wings of the international stage to this day. RSF leader Hemetti has long enjoyed control of Sudan’s gold mines, which democratic reform would have taken back under national jurisdiction. Having secured his gold in the coup d’état, Hemetti provided Wagner with hard currency to prop up the ruble for a time during the economic sanctions levied on Russia in response to its attack on Ukraine. Leaders of the RSF went to Russia to meet with Putin themselves, but sources say it was the UAE who brokered the deal. The Wagner group has also been arming the RSF for war against the SAF, and last week it was revealed that Ukrainian special forces are combatting the Russian mercenaries on Sudanese soil.

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Corruption, Conflict and Coalitions

Part of UAE’s new offering to the global market is washing conflict goods, claims the Center for Impact Communications. Last year, the UAE became the world’s top importer of conflict diamonds, overtaking Belgium. This is partly in response to its political feud with former ally, Saudi Arabia. Saudi ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), seeks to undermine the UAE and position himself as the ruler of the Middle East, and has recently called for international businesses to relocate their regional HQs from Dubai to Riyadh. With the alliance breaking down, the UAE now needs to compete with Saudi Arabia for Western attention by providing attractive services and fossil fuels. ADNOC, the nation’s state-owned fossil fuel company, is planning to increase its fossil fuel production by 7% in just three years—and offset those emissions with 10% of Liberia’s land mass.

Yet, the UAE’s relationship with Russia attracted the wrong kind of Western attention. In retaliation, it was slapped on the ‘grey list’ of the Financial Action Task Force in June 2022, putting its right to access the international banking system under threat. The FATF is an OECD initiative and essentially controls who has access to the global financial markets (Iran and Myanmar are on the ‘black list’). The UAE was told to scuttle off and prepare masses of documentation proving its clean finances. However, sources say the USA stepped in and offered the Gulf state the opportunity to supply a Russian-gas starved Europe with LNG—if it stopped propping up the ruble with hard currency from Sudan. Mere months later, in September 2022, the UAE and Germany signed a deal for LNG. Austria followed suit in October, and France signed a $1 billion deal with the UAE in May 2023.

The UAE’s FATF case was then reviewed after major lobbying and is set to be removed from the grey list next month. However, during proceedings, a Belgium representative dared state the obvious that the Emirati nation had made no progress in cleaning up its financial services. A coalition of EU states and the USA simply ignored these concerns.

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Climate Wars

It’s not just the political climate which is unstable. These geopolitical shifts are panicked responses to a world that is heating up and running out of resources. Rather than keep the main source of the Earth’s global heating in the ground, the world’s most powerful nations are scrambling to eke out the very last drop of oil before abusing gas reserves. Marketed as a “transition fuel” by those with vested interests, LNG is just another filthy fossil fuel which the USA hopes will continue to guarantee the Dollar hegemony, given its dominance over gas production, export and supply chains. Even Biden’s latest superficial gas U-turn seems to be nothing more than appeasing young voters ahead of the election in September. Powerful nations face a choice: find your own source to keep your skin in the game and continue growing your economy, or depend on the USA. The gas rush reveals nobody wants to be dependent on anyone in this world.

The USA may have overplayed its hand, though, because on January 1 2024, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia all joined BRICS, the new political bloc with China at its centre. The more OPEC members BRICS attracts, the weaker the USA’s gassed-up grip on the world’s energy supply becomes. Since its illegal invasion of Iraq, the military superpower has preferred to quietly source what it needs through proxy wars. But the longer it backs Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, the easier its allies can resist the USA’s might and gain public approval. In November last year, the then-BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—called for an immediate ceasefire, and South Africa has captured the global public’s heart by taking Israel to the international court for war crimes. A line is being drawn in the sand. The United States and its dependent allies—gas-starved Europe—are on the wrong side.

But some on the side of the oppressed in Palestine are also those guilty of war crimes elsewhere, from Indonesia’s genocide of West Papuans to the UAE-backed genocide in Darfur. These crimes against humanity are often touted as rooted in ideological differences, but the boon of natural resources is always in the fine print. Sudan is an untapped source of fossil fuels with substantial reserves of gold, copper and uranium, all necessary for the “green” energy transition. It also boasts huge stretches of fertile land and abundant water resources, immensely valuable as traditional food supply chains come under stress. A report by the Center for Impact Communications suggested the UAE wants to exploit these resources to position itself as a “major player in the global food market, consolidating its economic power and influence”.

Sadly, these ruthless geopolitical moves are also playing out on the ground with the RSF, typically made up of Arab herders, targeting the African agriculturalists who prevented the desertification of Darfur. Global heating, due to the burning of fossil fuels and abuse of the earth’s resources, almost turned the fertile lands of Darfur into sand. The indigenous peoples saved it—only to be wiped out by a group that desired that land for itself.

This violence is backed by Emirati money and Emirati-sourced arms smuggled into Darfur, despite the arms embargo. The UAE’s involvement is a widely discussed “open secret”, yet Blinken’s atrocity determination failed to mention the Gulf state. The US Secretary of State also did not call a press conference. Civil Society groups say this was to avoid comparisons with Gaza—and questions about the arms sale made to the UAE just two days prior.

“It's pretty rare that the U. S. says officially there's ethnic cleansing and war crimes happening in a conflict,” said Wojciechowski. “The Secretary of State would usually announce this at a press conference and make a point, but you can't do that when you're denying ethnic cleansing and war crimes in Palestine.”

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The United States has no official framework for atrocity determinations, and as such the State Department can bend the rules depending on the result they desire. However, each determination does kick-start a legal proceeding, some of which, including the last determination about Darfur twenty years ago, can have immense effect. But this time, the determination was delayed. It is understood this was because of the desire to avoid a demand for the same to be done for Gaza.

“That was really frustrating for those that have been advocating for attention and focus on the crimes in Sudan”, said Widdersheim. “They are completely unrelated crises. The Sudan conflict started in April and a lot of the worst crimes we saw were in June, but there's been various acts, including the bombing of civilian infrastructure by the Sudanese Armed Forces, which calls into question how the U. S. views that when other parties do the similar thing.”

When asked about the effectiveness of an atrocity determination which refuses to point fingers at the regime funding genocide Widdersheim said the United States never traces the roots of enablers: “That has not come up in any atrocity or genocide determinations. One of the basic principles of doing atrocity prevention—this is in the US framework and the UN framework for prevention, it goes back to all the lessons learned from Bosnia and Rwanda—you break down perpetrators, targets, and enablers. The U. S. doesn't seem to have used these determinations as a tool to expose who is enabling genocides.

“There's no set process, and they're often—and I believe this from also working inside the U.S. government—they're often a political decision.”

Last week, experts warned the United States, in finding atrocities in Darfur but not Gaza, risks complicity with Israeli war crimes.

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The erasure of UAE’s involvement is likely because in that in the very same week Blinken was holding secret talks with UAE leaders to convince them to once again go to war with Yemen. This attempt to stir up the proxy war was likely due to the desire to control the Red Sea, critical to the safe passage of goods, including gas, around the world—the USA and UK practically confirmed this hypothesis by launching missile attacks on Yemen on January 12, after the Iran-backed Houthis launched a series of missiles at shipping vessels. The Houthis claim they are merely following the Geneva Convention on genocide and doing everything in its power to stop Israel and those who back Israeli war crimes.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C, Biden’s government wants a $95 billion “aid” package to fund confllict in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. In contrast, amid another nation-wide internet blackout, the UN last week called for $4.1 billion in aid for Sudan where 700,000 children face deadly malnutrition.

Widdersheim says the Biden administration ignored the Human Rights Watch plea to provide a package to Sudan: “We kept telling The Hill, please make a package when you announce this. We provided them with a list of actions again in December and I was feeding them to the administration prior to them announcing the determination. We were disappointed to see nothing concrete mentioned when they made the Sudan determination.”

© Rachel Donald

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It’s remarkable the former Prime Minister had the time to think about Palestine given he’s been busy securing Chinese and Emirati investment for an Indonesian project set to destroy the precious Borneo rainforest. Local campaigners such as Sarawak Report have been sounding the alarm about the disastrous impact on the local ecosystems—and the foreign money propping up the project.

In a story that encompasses the complexity of a world mired in crisis and corruption, Indonesia has spent the past four years trying to drum up foreign investment for its proposed “eco-city” in the heart of the Kalimantan jungle. Nusantara, a $31 billion project, will be declared Indonesia’s new capital upon completion. Why?

Because Jakarta is sinking.

A sinking city and an eco-city

The desire to move Indonesia’s capital from the island to Java to the island of Borneo is being pushed by President Joko Wido, known as Jokowi. In 2017, his administration awakened a dormant motion to move the capital, formally ratifying the plan in August 2019. Jokowi, a carpenter, who was widely praised when elected as a beacon of democracy in a nation which had struggled to shake off the shackles of political dynasties, has said the idea proudly harks back to the beginning of Indonesian democracy. President Sukarno, the nation’s first democratically elected leader, was the first to broach the idea of moving the capital from Jakarta. He was later deposed in a CIA-backed coup which killed one million Indonesians.

Jakarta is a frightening example of a city under threat from the climate crisis, with experts suggesting one third of its could be underwater by 2050. It’s also, quite simply, full, ranked as the world’s most polluted city in 2023. Yet, it’s been the beating heart civic engagement in a notoriously undemocratic democracy, housing protests which have toppled regimes, changed laws and jailed politicians. Experts warn moving the capital will fracture that critical civic engagement, putting politics at a safe distance from dissenting civilians. Such warning is prophetic, as it was announced that Nusantara will be governed by a Capital City Authority, elected by the President. The rest of the country is governed by democratically-elected mayors and governors.

This slide into authoritarianism couldn’t have a more beautiful backdrop. Nusantara is being built in the heart of the Borneo rainforest, the oldest and most biodiverse region on earth. In a terrible irony representing the madness of eco-modernism, the rainforest in Kalimantan is being logged to make way for the eco-city. Blair, an ambassador for the project which claims to be Net Zero despite destroying the rainforest, seemingly forgot the part where logging threatens biodiversity when he proudly stated: “Nusantara is situated in a beautiful part of the world that is rich in biodiversity, and it's going to be a sign of modern living that is sustainable and protects our environment.”

But autocratic sustainable eco-cities which protect our environments by destroying them come at a cost. No matter, when you have autocratic friends—or rather, a connections-for-hire globalist who has made it his life’s work to befriend autocrats since stepping down as the democratically-elected leader of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

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Connections-for-cash

Blair joined the “ecological disaster” project’s steering committee in January 2020, alongside Japanese businessman Masayoshi Son (who has since pulled out) and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who supposedly “shares chemistry” with Blair. Blair worked closely with leaders across the Gulf States as the Quartet peace envoy, with The Times revealing last summer that his Institute continued to advise the Saudi government after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist critical of the Saudi regime. Blair’s institute is still on the Saudi payroll.

Was it Blair, then, who pitched the eco-city investment to MBZ?

In March 2021, the United Arab Emirates pledged a $10 billion investment through the Indonesia Investment Authority, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. Reaffirming their investment in 2022, the UAE noted only a part of their investment would go towards Nusantara, with the remaining unspecified amount invested in strategic sectors, such as health, education, and food.

These are critical sectors for the security of any country as we move towards decades of increasing political and climate instability. Just two months ago leaked documents before COP28 showed Saudi Arabia was concocting strategies to get the continent of Africa “hooked” on petrol. Is the investment in critical Indonesian sectors the UAE’s attempt to buy outright influence in a region with less political power to resist?

Commentators certainly fear that’s exactly what China is doing, with Nusantara even being dubbed the “New Beijing”. China has used this same political strategy to buy influence and even outright political control in democratically-weak regions across Africa and the Pacific. Home to huge swathes of rainforest—or timber, as capitalists would call it—China has had its eye on Borneo for decades and, finally, it has found a Blair-sized way in. In October 2022, it was Blair who promoted China and the UAE to Jokowi when they were discussing securing investment for Nusantara.

The concerns of Chinese involvement in Nusantara’s construction is nigh-on confirmed by plans for a Chinese state-owned cement plant in the city’s vicinity. The plant, owned by Hongshi Group, will employ 13,000 people and be capable of producing 8 million tons of cement per year, no doubt supplying the cement for the city. But, given the Indonesian cement sector is already over-producing by a staggering 40%, plans for this immense plant raise questions about the Chinese government’s influence over the plans for Nusantara—and their possible cannibalisation of Indonesian industry.

Unfortunately, sacrificing Indonesia’s sectors for power or money or whatever it is autocrats desire is on trend for Jokowi, who began life as a citizen of democracy but has since planted the seeds of his own political dynasty, appointing a series of family members to top government jobs. Shockingly, whilst he hasn’t announced his support for the next presidential candidates, he rehabilitated the image of former military commander and anti-democratic reform candidate Prabowo who campaigned in the last two elections.

But Indonesia’s descent into authoritarianism should pose no problem for Blair, who has made a lucrative career out of washing the images of some of the world’s most notorious regimes. Tellingly, despite Nusantara’s struggle to attract foreign investment, Blair stays the course, alongside the UAE and China. In fact, in October 2023 he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Indonesia on behalf of his think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), to build a “research and development centre” in the future city.

A huge investment, no doubt, yet Blair hasn’t said who’s coughing up the cash. Could it be China, who he visited not three days prior, seemingly to discuss Labour’s relationship with the Chinese?

Blair’s Hold On Britain

Despite leaving office in 2007, a formal statement released after Blair’s visit by the Chinese claimed China’s top diplomat used the meeting to call for stronger ties with the Labour Party. According to the statement, “Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Blair on Monday in Beijing that the Communist Party is prepared to boost its relationship with Labour.”

The meeting flew mostly under the journalistic radar, probably because Blair is a private individual and not a representative of the British government, but raises huge questions about the role of such individuals supposedly committed to spreading the word of democracy doing so without being elected. Whilst TBI is cooking up policy for British politics—and has more than doubled its earnings in the past two years, no doubt a signal the global elite think Labour will return at the next election—it is unclear if Tony Blair now represents Labour at such meetings. Much like his clients buy influence abroad, Blair’s foreign connections could be buying influence at home.

Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, has been deeply criticised for adopting watered-down Tory policies in his bid to seduce the centre. Is Tony Blair’s political gallivanting a watered-down mimic of PM Sunak’s laughable decision to bring back Cameron as a Lord?

Starmer has certainly let the man who helped start an illegal war closer to politics than most of us are comfortable with, with he and senior members of his party attending a TBI Future of Britain event last summer which promised to “address the challenges the country faces”. The Future of Britain programme is designed to restore the “centre ground” of British politics and is defined by its “pragmatic” agenda (not like clearing a rainforest to build an eco-city). The institute has produced numerous policy initiatives directed at influencing the direction of Labour policy.

But if Blair is influencing Britain, who is influencing Blair? While not legally mandated, TBI has refused to disclose many of its clients, donors and connections. Unsurprising, really, for a man whose moral compass points East.

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Blair the Broker

Blair’s special relationships with China and the Gulf States were revealed in 2016 when leaked emails obtained from the 1MDB PetroSaudi files, linked to the biggest financial scandal in history, revealed the client base of Blair’s then-venture, Tony Blair Associates (TBA). Blair’s shady business structure. The emails also revealed the complex structure of TBA had worked to obscure Blair’s status as its sole ultimate beneficiary.

Back in 2010, Blair was charging PetroSaudi $65,000 a month (plus a 2% commission on any contracts netted) as an undisclosed consultant to the fledgling outfit, which had just landed a $300 million windfall in return for fronting Jho Low and Prime Minister Najib’s first billion dollar heist from Malaysia’s 1MDB. You can read all about this scandal on Sarawak Report.

The money was being channelled through a network of companies which all traded under TBA. When pressed on whether the ex-PM himself was the actual employee in this arrangement, TBA staff members assured PetroSaudi’s lawyer that Blair was indeed the sole ultimate beneficiary of all the related companies and would perform the duties directly and personally for the cash.

So, what services did Blair perform?

In return for the payments, which continued for some months, Blair offered and delivered introductions for the company to various influential Chinese figures whom courting in the course of several visits. This was whilst simultaneously conducting his role as the Middle East peace envoy.

It is clear from the leaked email dialogues that China was interested in the PetroSaudi connection, given the potential channel to influential decision makers in the Middle East. After all, the co-owner of the company was none other than Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a son of the then King of Saudi Arabia. Blair’s Middle East role clearly provided unique high level contacts with some of the world’s wealthiest investors that were of interest to China.

Chinese investment through its Road and Belt policy into the oil rich Gulf was burgeoning at that time, driven by the determination by the super power to increase its influence throughout the region, purchasing major new sources of oil and funding construction.

But the Gulf states were traditionally aligned to Western economies. Whilst buying oil fields showed commitment to the Gulf’s fossil fuel interests, there was surely still a risk of such moves upsetting the USA, who considers China to be enemy number one. Having a sleek, USA-friendly globalist vouching for them would certainly smooth over any concerns.

Was TBA in the business of providing such a service alongside the charitable agenda proclaimed by Mr Blair’s concurrent roles and commitments? Certainly, his growing connections with China were less easily explained in the context of his various mission statements on world peace, religious extremism and climate change.

An analysis by the Guardian of that period pointed to how Blair, who had visited China just five times during his lengthy premiership and the tricky handover of Hong Kong, was to step up his presence impressively after stepping down from office in 2007. Following a visit where he earned £200,000 for a speech in the industrial city of Dongguan, the newspaper spotted a turning point in how he viewed the rising power

During ensuing period, as the Guardian recorded in 2016, Blair visited China more than two dozen times. One reason given was the expansion of his Faith Foundation whose charitable mission was “to provide the practical support required to help prevent religious prejudice, conflict and extremism” and another to pursue his mission to combat climate change.

Yet in August 2010 he found time during signing a partnership agreement between Peking University and his Faith Foundation for meetings with the Chinese oil giants CNPC–who bought the Abu Dhabi oil field in 2014—and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, as well as China’s supreme economic council, and the National Development and Reform Commission.

Not-For-Profit, For Power

Such exposures, questioning the cash Blair was receiving for private consultancy work, alongside his continuing public roles (reportedly for countries like Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Columbia, Rwanda, Albania and Azerbaijan and entities like JP Morgan in negotiating loans for Gaddafi’s Libya) appeared to prompt a reset.

In May 2015 he announced he would quit his formal Middle East envoy role, whilst explaining he remained “fully committed to assisting the international community in its work with Israel and the Palestinians to bring about progress on the two-state solution.” He could “best support these efforts through working with the key regional players, the USA, the EU and others, without any formal role.”

In September 2016 there was a further announcement that the former Prime Minister had chosen to close his lucrative consultancy in favour of his not-for-profit work and would gift TBA’s “substantial reserves” towards that end. The ex-PM elaborated that he would retain “a small number of personal consultancies for my income, but 80 per cent of my time will be pro bono on the not-for-profit side.”

These plans were refined yet again two months later with the setting up of the Tony Blair Institute, trading under the name of Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI). The organisation now boasts offices in over 30 countries with its teams described as “embedded, working directly with political leaders and governments to implement reforms”, raking in over £122 million last year.

But the Tony Blair Institute can’t seem to rid itself of Tony Blair Associates, given several of its known clients and donor governments show little interest in its proclaimed objectives of reform, change or enhancing social justice. Perhaps because the Institute cannot rid itself of Blair, who sources claim promoted the Abu Dhabi bid to purchase the floundering Daily Telegraph, the key opinion-forming paper of Britain’s Conservative party voters, a bid that former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove described as a major security threat to the nation.

Another firm connection with Abu Dhabi comes through the Israeli linked US billionaire Thomas Kaplan. Kaplan is an old university friend of Blair’s top advisor both in government and business, Jonathan Powell, and has a record of extremely close relations with the autocratic leader of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan (MBZ).

Indeed, the US entrepreneur has described his relationship with MBZ as “closer than with anyone besides his wife” and played a key role in the hardline alliance to counter perceived rapprochement with Iran, and in developing the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf. The Tony Blair Institute also claims Blair holds a “publicly recognised role” in cementing the accords in its 2022 financial statements.

The apparent dissonance between promoting a reform led platform and whilst working with repressive regimes is being explained by some TBI staffers in African countries who have explained to journalists the view of their organisation: democracy has failed in Africa and the only successful states are in the Gulf which show stability, permanence and prosperity.

Democracy seems to be failing everywhere—but why help get it on its feet when you can cash in on its demise?

© Rachel Donald

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Except, the expanding oil production is barely mentioned in the documents released by CCR (which do not contain all briefing notes). This could likely be because the world is running out of available oil, with producers digging further into the earth’s crust in order to procure lower quality shale oil. This, to any capitalist, is a bad investment, and some researchers say the energy return on investment (EROI) will soon mean we use more energy reaching those oil deposits then we could ever hope to get from using them. Essentially, dusk is falling on oil. The Saudis can do all they want to artificially stimulate demand in Africa by flooding the market with cheap cars, or proposing supersonic jets which consumes three times as much fuel, but at this stage in the game such tactics look like desperate moves to sell every last drop.

Gas, though, is a different story. With 125 years left of the stuff which produces 40% less emissions than coal, it has been falsely branded by governments and the fossil fuel industry as a “transition fuel”. The leaked documents reveal ADNOC is offering developing nations around the world to develop and exploit their gas reserves (like helping Venezuela export to Trinidad and Tobago) and offering partnership to Western companies. Not only is this a terrible move for climate, it makes little business sense given the demand for gas in some of the world’s biggest markets is… declining.

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Seb Kennedy of EnergyFlux and Peter Sainsbury of Carbon Risk keep a close eye on the energy markets, reporting that demand in Europe is “in secular decline”. This is due to Europe’s dying industry and Russia’s blown-up pipeline. Europe’s gas consumption has been declining for years, not due to excellent climate policies, but rather rampant deindustrialisation as the global goods market allowed for wealthy countries to outsource their dirty work abroad. The industry left, dominated by just six sectors, were hit particularly hard by the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline which imported cheap Russian gas into Europe. As Seb kindly explained to me over email, LNG, the American gas the EU now relies on, is much more expensive than Russian gas.

Another reason for the decline is thanks to batteries. 68 gas plants around the world were cancelled this year alone as giant batteries are becoming cheap enough to be used as back-up power when available renewable energy dips. Gas had originally been touted as filling the energy gaps during intermittent periods in solar and wind, but the rapid improvements in battery technology and availability now make them cost-competitive. Without getting into the details of the negative impacts of mining and availability of materials, giant batteries are still better than gas, and prices will likely continue to drop as their market share increases. So why on god’s greenish earth would the UAE push gas, especially given they also have a renewable energy company?

Fossil fuel infrastructure is very energy-intensive itself: transports, refineries, pipelines. If you want to get gas to your house, you’re going to have to connect to a pipeline which is part of a national gas infrastructure, itself part of an international energy infrastructure. All of this costs capital to build and run, which is why developing nations are forced into partnerships with Western countries in order to exploit these natural resources.

Renewable energy is a bit different: it could be done on mammoth scales, as being proposed, or it could be done more locally. Unlike fossil fuels, renewable energy can be decentralised. A community can raise the capital for their own wind turbine; individuals can install solar panels on their own homes; developing nations are even rolling solar out to off-grid areas. Unlike fossil fuels, such communities don’t need to be hooked up to the main grid. Once the parts are delivered, they could technically enjoy the fruits of a closed circuit.

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Boy oh boy does this threaten the political world order, not just run on but run by fossil energy. When fossil fuels were the only viable option, vulnerable nations were forced to put their resources on the global market in order to exploit them as they didn’t have the capital to cover start-up costs. Secondly, these fuels are controlled by a relatively small section of world powers, who thus maintain political relevance and immense lobbying power. This is what is sometimes missing from the climate-energy conversation: Not only does a power like the USA need more fossil fuels to grow its economy, it needs the rest of the world to need those same fuels to keep its position as top dog. The West doesn’t particularly know how to bargain let alone collaborate—how will it trade with the world if it has nothing to offer? How will it maintain control if control is dissipated through a decentralised energy network?

Getting nations hooked on gas ensures a continued presence from political actors who would rather see the world burn than lose their position in the global hierarchy. Without the capital to invest in the necessary infrastructure, developing nations will rely on fossil powers to exploit their resources and enter into the global energy market. Tragically—and critically—these partnerships also ensure such resources are not distributed amongst the home population, but rather put onto the global market who trades at the highest price, meaning that the very nations who are rich in resources the world needs remain poor as all of their natural wealth floods out of their borders, unable to pay to keep it for themselves. Again, this perpetuates a cycle of power, energy, capital and politics which benefits a minority. And this is why bad business decisions sometimes make good political decisions.

This is the energy war playing out at a conference allegedly dedicated to coherent climate strategy. The energy war is the biggest investment made by the Global North and it has rewarded them handsomely—until now. While the West and its allies focussed on harnessing fossil fuels by any means possible, China was snapping up access to precious minerals and expanding its control over materials supply chains, paid for by the Global North’s industrial outsourcing. It’s China who are making leaps and bounds with regards to renewable technology development and deployment. To go green, you need to go through China. The economic boon of this energy transition will likely help them snatch the top spot from the fossil-fuelled USA and all its allies in the West and OPEC, who are doing everything they can to delay the inevitable.

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Ironically, beside enormous geopolitical tension with their should-be main customer, the one thing stopping China supplying the world with renewable power is the energy it would take to do so: China still relies heavily on fossil fuels, and, according to the leaked documents, is the biggest customer of ADNOC out of all the Parties. ADNOC is also offering to partner with China to explore LNG opportunities in Mozambique, Canada and Australia. This may seem strange given China’s position as the world’s top supplier of renewable energy infrastructure—why enter the energy war when you’re winning the material war? Because whilst China has muscled into the energy market by way of materials, energy security is still a top priority for every nation and, frankly, the more diverse your supply, the more resilient you are to shocks. An alliance could cut off the gas flow to China fairly easily, if it so chose, just as an alliance of OPEC caused the 1980s oil crisis. But then China would stop its exports of materials to those allies’ industries, at which points the markets would cry out and lobbyists descend on Washington in horror. Of course, at that point, both economic superpowers would be in economic free-fall, rippling out across the rest of the world, causing irreparable damage to markets, industry and people.

Geopolitics in a globalised world is like playing Russian roulette with a fully-loaded gun. The only way to get out unscathed is to drop the weapon.

© Rachel Donald

These countries, known for their pacifism above all else, have been backing the Israeli genocide since its eruption in October, voting with Israel rather than staying neutral as other allies have preferred as public protests erupt around the world. On October 27, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga voted against a humanitarian truce to allow aid into Gaza. 

The Pacific Island nations have formed a voting bloc around Israel in recent years. In 2020, the USA, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru oppose a UN draft resolution in November 2020 on the creation of a Palestinian state. In 2017, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and the Marshall Islands, voted with the United States and Israel against the Untied Nations resolution to reject Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In September this year, Papua New Guinea joined the United States in becoming one of five nations to open an embassy in West Jerusalem, effectively rejecting Palestinian claims to partial sovereignty of the city. Israel is pushing for embassies to be opened in the partially occupied city but most nations prefer to keep their embassies in Tel Aviv whilst Jerusalem’s status remains contested and illegally occupied. Papua New Guinea’s bold move allies its cause with Western hegemony—despite the fervent desire to seek strong allies being rooted in their own colonisation.

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Colonised

Nations in the Pacific suffer from the “resource curse”. Bountiful in natural resources, their land has long been a target for extractive industries and stronger political powers looking to exploit the people and their natural wealth. The Pacific islands enjoy dense forests, supremely fertile soil, layers of precious minerals in the rock, and oil and gas off their coasts. They are a golden ticket, one Europe happily exploited until the 50s and 60s, rapidly granting these nations independence, bequeathing them a judicial and parliamentary system, before abandoning these particularly vulnerable countries to the whim of other players closer to home. 

First, the Malaysian loggers arrived, destroying huge swathes of Papua New Guinea’s forests by bribing, bullying, threatening and harming indigenous communities and politicians who dared oppose them. The Malaysian logging cartel is well-versed in getting what it wants, having destroyed the island of Borneo with the help of political figures. Their playbook involves drafting contracts in non-native languages to trick indigenous communities, offering the promise of building schools and churches, and even locking protestors up in shipping containers. 

China also landed on Pacific shores, interested not just in timber but the minerals deep in the island rock, extracting everything from copper to gold and causing enormous environmental damage. Like the loggers, they bought political influence throughout the islands in order to plunder the natural resources, investing some of the profits in maintaining their political influence. Peter Kenilorea, an opposition MP for the Solomon Islands, told me his opponents, who were being funded by China, claim he won his campaign simply because their funding dried up during the 2019 oil spill: “They told me straight out that I was lucky the shipment ran aground on the reef.”

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The Battle for Supply Chains

The proxy wars fought around the world can be divided into two camps: energy and materials. China controls most of the world’s supply chains for precious minerals and other critical materials needed for an energy transition. The West and its allies control most of the world’s energy supply. A renewable economy might be part of the answer to the climate crisis, but it would augment China’s political influence in the world, casting the West in a long shadow of the words MADE IN CHINA.

The West’s oversized influence ends with fossil fuels, unless it can re-enter the game as an industrial manufacturer. But decades of greed for cheap goods has given China a huge head start—and the chance to dominate the materials market. While the USA kept its sights set on the Middle East and getting access to the immense resources of oil, China took advantage of a distracted, short-term geopolitical strategy and sank its claws into the Pacific, including Australia, and Africa. And it struck gold. 

The energy vs materials war is currently played out as trade warfare, with the US and Europe slapping their enemies with sanctions, and China hitting back with tariffs on critical materials like graphite. Emboldened by Russia’s response to sanctions to simply sell their gas in rubles, China has also made noise about trading in Yuan, telling Gulf leaders last year that they are working to buy oil and gas in Yuan, thus weakening the petro-dollar. This trade war has also fractured Western relations, with Brussels refusing to join the USA’s heavy-handed campaign against Beijing.

This comes after Macron has been making the rounds in the majority world, shoring up European supplies of resources, including oil and gas. In Papua New Guinea this summer, he promised a third route to development, one in which these developing nations wouldn’t have to choose between two superpowers, but could progress “brother to brother”. Western sanctions on Russian gas made the EU desperately dependent on United States’ supplies, putting them in a vulnerable voting position. But if Europe sees a green transition on the horizon, they won’t want to be attached to the United States’ fossil-fuelled regime, even if it is the biggest in the world.

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East v West

So what does all this have to do with Israel?

Developing nations are vulnerable to the whims of superpowers. In the Pacific, China has caused more damage than the USA, Europe and their allies. Looking at the devastation of the forests and the vast areas of earth split open and gouged out by mining companies, it could be that the Pacific has decided Western allyship may help them fend off China’s pillaging. Backing Israel, the one Western stronghold in the Middle East, which the USA and UK have historically been desperate to conquer, is an excellent way of declaring allyship and backing the continued expansion of the fossil-fuelled regime. The islanders are seemingly happy to share their oil and gas reserves with Western countries because such industry typically happens offshore. What they no longer wish to see is their forests logged and their land destroyed by mining—especially when the profits buy elections.

Macron in particular has taken advantage of the Pacific’s distaste towards China, welcoming Papuan politicians into the folds of the elite political class. Less than one month after dining together in Port Moresby, Macron invited Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister, James Marape, to Paris to watch the Rugby World Cup. Marape then visited Israel to open the embassy.

Caught between the East and the West, the Pacific chose the West. 

But where is the West? Macron breaking ranks to court influence abroad, and Brussels outright denying the United States’ demands to punish Chinese innovation, shows that the Western front may be splitting apart. Israel’s brutality in Gaza is also putting pressure on unity, with Western leaders caught between the pressure of maintaining an international regime and currying support from their citizens who are vocally protesting the neo-imperial genocide. The USA is bound to support Israel, in no small part due to the powerful Israeli lobby which buys influence in Congress and the White House much as Chinese mining companies do in Pacific parliaments. But European and British leaders are facing revolts within their own parties, millions of people in their streets, and their bloodthirsty support is wavering ever-so-slightly, as evidenced in the abstaining from voting on the UN resolution in October. For now, the US’s staunchest allies are the some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. Yet, in a world of increasingly scarce resources allyship is cheap, and no amount of embassies and votes will save the Pacific Islands from the extraction both their allies and enemies depend on.

© Rachel Donald 

Still, Biden and his European pets champion Israel’s right to defend itself, suggesting the Palestinian Health Authority is inflating the numbers of their dead. The UN can only squawk while international law is revealed, yet again, to be upheld only when enemies break it, as Israel cuts off water, food, electricity and the internet to 2 million people trapped in the world’s biggest open-air prison, delivering collective punishment for the heinous crimes of Hamas on October 7.

But while bombs rain down, business continues as usual, with Israel granting 12 licences to six companies to explore for natural gas off the country's Mediterranean coast on October 30th. This is the latest venture to exploit one of several gas fields discovered on the Mediterranean coast over recent decades, aiming to solve Israel’s energy dependency and, crucially, Europe’s supplies.

The total oil and gas reserves were valued at a staggering $524 billion in 2019. But Israel does not have sole legal entitlement to the $524 billion, according to a UN report published in the same year. Not only is some of the $524 billion sourced from within the Occupied Territory of Palestine, much of the rest sits outside national borders in the deep sea, and thus should be shared with all relevant parties. The report questions the national right to these resources given they took millions of years to form—and that Palestinians occupied the whole territory until Israel’s recent formal creation.

The authors also note it is another war crime for the occupying power to deny the citizens the right to use their own natural resources, including diverting Palestine’s water supply, cutting off access to their fisheries, grabbing agricultural land and destroying olive groves. The financial costs are massive. “To date, the real and opportunity costs of the occupation exclusively in the area of oil and natural gas have accumulated to tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars.”

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Why share when you can export?

The USA’s and EU’s allyship with Israel has been steadfast since the state’s creation in 1948, with agreements strengthening ties ever since. In June 2022, under pressure to find another source of gas since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a different colonising force to import gas from the Leviathan gas field. This gas field, the biggest of recent discoveries, holds 22 trillion cubic feet in recoverable natural gas and could meet Israel’s domestic demands for 40 years.

The USA went one further, creating a USA-Israel energy cooperation agreement which stipulates that “United States-Israel energy cooperation and the development of natural resources by Israel are in the strategic interest of the United States”, promising to assist Israel with “regional safety and security issues”.

Natural gas is seen as a resource to “positively impact regional security”, which is policy jargon for building trading bridges with neighbouring Arab countries. Egypt began importing gas from the Leviathan field in 2020, and signed the MoU with Israel and the EU last year.

Natural gas, or “LNG” is being used as a political ploy around the world to deepen political relationships and economic interdependence as the world shifts from oil not out of morality but simply because oil reserves are running dry. Branded as a transition fuel by everyone from fossil fuel chiefs to the French President, LNG is the darling fossil fuel with 40% less carbon dioxide emissions than coal (a low bar), and 125 years of global supply in current reserves.

The USA, the world’s biggest producer and exporter of LNG, is banking on the energy transition going gassy before it goes green. 20 new LNG terminals, transporting gas from Southwest’s Permian Basin, are expected to be approved by Biden’s administration this year. Bookmarked for exports, analysts say the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with it would be twenty times larger than those from the oil drilling at Willow, the much-protested new oil field in Alaska.

Gas is the currency to curry political favour. In 1999, Gaza almost did just that.

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Gas in Gaza

In 1999, BG Group (BGG) discovered a large gas field between 17 and 21 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. According to the Oslo II accords, the Palestine National Authority has maritime jurisdiction up to 20 nautical miles off of Gaza’s coast. In November 1999, the PNA signed a 25-year contract for gas exploration with BGG.

The reserves were estimated at 1 trillion cubic feet and would meet Palestine’s demands and allow for exports. Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, approved authorisation for BGG to drill the first well in July 2000. They struck gas gold. Palestine and Israel began to negotiate and the deal was seen to benefit both Israeli demand and Palestinian supply.

However, a change in Israeli leadership soured the deal, with Ariel Sharon’s government allegedly driving the rejection of a supply deal between the Palestinian gas field and the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation. In May 2002, the UK’s then-PM, Tony Blair, got involved and Sharon agreed to negotiate an agreement for the annual supply of 0.05 trillion cubic feet of Palestinian gas for a period of 10 to 15 years.

However, he changed his mind in 2003 stating that the funds could be used to support terrorism.

Ehud Olmert’s government, spurred on by the new PM, agreed to reopen negotiations with BGG in April 2007. Starting 2009, Israel would purchase 0.05 trillion cubic feet of Palestinian gas for $4 billion annually, creating a good atmosphere for peace, it was argued.

However, the 2007 Battle of Gaza in which Hamas took control of the strip changed the deal once more, with Hamas looking to increase the original 10% Palestinian share in the BGG deal. An Israeli team of of negotiators was set up by the Government of Israel to formulate a deal with BGG, bypassing both the Palestinian government and PNA, effectively nullifying the contract signed in 1999 between BGG and PNA. However, in December 2007, BGG withdrew from negotiations with the Israeli government.

In June 2008, the Israeli government recontacted BGG to urgently renegotiate the deal. The UN report states: “The decision to speed up negotiations with BGG coincided, chronologically, with the planning of an Israeli military operation in Gaza, whereby it would appear that the Government of Israel wished to reach an agreement with BGG prior to the military operation, which was already in an advanced planning stage.”

Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008 brought the Palestinian gas fields under Israeli control—without regard for international law. BGG has been dealing with the Israeli government ever since. The UN estimates billions of dollars in loss for the Palestinian people.

But more gas for everyone else.

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The situation in Palestine is more complex than the location of gas fields, but geopolitics and geology map similar courses. In the EU, demand for ally-approved gas is higher than ever, perhaps fuelling the audacity to champion Israel’s war crimes whilst decrying Russia’s own. As for the USA, a network of pipelines is a network of dependents who are less likely to threaten hegemony if their own energy depends on the USA’s 51st state. Through all of these calculations, Palestinians are being murdered—another externality of petrostates which will never be taken into account by our current leaders.

© Rachel Donald

Questions have been raised concerning Our World in Data (OWID) and its pro-economic and population growth bias after it emerged the organisation has taken donations from tech billionaire Musk since at least 2021. The Oxford charity has also been sponsored by organisations linked to Effective Altruism, a philanthropic movement connected with Musk which has been slammed for its racism.

OWID, which aims to make data on “the world’s largest problems” accessible, has already come under scrutiny for its influence on the “public narratives” surrounding both economic and population growth. 

Billionaire Musk is the most outspoken proponent of population growth in the world, recently tweeting that "population collapse" is more dangerous than climate change. Scientists are now raising the question whether OWID’s link to Musk explains the slant in its reporting—a slant which has not been addressed—despite criticism from world-renowned scientists.

Degrowth scholar Tim Parrique is the latest to raise concerns around OWID’s methodologies: “Publishing raw data without analysis is not science.” Parrique has worked at length to debunk “green growth”, the harmful myth that sustainable economic growth can be done within the planetary boundaries, a stance OWID supports. Parrique’s work comes after economic anthropologist Jason Hickel published this rebuttal to OWID claims about economic growth and poverty in 2021. 

OWID, which reaches millions of people every month, states its mission is to “publish the research and data to make progress”. The online publication, created in 2011, makes data on global problems accessible in an understandable and public platform. However, scientists and researchers have repeatedly rebuked the charity, questioning its two full-time employees over its pro-growth agenda, particularly on economics, technology and nuclear energy.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance, is also alarmed by OWID’s pro-growth skew: “Hannah Ritchie wrote a piece arguing that people in the Global North should not be concerned about having children, as the environmental problem primarily resides elsewhere. In making this rather callous statement, Ritchie conveniently neglects the ethical implications of procreation in high-consuming countries, which bear the greatest responsibility for the climate catastrophe that have now put over a billion children in the most impoverished countries at extremely high risk. Given her organisation is funded by the growthist Effective Altruism Foundation, and by the avowed pronatalist billionaire Elon Musk, who is pouring millions into fertility “research” to avert a "population collapse" of the western world, perhaps Ritchie's position is not so surprising."

Exactly how much money Musk donated to OWID is information that was not made publicly available. OWID did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York Times has also come under fire after publishing an opinion piece by Dean Spears who runs a population research centre which just accepted a $10 million donation from Musk. Bloomberg reported that Spears also received $383,000 of funding from one of OWID’s Effective Altruism (EA) sponsors, Longview Philanthropy. The EA movement promotes the wellbeing of the unborn trillions of humans who will eventually colonise space, and has been sharply criticised for promoting a position which ensures the existence of those trillions of people, and prioritise their wellbeing, over the suffering of humankind today.

Spears argues:

“Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.”

Such arguments, smacking of entitlement, erase the reality for billions around the world who suffer inexcusably low living standards, thanks to the global north’s extraction of wealth from the developing world to the tune of $2 trillion every year. Degrowth economists like Fadhel Kaboub argue the deliberate under-investment in the global south ensures the lifestyles of the rich.

This is not the first time the New York Times has uncritically promoted the logic of billionaires. Last September it published an exclusive detailing why the founder of clothing company Patagonia was donating his billions to fighting climate change. However, the piece failed to flag a previous investigation which showed that Patagonia’s former climate initiatives have harmed sustainability standards in the fashion industry, promoting the logic that money will solve the world’s problems.

Capital intervention in academia, media and politics sets the rules of debate. In this case, we must ask: How much influence do donors like Musk have on the organisations they fund?

Additional reporting by Rachel Donald.

Jeffrey Bomanak, leader of the Free Papua Movement, slammed the UN as “beholden to the G20’s vested interests” and urged indigenous populations to create their own international democratic forum in response. 

Bomanak referenced West Papua’s treatment within the UN over the past six decades, condemning the intergovernmental organisation as supporting Western interests to control resources and money around the globe.

As International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples came and went with no resolution to the conflict in West Papua, TPNPB (West Papua National Liberation Army) militant Jeffrey Bomanak called upon all indigenous peoples around the world to abandon the United Nations and create their own international organisation. In his press release, Bomanak tore apart the UN for its corruption and crimes against humanity, and proposed a new forum that would unite all indigenous people. 

“G20 conquerors and colonizers have never put down their swords and guns. They have never stopped conquering and colonizing, either by military invasion or economic imperialism.”

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The press release came after no recognition from the UN of the violence in West Papua at the hands of the Indonesian government. This little-known conflict has been branded a “genocide” of the Papuan people, but receives no international attention from governments or organisations alike. Bomanak claims the G20 manipulated the “illegal annexation of West Papua” in 1963 to gain access to the nations’ rich resources. 

“The hundreds of thousands of indigenous victims, and the living who are dispossessed and impoverished, are collateral damage to the vested interests of the G20 and the unapologetic national interests of USA, Australia, Chain, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Germany, et al.”

Bomanak claims that the UN is unable to address the climate crisis and “global melting” due to the conflict of interest between desired economic growth of G20 countries and the exploitation said growth is built upon.

“They will not stop until all our ancestral lands are one infertile wasteland.”

Stressing that indigenous people have faced centuries of marginalisation which ensure they still do not have access to “basic things” such as education, health or digital communications, Bomanak proposes a new forum for indigenous peoples to take sovereignty over their future. The United Indigenous Nations would become a world-first international institution that would “favour a guardianship of creation and not the predatory destruction of the world caused by the economic multinational imperialists and their unsustainable greed”. The proposed manifesto includes:

• The United Indigenous Nations (UIN) will be international relations with indigenous governance for indigenous people.

• Integrity will be at the heart of the union and cannot be a “commodity bought and sold for geopolitical and economic plunder”. 

• The UIN will have a “Charter of Human Rights and Accountability that cannot be only for some and not for all”. 

• The UIN will not have “self-entitled elitist Security Council of dysfunctional permanent members operating on self-interest”. 

• The UIN will “never operate with conspiracy and complicity in aiding and abetting crimes against humanity”.

Bomanak has said the UIN will be built in West Papua once the nation wins its independence from Indonesia: “The United Indigenous Nations will lead international governance as an international forum representing, for the first time, the principled values and ideals of indigenous and First Nation peoples who are the true guardians of our ancestral motherlands and the only custodians of this earth who favour a guardianship of creation and not the predatory destruction of the world caused by the economic multinational imperialists and their unsustainable greed.”

The call comes six months after after the TPNPB OPM took New Zealand pilot Phillip Mark Mehrtens hostage. The TPNPB have said they will release him once Indonesia agrees to negotiate the new terms of West Papua’s independence. Bomanak insists the TPNPB is not a terrorist or criminal organisation, but the “last defence of West Papua”.

But never mind all that—do you know that the biggest threat we face is actually feminism?

The Dangers of Liberation

Long have bands of men wished to control women’s bodies, through marriage, religion, pseudo-science and violence. This spirit of the malignant patriarch also acts upon mother earth, splitting open her depths to drill into her core, no matter the consequences for life itself who depends on her hospitality. That women’s rights should once again be under attack in this time of extreme violence against nature herself seems no surprise, revealing a pathology of uninhibited contempt which sees certain individuals behave with entitlement to bend the world to their will.

As neo-fascist Republicans simultaneously deny climate change and strip women of the right to abortion in the land of the free under the guise of protecting life, women are also under attack from former Dems who claim population collapse is the greatest threat to mankind and, thus, women having less kids will bring about the end of the world.

The biggest culprit? Elon Musk.

Not just content with ruining my favourite site on the internet, Elon has become increasingly obsessed with women’s bodies and procreation in recent years. A father of 10, he seemingly subscribes to “long-termism”, a philosophy which euphamises the obsession with controlling women’s reproductive organs as visionary concern for humanity’s future. Devised by Oxford scholar Will MacAskill, and gladly subsumed by a range of Silicon Valley tech evangelists, including cyrpto con-man Sam Bankman-Fried, long-termism suggests that the value of the future unborn trillions of humans outweighs the billions who exist today, and sacrificing the wellbeing of some of those billions in order to make the technological advancements which can protect and house those eventual trillions is thus morally correct.

It’s this grandiose narcissism which justifies sending children down mines in the Congo to extract the minerals for a Tesla battery and blasting millions of tonnes of carbon into the air to explore space: We’re doing it for the future humans, not to line our own pockets. (Will Mars be a communist colony with universal basic services? I somehow doubt it, given Musk recently shut down Ukraine’s access to the internet without warning their military after the Pentagon didn’t foot the Starlink bill in time.)

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Women—you had one job!

Welcome to the world of pronatalism, where people believe exponentially increasing our exponentially increasing human population will solve all our problems on a resource-limited planet.

The pronatalist argument seems to have split into two camps, depending on IQ: elite masterminds like Simone and Michael Collins believe smart people need to have lots of smart babies and encourage them to have lots of smart babies themselves. They’ve created a pro-procreation matchmaking service for the intellectual elite (read: white and rich) and plan on having 10 children themselves. They hope their bloodline will outnumber the current human population in just 11 generations and have gone on record saying they believe investing in the top 0.1% is more important than investing in the bottom 10%. Musk is also taking the burden of improving humanity personally, recently donating $10 million to fertility research. With a man as powerful as Musk, though, the personal is always political: he recently tweeted that only parents should have the right to vote given only they care about the future. 

The other camp is more obviously anti-women in their thinking, providing the other side to the anti-abortion campaigners who claim to be “pro-life” but unflinching in the face of incest, rape, ectopic pregnancies and fatal miscarriages. These men (because they are men) claim the fairer sex are threatening humanity’s very existence by having the audacity to choose childlessness.

Just as our population blasted past 8 billion, one such bloke, Stephen Shaw, released Birthgap – Childless World, a film which pins the planet’s “collapsing birthrate” on the “pitfalls of Feminism and the modern dating-world”. Not one to be far from the limelight, Musk makes a special appearance. In the film, Shaw claims declining birth rates are not due to smaller family sizes, but due to “an explosion in childlessness” in women, claiming such childlessness often leaves women “regretful, lonely, and frankly confused about how life worked out the way it did”.

A special screening for Cambridge students to encourage them “to consider factoring in plans for parenthood into their career plan” was protested by the student body in May, who rightly decried the film’s unscientific grounding as “misogynistic”. Concerned by the impact of such propaganda on the wider populous, a group of leading scientsist this week launched the Birthgap Facts project to debunk its claims.

Project lead, Nandita Bajaj, said: “Women without children, whether by choice or circumstance, face enormous stigma in most cultures, which often includes domestic abuse, divorce, and social ostracisation. There is also a lack of reckoning with the great unraveling of our ecological and social crises, which, according to the leading scientific authorities, including the UN, will likely bring unimaginably dire consequences for humanity and other species over the next several decades. These stark realities, including the climate-driven death toll and refugee crises, and the sixth mass extinction, are not acknowledged in the film.”

Given human population has increased from 2 billion to 8 billion in the past 100 years, stirring up a moral panic about childlessness seems an odd hill to die on. But moral panics are rarely about morality themselves, and the lack of scientific evidence of Musk et al’s arguments reveal an ideological underpinning which justifies terms like “neo-fascism”.

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Supremacy

It’s not that there isn’t enough kids in the world—it’s that there isn’t enough of the right kind of kids. The white, middle-class, Western kind. If the population argument was purely a numbers game, then Western countries would open their borders to booming populations across Africa and Asia. Instead, governments are tightening border controls and deploying a range of coercive pronatalist policies from child tax credits to stripping women of the right to abortion.

And for much the same reason that the Catholic Church still wanders about sub-Saharan Africa preaching that contraceptions gives you AIDs, increasing our own population isn’t about protecting kids but about increasing the number of believers in our way of life—it’s about maintaining political hegemony, a hegemony which is built on the back of inequality, of sending children down mines in the Congo so we can drive to the cinema in an EV and claim moral superiority. The economic machine driving wildfires, drought, food insecurity, tribal warfare, mass extinction—and huge wealth—demands labourers and consumers to function. The decline of either threatens corporate bottom lines—you can’t send people to space if they can’t afford a ticket, and they can’t afford a ticket unless someone else can’t afford running water.

“The world's eight richest individuals have as much wealth as people who make up the poorest half of the world,” continued Bajaj. “Ecologically blind to limits to growth, and operating from a warped bubble of techno-utopia, Musk's obsession with population growth is linked to economic growth. After all, he constitutes the small minority of elites that has benefited most from a system of patriarchy, extractive capitalism, and market fundamentalism, built on the practices of exploitation of the planet and the oppression of the most disempowered communities.”

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The “pitfalls of feminism”

The population question is often kept out of mainstream conversation for fear that talk of population control will lend validation to eugenics. This squeamishness is understandable given the world’s not-so-distant eugenicist past, but assumes top-down policies are the only way to manage population. On the contrary, the best population control policy has nothing to do with population and everything to do with education. Improving girls’ education always results in a lower birth rate. Period. Once granted the choice, women almost always choose to have less children, resulting in more attention, education and opportunity given to their smaller families.

Now, smaller families don’t automatically mean protecting the planet from population impact in a world where a minority have access to private jets, however, increasing the standards of living in the majority world threatens the labourer/consumer binary. Dismantling our for-profit economic system which perceives the natural world as a wasted resource is a priority if humanity is to survive itself. 

Feminism is a threat. It’s a threat to the inequitable distribution of resources, to racist border policies, to coercive pronatalism and extractive capitalism. Men like Musk would have us believe women’s liberation is destroying society. No, women’s liberation is birthing a new world where men like Musk don’t get rich off of kids in mines. 

© Rachel Donald

Upstairs from the conservation event, the main room in Port Moresby’s Apec House was filled to the brim with politicians, state officials—and fossil fuel executives. Macron had timed his visit to coincide with TotalEnergies final investment decision on a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) project they’ve been exploring in Papua New Guinea for the past 5 years. TotalEnergies, the French energy giant, is pouring no less than $10 billion into the joint venture, of which they own 41% and will develop. France’s purported conservation pledge pales in comparison. Indeed, a TotalEnergies’ executive, unaware he was speaking to a journalist, told me the company was irritated that Macron had decided to gatecrash their decision day: “Coinciding it with a conservation event? It doesn’t look very good for us.”

I asked him whether or not the carbon credits from the conservation project would be used to offset the emissions from the LNG project. He said yes. Later, when I asked him to go on the record, he denied any knowledge of the conservation project whatsoever.

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I had sidled into the state luncheon held in Macron’s honour whilst the President was signing agreements with PNG’s Prime Minister, James Marape. Fortunately for me, everyone was kindly wearing pins denoting their country or corporate allegiance. China, Japan, Israel—apparently a representative of each embassy had been invited, along with every French national living in PNG. Showing off his knowledge of the LNG deal, one Frenchman told me that Japan has bought 2% of the project because they will be the biggest buyers. Why? Asia is looking to transition away from coal.

The USA is the world’s largest producer and exporter of LNG. Is Macron—who foolishly called gas a “transition fuel” later that day—looking to weaken America’s gassed-up grip on the world?

The Americans seem to think so. Their Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, suddenly arrived in PNG the day before Macron’s visit. A Defence Cooperation Agreement was signed, whereby the USA promised naval support to “tackle illegal fishing and trafficking in your country’s exclusive economic zone”. Funnily enough, the following day, Macron also offered naval support in the same stretch of water against illegal fishing.

The USA’s move sparked the national paper to assure citizens that the “DCA [is] not about war preparations”, referring to increasing tensions between the USA and China. China has tightened its grip on the Indo-Pacific region in the past decade, buying up much of the mineral sites. PNG in particular, with its large land mass, has been a huge target. Local politicians say they are “sitting on a mountain of gold, on top of a lake of oil”. But without the infrastructure to use their own resources, the nation has been forced to sell it off to the highest bidder. With the threat of resource scarcity on the horizon, military control of waterways may provide access to precious material in the near future.  

And thus when Macron began lamenting climate change at the conservation event, and how we must all collaborate to overcome it—just minutes after dining with fossil fuel executives, who remained upstairs—it sounded like he plans on using the Managalas Plateau to greenwash France’s image as its largest energy company bores into Papuan soil, emitting 220 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over the next twenty years. Such carbon bombs exact a high price on people, planet and pocket. But offsetting them costs peanuts. It’s a win-win for imperial powers who depend on developing nations being unable to extract their own resources, and who want to promote “net zero” as a solution to the damage they’ve wrought over 200 years. Even better, they can now use a bastardised version of “woke” politics to decry that past imperialism by refusing to direct the course of the energy transition in nations who still have oil and gas in the ground to be profited from: “I am not here to lecture people,” declared the President of a nation whose political weapon of choice in Africa has been deposing democratically-elected leaders of former colonies. 

This, however, may be their best coup yet.

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TotalEnergies’ profits in 2022 were $32 billion. I asked Macron how much of this would be invested in Papua New Guinea’s renewable energy and conservation. “Look, I am not the CEO of TotalEnergies,” he quipped, smiling, as the people around me giggled—perhaps unaware of his ties to the energy company’s CEO who he decorated with France’s highest honour not a fortnight previously. Macron went on to explain that the project is part of “the strategy of the country and for the region” as they transition from coal to gas and then, eventually, to renewables: “This is the right way to proceed. I’m not here to lecture people, neither company nor country, you should not make gas project because it is bad. I’m not lecturing people. I’m trying to help people to reconcile development and climate change.”

This begs the question, of course, why developing nations need to take a whistle stop tour through all of the available fossil fuels before going green? Why is the strategy not financing renewable energy in developing nations and using those to offset historical emissions in the West? We could call them imperial credits—or reparations. Surely that would be the way to reconcile development with climate change, rather than triggering a carbon bomb and pretending that throwing money at an existing forest will somehow change how much CO2 ends up in our atmosphere? The science is out on the carbon credit scam—the only people who can make it make sense are economists.

World “leaders” would like us to believe that carbon accounting—not accountability—will solve the crisis. Rather than putting their money where their mouth is, their fossil fuel investments divest us from the future; the only green they’re committed to is that stamped with a currency sign. Perhaps they feel as disempowered as their citizens, compelled to play a game of Russian roulette in which all the chambers are loaded. Certainly, that’s what the fossil fuel executives suggested, as they wondered out loud whether we’ve run out of time for a transition. Yet, the cunning on Macron’s face as he leveraged climate change to greenwash political relationships with resource-rich nations, decrying their dependence on “old hegemonies”, suggested he really does think he can out-strategise both science and nature—or at least offset both cost and responsibility. 

MORE THAN A decade ago, the clothing world’s ultimate would-be do-gooder, Patagonia, partnered with Walmart to clean up the fashion industry’s environmental image. The reason was obvious: The garment industry is the second largest polluter in the world.

The cooperation between the leading brands eventually led to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which would go on to create a standard by which fashion companies could be graded for ecological impact. Now, those standards — despite criticisms that they lead to toothless regulatory frameworks and produce misleading ratings — could be codified in the fashion capital of the United States.

The Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, introduced in the New York State Assembly in October 2021, has been heralded as history-making. The act proposes all fashion companies that do business in New York and generate more than $100 million in revenue must map out at least 50 percent of their supply chains and disclose impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, water footprint, and chemical use.

Critics of the proposed law, however, worry that it would make history for its negative impact: They say the measure was written to greenwash fossil fuel manufacturing by fashion’s worst climate offenders who depend on cheap synthetic fibers — allowing for massive profits, while masking the products’ true environmental costs.

“They’re colluding with the fossil fuel industry to protect their bottom line,” said Dileep Kumar, the program coordinator of the International Sericultural Commission, a nonprofit focused on the global silk industry.

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The proposed New York law is part of a larger effort by groups backed by clothing manufacturers to present an environmentally friendly image. Along with the New York bill, organizations like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition are leaving their fingerprints on other environmental legislation, such as the European Commission’s Product Environmental Footprint.

Concerns about the framework proposed in the New York law are already coming under scrutiny in some countries. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Index, a standardized supply chain measurement tool used by some clothing labels to show their social and environmental footprint to consumers, is reportedly facing a ban in Norway after the country’s consumer watchdog raised “greenwashing” concerns this week.

The proposals are based on sustainability targets, and its reporting methods are created by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and other networks of self-promoting “independent” organizations.

While the widely recognized goal of climate change efforts is to reduce emissions, brands appealing to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition can win high scores even as the level of pollution they create increases annually. The apparent paradox should not come as a surprise: The boards of these industry-backed groups are cross-pollinated with some of the fashion industry’s worst offenders, meaning the members of these organizations each have a stake in the continued growth — and profits — of the industry, rather than the reduction of emissions.

By setting goals that are, in essence, internally created by its biggest culprits, fashion has ensured it remains accountable only to its shareholders.

“Frankly, if the industry itself were drafting the legislation, both the New York act and the EU PEF are the sort of thing that they would propose,” said Veronica Bates Kassatly, an independent researcher who evaluates sustainability claims. “Neither requires any fundamental change in the business model and both could easily increase consumption rather than reduce it, by suggesting to consumers that their shopping is now sustainable.”

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FASHION’S BID TO rescue its image began in 2009 when Patagonia and Walmart wrote a joint letter “inviting CEOs of leading global companies to come together to develop an index that would measure the environmental impact of their products.” The Sustainable Apparel Coalition was formed as a result in 2010, and the group and the companies behind it worked together to produce their measurement tool, the Higg Index. Patagonia did not respond to a request for comment, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition declined to answer The Intercept’s questions.

A central piece of the New York Fashion Act known as the Higg Materials Sustainability Index, or Higg MSI, is a database that ranks the environmental impact of fibers used in manufacturing. The proposed New York law says it relies on the reporting standard — the Higg Index — pushed by a research nonprofit called the World Resources Institute. Liz Cook, a vice president at the institute who sat on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition board from its beginnings until her term ended in 2021, eventually even went into fashion herself, launching an underwear brand in September 2020.

“WRI is not involved with the drafting of the environmental legislation,” a spokesperson for the institute said. “We also are not in the business of promoting SAC or its derivatives.”

“WRI has worked with the apparel industry on setting and delivering on science-based targets on climate change,” the spokesperson continued, pointing to its role as a founding member of Science Based Targets, an initiative aimed at apparel and footwear companies, founded by Nike. “WRI believes in the importance of setting targets and rigorously tracking emissions in all sectors, and in holding companies accountable to their climate commitments. WRI is proud of this guidance, as it aligns with our mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with what science requires.”

Analysts have repeatedly criticized the Higg MSI for using dubious data to promote polyester — a material which only became widely used 20 years ago and now accounts for 60 percent of the industry’s products — as the most sustainable fabric available. Dileep Kumar’s group, the International Sericultural Commission, wrote to California’s attorney general in June 2021 claiming the Sustainable Apparel Coalition publicized “false information” in order to “bring credibility to their unfair practice.”

Some critics of the ranking of various fibers suggested other factors were at play in judging what was sustainable; several noted that the Higg MSI ranks the cheapest materials as the most sustainable. “They’re deliberately marketing polyester as sustainable,” said Kassatly, the sustainability claims researcher. Kassatly said the Higgs MSI tends to list materials from least expensive to most expensive.

The Higg MSI does not collect primary data or conduct its own studies. Instead, the index collates secondary data from life-cycle analyses, which track impacts of products from sourcing of materials to their eventual demise.

Take polyester. The Higg Index uses a life-cycle analysis produced by Plastics Europe, which gathered data on European-produced polyester from 2009. Yet 93 percent of polyester is produced in Asia, where manufacturing and energy standards vary wildly between nations and companies.

Neither do the chemicals used in polyester production get a full airing. The synthetic wins praise because, unlike natural fiber production, it does not depend on pesticides and fertilizers. The ranking elides that antimony, a suspected carcinogen, is a chemical element used in the production of polyester.

Nor does the Higg MSI take into account the full life cycle of each material, only measuring its “cradle to gate” impact — excluding what happens after the products are sold — despite the life-cycle analyses covering the products’ whole lifetimes. For synthetic fibers, this means microplastics, which shed with every wear and wash — and deemed to have dangerous and toxic effects, according to recent research — are not considered.

The Higg MSI is equally notorious for refusing to disclose information. The International Sericultural Commission says the creators of the index refused to provide the study used to create the ratings for silk manufacturers.

This lack of transparency is common among enterprises associated with the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. The group is based in California but was only registered in 2012 as a foreign company under the jurisdiction of Delaware, a state well known for enabling companies and individuals to hide their finances and intent. Patagonia’s Rick Ridgeway and Walmart’s Ken Lanshe created the nonprofit, but it was Sustainable Apparel Coalition CEO Jason Kibbey who signed the company documents — after his internship with Patagonia during business school.

Kibbey also created the Sustainable Apparel Foundation in California in 2012, which was renamed the Apparel Impact Institute in 2017, a collaboration between the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, the Sustainable Trade Initiative, and Target Corporation “to strategically drive sustainability improvements.”

In 2019, Kibbey founded a company called Higg, again with a Californian address but under the jurisdiction of Delaware. The company, which says it is an independent technology company that licenses the MSI from the the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, declined to comment about the practices used in creating the MSI.

Critics say that the refusal to offer more information on the index is a feature of both Higg’s and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s work. For instance, when the rating of polyester dropped from 45/kilo to 36.2/kilo overnight on the Higg MSI in May 2021, the new numbers bestowed an even better sustainability ranking on the plastic-based fiber. Experts cannot explain the change, and Higg and the coalition have not publicly offered their reasoning.

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FROM POLITICS TO oil and gas, this fashion network seems to have a finger in every pie in the U.S. and abroad. Like a greenwashing merry-go-round, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and other “sustainability” organizations share a host of board members, funders, and, in some cases, are even based in the same building. The intertwining networks can make for strange bedfellows.

The building in Amsterdam that houses the Sustainable Apparel Coalition office there, for instance, also houses the Laudes Foundation, a philanthropic organization. Laudes is connected to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition because the foundation funds the group whose reporting standards the proposed New York law uses, the World Resources Institute. Laudes, for its part, was created by the Brenninkmeijer family, which made its fortune from the apparel retail giant C&A.

The family also owns Cofra Holdings, which through a subsidiary in turn owns energy firms doing oil and gas fracking in North America. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition, then, ends up being linked to the oil and gas industry whose products are frequently used in the production of polyester.

Many of the groups involved in the sustainable apparel machine are peppered with these sorts of connections. The links prompted a group of independent experts — including Veronica Bates Kassatly — to write an open letter to the New York Fashion Act’s Democratic co-sponsors, Sen. Alessandra Biaggi and Assemblymember Anna Kelles. The experts warned them that the proposed law used ambiguous language and suffered from “poor data integrity.” They pushed for removing the World Resources Institute from the bill.

Biaggi said her office met with some of the activists behind the letter, opened a dialogue with them, and proposed amendments to the bill accordingly in an effort to “fine tune” the proposal. “I want to be clear that the requirements for companies to reduce and report their green-house gas emissions remain an open issue,” Biaggi said. “We share the goal of requiring companies to use site specific data — and most importantly, providing the right tools for rapid decarbonization of the industry.”

The activists noted that the World Resources Institute had not, however, been removed from the bill. One of the signatories then followed up on the issue; that letter was ignored, the activists said, until an hour after The Intercept’s inquiry to Biaggi’s office.

The latest version of the bill is no longer available to download on the New York State Senate website, but The Intercept reviewed a leaked copy. For the meantime, the language and models the experts warned against — citing the World Resources Institute — remains in.

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• Critics of a government plantation scheme have slammed the program following revelations that only a fraction of forest reserves cleared for plantations over the past decade have actually been replanted.

• An investigation by environmental news site Macaranga found that only 5% of the 77,331 hectares (191,089 acres) of forest reserves cleared in Pahang state for plantations between 2012 and 2020 were replanted.

• A Pahang state opposition lawmaker has called the program a “cover-up” for a logging scheme, while an environmental activist has criticized the government for its lack of accountability.

Activists and an opposition lawmaker in the Malaysian state of Pahang have demanded government accountability after reports that just 5% of forest reserves cleared to make way for plantations have actually been replanted.

According to an investigation by environmental news site Macaranga, 77,331 hectares (191,089 acres) of Pahang’s forest reserves were cleared between 2012 and 2020 as part of the country’s Forest Plantation Development Programme. During the same period, only 3,971 hectares (9,813 acres) of that land — slightly more than 5% — was actually replanted with rubber or other commercial trees.

The disparity in Pahang state is the most extreme example of a broader trend across Peninsular Malaysia, where less than one-third of the 185,413 hectares (458,165 acres) cleared for plantations between 2012 and 2020 were found to have been replanted.

Forest reserves in Malaysia were established to be managed as sustainable timber sources, and the plantation scheme was touted as a way to transform so-called degraded forests into long-term sources of jobs and wood.

However, one opposition member of the state parliament has blasted the program as a “cover-up” for a clear-cutting scheme. “The whole scheme is dubious,” politician Lee Chean Chung told Mongabay. “The loggers or operators are more interested in taking the timber rather than running the replanting scheme.”

‘Brutal’ logging method

Felling rainforests for timber has long been carried out in Malaysia, but clearing land to make way for plantations differs from standard logging practice. Loggers typically only fell the largest trees, leaving behind much of the undergrowth and saplings. When clearing land for a plantation, however, the “bowl washing method” is used, meaning the entire patch of land is clear-cut, leaving it completely barren. Lee blamed this “brutal” method for contributing to the increased flooding in Pahang, which has destroyed entire villages and left thousands of people homeless.

“I suspect this single scheme contributed extensively to the deforestation that’s happening in Peninsular Malaysia,” he said.

Pahang’s chief minister did not respond to requests for comment from Mongabay.

When Lee demanded an explanation from the state government during the Pahang state assembly, the chief minister said 21,000 hectares (about 51,900 acres) of forest reserve slated for the plantations scheme had been removed from the program. He did not say when the cancellation had occurred.

Lee said canceling 21,000 hectares isn’t good enough when the scheme involves close to four times as much land.

“No actions were taken against the operators which have violated the original scheme to replant,” he said. “I am not satisfied with the explanation. I call upon the government to take stern action against those violators. I even suggested a lifetime sentence should be taken to penalize those irresponsible operators.”

Lee also questioned the viability of genuine plantation schemes, saying many operators are struggling because rubber and other plantation trees are difficult to maintain and require a large workforce. “I don’t know who came up with the idea of having a forest plantation, but it seems like we are now stuck in the middle of not getting any commercial success and at the same time we are losing our tropical forest land.” Despite this, the government plans to inject another 500 million ringgit ($118 million) into the scheme through to 2025.

Environmental activists have also questioned the history of these plantation programs. Damien Thanam Divean of PEKA Malaysia, an NGO, told Mongabay that Malaysia’s first forest plantation schemes were created around 25 years ago, allowing ample time for trees to mature. But there’s been no news or evidence of these trees being harvested, he said. “We would like to know what happened.”

Divean accused the government of incompetence when implementing plantation policies, saying there’s no accountability in government when plantations fail. “The state is not answerable if they do not reach the targets that they promise. The state government, the state forestry department, the state’s forestry director — who do they answer to?”

Those who do attempt to hold Malaysian officials accountable often do so at great risk. Activists in Malaysia say they are increasingly seeing court cases filed against those who speak out. “We are seeing a trend now where we believe selective prosecutions are being initiated to silence activists,” Divean said. Among those is Shariffa Sabrina, the PEKA president, who was unable to speak with Mongabay due to an ongoing court case. “They’re trying to make her an example that you should not question the government.”

Land management falls under state jurisdiction, and PEKA is now lobbying for the federal government to compensate state governments for permanently protecting their forests. “This will create a scenario which will directly reduce or totally eliminate the practice of power abuse to provide favors to companies and logging licenses,” Divean said.

“Malaysian states have been using the forests as an ATM for immediate cash.”

Fashion accounts for 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and is the second-most polluting industry in the world. But in an increasingly climate-conscious society, it is increasingly trying to present itself as sustainable to appeal to customers.

One big target is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for the past two decades many brands have signed up to a scheme called the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent body that awards grades for environmental performance.

However, the Guardian can exclusively reveal how the fashion industry’s impact on the planet is being hidden. Thanks to the way the scores are calculated, household names such as H&M and Nike can claim an overall decrease in annual carbon dioxide emissions – and receive high scores from the CDP – despite their actual emissions increasing.

It’s all about the fine print. These fashion brands do report their gross global emissions, but these are calculated against total revenue. This means that as long as their emissions increase less than their revenue increases each year, the total emissions are scored as a decrease. In Nike’s 2020 climate change report, it describes how “emissions increased 1% year over year, which was offset by 7% year-on-year revenue growth, resulting in over a 5% drop in emissions per revenue in [financial year 2019]”.

Despite the rise in emissions, the CDP scored Nike A-. H&M also self-reported “gross global emissions” increases in 2017 and 2018, but because those emissions increased less than revenue did, it reported an overall decrease and was also awarded an A- each year.

Linking emissions and revenue is only one of the tools provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which sets the scheme for emissions reporting. How emissions are broken down, into Scope 1, 2 and 3, is also critical to understanding how brands can appear to decrease their total emissions.

Scope 1 emissions are those that stem directly from the company burning fossil fuels. Scope 2 emissions are those which come from energy bought from utility providers. Scope 3 emissions are all the other indirect emissions that occur along the value chain. For the CDP report, companies provide “gross global combined Scope 1 and 2 emissions”, and self-report whether these have increased or decreased against revenue increase.

Nike’s Scope 1 emissions – the metric tonnes of CO2 produced by the company’s burning of fossil fuels – have increased every year since 2016. It includes retail, distribution and offices, among other things. The sportswear manufacturer self-reported emitting 17,975 metric tonnes of CO2 in 2015, jumping to 47,398 in 2021 – a 163% increase. H&M’s have increased from 10,723 in 2015 to 11,973 in 2021, which is down from a high of 13,380 in 2020.

Critically, many companies exclude Scope 3 emissions, which are categorised as upstream or downstream, meaning they do not account for the pollution produced by their supply chain. Although Nike tracks these emissions, it does not provide a gross total. Business travel is calculated as Scope 3 upstream emissions, meaning the impact of its employees’ flights is not included in its “gross global emissions”. Nike did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously stated that Scope 3 emissions such as business travel are not included in its future sustainability targets.

H&M is accounting for and targeting its Scope 3 emissions. In a statement to the Guardian, the company said: “Scope 1 and 2 emissions stand for less than 1% of our reported emissions and while they are important, they are not our focus of work towards reaching our 56% reduction goal. This will not be enough. Our main focus is Scope 3. We see significant opportunities to grow in a way that respects planetary boundaries.” The company made a profit of €1.36bn (£1.14bn) in 2021.

Experts are dismayed at the industry’s self-proclaimed progress, warning that focusing on increasing efficiency rather than reducing absolute emissions – known as relative decoupling – puts the planet at risk.

“Celebrating the success of this sort of relative decoupling is a recipe for disaster,” said James Dyke, an associate professor in Earth system science at the University of Exeter. “Global warming will stop when we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Nike having a few million more in the bank doesn’t change that.”

• Papua New Guinea’s government is working to create new regulations governing voluntary carbon schemes, which are arrangements negotiated directly between developers and resource owners.

• While the new laws are developed, the country’s environment ministry has imposed a moratorium on new voluntary carbon deals in the country.

• The moratorium, and development of a stronger legal framework, comes after “significant red flags” were raised over a proposed carbon credit deal in the country’s Oro province.

Papua New Guinea’s environment minister has imposed a moratorium on new voluntary carbon credit schemes to give the government time to create a regulatory framework for future and existing deals.

Wera Mori imposed the moratorium on voluntary carbon standards (VCS) with immediate effect on March 2, temporarily banning all new proposals. According to a ministry press statement, the moratorium “will be in place to ensure a proper stock take and audit of existing voluntary projects are accounted for.”

This moratorium comes after industry watchdog group Carbon Market Watch raised “significant red flags” about a 100-year carbon credit deal in Oro province. The group criticized the deal for “widespread absence of key details/evidence” and called on Verra, the international body regulating VCS projects, to reject the proposal.

‘Voluntary’ or ‘results based’

The PNG government identifies two separate of carbon credit deals: voluntary carbon schemes and result-based carbon schemes. Voluntary schemes are negotiated directly with resource owners and developers, without any government intervention. Result-based is the PNG government’s system, which includes government authorities in the negotiations.

The moratorium only impacts voluntary schemes, while the environment ministry establishes the requisite safeguards and regulations.

“If we have those in place, [PNG] can safely say that we can go for carbon business,” Pamela Avusi, interim coordinator of the PNG Environmental Alliance, an NGO, told Mongabay. While the moratorium currently puts a blanket ban on all new and intended voluntary carbon credit programs, the ministry plans to reopen the market to these schemes once regulations have been established.

The implementation and details of these regulations are expected to be circulated to other governmental departments and stakeholders in the coming weeks before being presented in Parliament.

The governor of Oro province, Gary Juffa, who also pushed for the government to take action, called the moratorium “well overdue,” saying: “I’m going to continue to push so that the government doesn’t just pay lip service. We already have what we call ‘carbon cowboys’ in this country, these so-called brokers and experts who are running around claiming to be middlemen. But what they are essentially trying to do is collect a hefty profit and then pass on as little as they can to the custodians and stewards of the forest.

“The government has to be more responsible than to just allow this to happen and not do anything, which has been the case for far too long already,” he added.

In April 2021, a coalition of concerned civil society groups wrote an open letter calling on the government to impose safeguards to regulate PNG’s entire carbon market. Avusi said she’s frustrated with the ministry’s delayed response. “Why are the safeguards still under development? There are already voluntary carbon projects in every part of this country!”

With no safeguards in place, such as regulations requiring free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), a commonly used legality to protect Native landowners from logging interests, the coalition was concerned the market would take advantage of these landowners.

“Carbon financiers were approaching our landowners, approaching resource owners, approaching different stakeholders to do voluntary carbon projects, which has no control over the process,” Avusi said. “The safeguards will build a good regulation for this country before we allow voluntary carbon projects, especially finances, to the carbon business in the country. At the moment, we don’t have this in place — it’s really not going well and it’s really uncontrolled at the moment.”

Carbon credit schemes were lauded at last year’s COP26 climate talks as a key mechanism to reach net-zero emissions targets. However, the market remains unregulated outside Europe; increasingly, concerns are being raised about voluntary schemes around the world. In November, Mongabay exposed how leaders in Malaysia’s state of Sabah signed onto a carbon credit deal covering 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) without significant consultation with landowners. The scheme was investigated by the state’s attorney general only after extensive reporting done by international media.

Situated on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, which contains the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest, PNG is immensely attractive to the carbon credit market. Juffa calls these forests, which are home to 7% of the world’s biodiversity, “the breathing apparatus of the world.” Protecting them, he said, is key to the fight against climate change.

PNG’s forests have long been threatened by loggers seeking to extract timber at the expense of both the island’s natural ecology and Native landowners. Juffa said he fears history will repeat itself with the carbon credit market, warning that already “unscrupulous characters who claim to be experts, consultants, brokers … are coming in and taking advantage of the largely illiterate population of Papua New Guinea.”

“[They’re] having them sign over their rights to these forests,” he said, “so that these insidious characters can go out there and lobby with reckless, irresponsible corporate entities who want to continue making profits and just pay as much as they can to get rid of the government oversight demanding that they improve their efforts insofar as consumption of energy, pollution and carbon dioxide is concerned.”

As Sabah wrestles to rid itself of an outrageous corrupt carbon credit deal spearheaded by deputy chief minister, Jeffrey Kitingan, more examples of this form of eco-opportunism are being confronted in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a country already ravaged by Malaysian logging.

The latest scheme proposed in PNG is from an Indian company named Kanaka Management Services and represents a major ‘voluntary agreement’ binding local people in Oro Province to a similar 100 year deal as with Sabah.

Worryingly, the contract stipulates that an appointed representative can make deals with the company on behalf of the community. Chris Cook, a senior fellow at University College London explains that thanks to the troubling clause: “The lessee can, essentially, in cahoots with the rep, supposedly acting on behalf of the community, ensure all sorts of trumped up charges, concealment of income etc. [It] reminds me of the profit sharing deals by film financiers who always ensure there is no profit to share.”

The question to the supposed eco-capitalists from Kanaka Management Services is therefore why such a clause should exist which at the stroke of a pen in the small print of the deal removes the native rights of the community for a hundred years.

The Governor of Oro Province, Gary Juffa, has meanwhile slammed the deal as “a scam” and has called for all such land management enterprises to be banned from PNG:

“The company’s landowner representatives have circumvented the provincial government. I do not blame them, they were perhaps looking for the best possible options for their people but in the absence of thorough, informed knowledge about carbon projects and the particular sector, without proper advice from appropriate government organisations, agencies, private sector experts, they have entered into an agreement which is detrimental to their interests, the interests of the province, the interests of the country, indeed the interests of the world. Such organisations like Kanaka Management Services, should be completely banned from countries like PNG to ever get themselves involved in this kind of arrangements or agreements…  without the benefit of a regulatory framework in place, it appears that the agreement is flawed and in my opinion null and void.

I have informed the developer and his agents that they are more than welcome to take us to court if they wish, but we are satisfied that we are in a position to basically inform them that their project—or this scam that they are purporting to be a project—is null and void and will not be recognised or tolerated by the provincial government.

The vast area comprising 397,000 hectares of forest in the deal were expected to generate 8.1 million credits annually, therefore sequestering over 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The contract states that Kanaka Management Services would take home 65% of the income for the first five years, only sharing the profits equally with native landowners after the 16th year.

With very little details on who would be affected and how this money would be redistributed amongst the community, the deal was slammed by carbon credit watchdog, Carbon Market Watch, as raising “significant red flags”. Despite this, the proposal was signed off as a Verra Verified Carbon Standard project (VCS). Verra is currently the world’s leading carbon credit organisation, boasting 1781 “certified VCS projects” around the world.  Governor Juffa has added his concern:

“It’s strange that VERA, supposedly a reputable organisation, has endorsed this or has even publicised this on their website when the fact of the matter is that this arrangement is so deplorable and disgusting that it should be thrown out by any organisation involved in the reputable processes of carbon trade projects.

“For instance, they’re offering for the first 5 years, 35% to landowners for carbon pricing at $6–$8 for atmospheric carbon. This is ridiculous already to start with. Nothing improves for the next 95 years according to this agreement.

PNG has since issued a moratorium on these “voluntary” carbon credit deals in a bid to protect its forests and peoples from such deals. Any future carbon credit schemes will have to be done through the government.

Kanaka Management Services was established in 2007 as a greenhouse gas project consultancy and project development. Their executive team is led by environmental scientists and engineers, and the company has received acclaim from the UN, scooping up many of UN-granted Kyoto awards over the years.

Their website claims: “Our UNFCCC CDM, VERRA VCS, VERRA CCB, SD Vista, Gold Standard, REDD+, Plan Vivo, Sustainability and other GHG projects due diligence, consultancy and process integrity is one of the best in the industry.” The company claimsthat critics of their project may have ulterior motives to discredit the scheme:

“There is no scam or confrontation with anyone. Maybe due to political reasons some elements are propagating some news for their own benefits which is against the land owners and communities interests. Both local communities and land owners are happy about this REDD+ project. We do not want to discuss the local politics here.”

Carbon Credits – A Credible Climate Solution?

Meanwhile, KMS is just one of the companies rushing to get their hands on the newest resource stored in Papua New Guinea’s lush rainforests, the third-largest in the world, namely the unregulated carbon credits that represent a new, fashionable and speculative money-maker for “green” financiers.

Touted as the solution to both climate change at COP26 last year, carbon credits allow companies and nations to protect vulnerable forests by “buying” the carbon the trees sequester, and then offsetting those credits against their own emissions.

But while markets and middle-men rush to profiteer from climate change, experts around the world warn against both the flawed economics and the land management. One concerned Australian economist, Prof Steve Keen, told ForestSEA:

 “Carbon credits are an attempt to financialize climate change. This is inherently a fallacy, because what we need is far less carbon production, which can only count from cutting output, and you can’t profit out of cutting output. The schemes to date have been more scams than genuine attempts to reduce our carbon footprint.”

He said the system is putting forest nations at risk of speculative profiteering, once again at the expense of native land rights, forest management, and indigenous people’s access to their own resources.

Currently, there is no international regulatory framework for the carbon credit market, but the UN has provided validation for the concept and offers guidelines as part of its REDD+ programme. These guidelines include respecting and protecting indigenous rights to land, and the compulsory development of indigenous communities from the profits of trading the carbon from their forests.

However, deals like the one in Papua New Guinea and the notorious Sabah carbon deal—which saw the state bound to pay 100 years worth of carbon credit profits to an organisation with no history of carbon trading should any future government cancel the deal—raise serious questions about whether or not the UN is doing enough to enforce those guidelines and protect the world’s most vulnerable groups. 

When asked if the UN will condemn or acknowledge these “scams” done in the name of REDD+, or redevelop these guidelines in response to mounting evidence of exploitation and profiteering, the UN-REDD Programme Secretariat Mario Boccucci responded:

“Since 2008 the Programme has supported partner countries in strengthening   the technical capacities needed to design and implement REDD+ strategies, safeguards, monitoring and reporting elements meeting UNFCCC requirements for REDD+ results-based payments. It does so through a country-based approach that provides advisory and technical support services tailored to national circumstances and needs for countries to achieve REDD+ readiness, which refers to the efforts a country undertakes to develop the capacities needed to demonstrate and implement REDD+.

“In its technical assistance, including the support to countries to unlock climate finance, the UN-REDD Programme follows the highest standards for environmental and social safeguards, including the so called Cancun safeguards, and promotes inclusion and engagement of indigenous peoples and local communities. In accordance with its mandate the UN-REDD Programme works at global, national and subnational level, focusinges on jurisdictional REDD+ in line with the country REDD+ strategy. The Programme does not work on the topics your questions cover. Other examples of REDD+ multilaterals include the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and Forest Investment Program, hosted by The World Bank.”

The problem appears to be that the claimed support and regulation are doing little to prevent carbon scams conducted in the name of the UN programme, which has provided a veneer of respectability for profiteering.  It is time to put proper controls in place or dump REDD as a misguided and counter-productive programme that has distracted from more effective measures to combat climate catastrophe.

• In November 2021, Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, was wracked by riots that left three people dead and the city’s Chinatown in ashes.

• The unrest was stoked by the prime minister’s decision to end diplomatic ties with Taiwan and instead side with Beijing, stirring up anti-Chinese sentiment, as well as tensions between Guadalcanal province, where the capital is located, and Malaita, the country’s most-populous province but also one of its least-developed.

• However, some analysts say the true causes of discontent lie in the cozy relationships between officials and the foreign logging and mining firms that are ravaging the country.

For four days last November, Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, was on fire. Four people died during violent riots, and the city’s Chinatown was torched, leaving hundreds homeless.

Anti-Chinese sentiments had been bubbling since September 2019, when Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare abandoned the country’s historical ties with Taiwan and switched allegiance to Beijing.

The anger over this political realignment has been linked by some analysts to opposition to China’s state policies of atheism and communism among the predominantly Christian Solomon Islanders, and by others to fears that accepting development aid from China could land the Solomon Islands in a debt trap.

The diplomatic shift also stirred up underlying tensions between Guadalcanal province, where the capital is located, and Malaita, the country’s most-populous province but among its least-developed, whose premier remains a staunch supporter of Taiwan.

However, other observers point to more practical causes for the flare-up of discontent: decades of policies — and official corruption — that have seen little of the islands’ natural resources wealth trickle down to ordinary citizens; and the current government’s cozy relationship with China, the destination for most of the islands’ resource exports.

‘It just got out of hand’

Peter Kenilorea Jr., a member of parliament representing Malaita, told Mongabay the Nov. 24-27 riots began after a civil protest demanding the prime minister’s resignation. The protest group, Malaita for Democracy, traveled to Honiara to seek a meeting with Sogavare. Kenilorea said the protest became violent when the PM failed to meet them.

“The protest didn’t go as planned and the spinoff turned into a riot,” he said. “It just got out of hand.”

For many, the scenes brought back memories of unrest between 1998 and 2003, a period known as “the Tensions,” when conflict between residents of Guadalcanal and Malaita escalated into riots and eventually a coup. Then, too, Honiara’s Chinatown was burned by rioters.

According to Kenilorea, the triggers for the 2021 riot were poverty, underdevelopment, and the government’s relationships with foreign state-owned enterprises that have enabled the nation’s wealth to leave the country. “There are people who live around the city who are very marginalized and vulnerable,” he said. “I would pretty much put the riots down to failed policies of the government who are pretty much in the pockets of the loggers. The loggers are very proud of the fact that they run the country.”

Even people who say they don’t believe the recent violence is directly connected to logging and mining policies, such as Honiara resident Glass Ulyssis Yanop, say that culpability for the riots ultimately lies with officials. “The immature and reactive leadership style of our leaders are the instigators of the recent riot,” Yanop said. “It is wrong to blame the tail of a crocodile for killing your dog; It is always the head to be blamed, where the arrogance is.

Communal land, private wealth

Around 85% of the land in the Solomon Islands is communally owned, and thus falls under laws that require the consent of every landowner to develop the land. However, the Chinese, Malaysian and other foreign logging and mining firms that dominate the country’s landscape have historically been able to skirt the complex processes of establishing exactly who owns what piece of land, and securing their consent to operate.

Kenilorea told Mongabay that companies are known to create documents that allow a single landowner to sign away the land rights on behalf of the community, who don’t see any of the profit generated from their land.

The country lost almost 7% of its forest cover between 2002 and 2020, most of it primary rainforest. The Solomon Islands, together with its larger neighbor Papua New Guinea, supply more than half of China’s tropical log imports. Its exports to China, in turn, accounts for more than 80% of the Solomon Islands’ logging exports. U.S.-based NGO Global Witness reported in 2018 that trees were being felled on the islands at 20 times the sustainable rate, with a senior campaigner warning that the Solomon Islands’ forests would be exhausted by 2036 if logging continued at this pace.

Andrew Mukai, a lawyer, told Mongabay that loggers and miners have a strong hold over political leaders and officials, and blamed them for the leadership decay in the Solomon Islands: “Having political leaders by their side who can give them tax remissions or duty exemptions as such is part of the relationship. Such favors mean a loss of government revenue to fund services that are of particular importance to the rural and ordinary people of the Solomon Islands. Rightfully, Solomon Islanders are not too happy about the connections and relationships between loggers and miners and the local political leaders.”

The switch

Prime Minister Sogavare faces serious criticism for abandoning the Solomon Island’s historical ties with Taiwan to build a diplomatic relationship with China. The “switch,” as it has come to be known, occurred in 2019 after Sogavare was elected as an independent candidate. He went on to build a party with independent candidates.

Kenilorea, an opposition MP, alleged that politicians affiliated with the ruling party were supported by Beijing. “In certain quarters it was known that there was funding from Chinese interests to certain candidates, and I think promises were made then,” he said. “As soon as the switch was made, the prime minister went on a state visit to formalize relations and to sign MOUs.”

Upon his return from China, Sogavare held a press conference at the airport to announce that state-owned China Railway had pledged $825 million to revive the Gold Ridge mine on the island of Guadalcanal. The mine had previously been owned by local landowners, who then secured interest from Hong Kong-listed Wanguo International Mining. Wanguo, the project rights holder, contracted China Railway for the redevelopment.

“It was really clear for me that as soon as the switch was made, this was one of the first announcements,” Kenilorea said. Sogavare did not respond to requests for comment.

Bauxite is a growing export from the islands, proving so popular that logging firms are now moving in on the Solomon Islands’ mining industry. In 2019, a bulk carrier loading bauxite ran aground on a reef off Rennell Island, near a UNESCO World Heritage Site, spilling more than 300 tons of heavy fuel oil. The miner involved, Bintan Mining, came under criticism for the disaster. Yet even as the cleanup was underway, the ministry of mines granted the company two more prospecting licenses on the island.

“I’ve heard from colleagues who say they were getting funded from Bintan during the elections,” said Kenilorea, alleging that the profits extracted from the mine on Rennell Island were used to fund his political opponents. He said his opponents claim he won only because their funding dried up during the 2019 oil spill. “They told me straight out that I was lucky the shipment ran aground on the reef,” he said. Bintan Mining did not respond to requests for comment.

Rich in resources, poor in opportunities

Over the past three decades, the logging industry has become an economic mainstay for the Solomon Islands, contributing 20% of domestic revenue and more than 70% of exports.

But the timber profits have not not been reinvested in the people; the Solomon Islands remains one of the Pacific’s poorest nations, and relies heavily on foreign aid. And an economy dominated by a single industry means few opportunities for workers.

“The poverty here is based on government policy which is pretty much based on logging. That has been their policy — logging, logging,” Kenilorea said. “Every year it’s the same. It brings in money in terms of our revenue, but there’s no other option, so the opportunities are very thin. So the protest is perhaps part of the switch, but the rioting that happened is just a reflection of the poverty that’s around the capital.”

He said this causes huge problems particularly because 70% of the nation’s population is less than 30 years old. “We are resource rich but the opportunities are not there.”

Tensions are also brewing between politicians. The premier of Malaita province, Daniel Suidani, has pledged to refuse Chinese investment in Malaita and describes Taiwan as “a true friend and an old friend.” This goes directly against the national government’s new “One China” policy, which acknowledges Taiwan as part of China rather than an independent nation.

Strict compliance with this policy is described as “the political basis of developing Solomon Islands-China relations” in a readout of a Dec. 16 call between China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and his counterpart in the Solomon Islands, Jeremiah Manele. The readout, prepared by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reports Manele as having said “It is the responsibility of Solomon Islands side to make all efforts to protect the safety and legal interests of the Chinese citizens and Chinese-funded organizations in Solomon Islands.”

Sudiani’s public intransigence has put him at loggerheads with Prime Minister Sogavare. In late October 2021, Sudiani faced a motion of no confidence in the Malaita provincial assembly. But after 40,000 Malaitans descended on the provincial capital, Auki, in support of Sudiani, the motion was withdrawn.

Members of the public have been quick to point out that the “switch” has compounded the Solomon Islands’ material inequality by inviting foreign state-owned enterprises to benefit from its vast resources.

Church leader Judah Suimae said the logging and mining industries remain inaccessible to local residents: “The nation’s switch to China has reinforced Chinese companies’ iron first over the logging and mining industries. Definitely in my opinion dirty money from the industry paid for the loyalty of MPs to remain with the government. These industries will always be allies to the government, for better or for worse.”

Kenilorea told Mongabay he worries that unrest will break out on the streets again when the Australian forces sent to help quell the riots leave the islands. “We will need a political solution before things settle down. Logging has been number one for us for a long time and it hasn’t cured any of our ills in terms of economic development.”

He said loggers have bragged about having the government under their thumb: “They say: ‘The next government’s our government anyway. We run this country.’

“We’re stuck in a cycle we can’t seem to break out of.”

Banner image: a leaf hut outside the Solomon Islands parliament building burns during the November 2021 riots. Image courtesy of Elliot Dawea.

Elliot Dawea contributed reporting from Honiara.

• Gary Juffa, governor of Papua New Guinea’s Oro province, is one of the country’s most outspoken critics of the logging industry.

• Juffa said he’s had to resort to the courts to force out three logging firms operating in his province, and called on the international community to fight illegal loggers in PNG.

• While critical about the slow pace of global deforestation agreements, Juffa said he’s optimistic about the possibilities of carbon finance for his country; other PNG activists are more skeptical.

Papua New Guinea’s forests are under attack, and the international community must join forces to fight the illegal loggers destroying one of the world’s largest rainforests. This was the message from Papua New Guinean politician Gary Juffa at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

“The world must win the fight against these bioterrorists. We must pursue with armies those who threaten the very existence of our world,” Juffa, the governor of Oro province, said at the conference last month. “If we continue to allow timber cartels to control nations, how effective will the climate agreements made at COP26 be?”

These “timber cartels” began targeting PNG’s forests in the 1980s, promising development to the materially poor local landowners in exchange for access to their forests, kicking out legitimate timber companies in the process. Land rights were signed away and the local people watched their forests disappear while the promised roads, churches and wealth failed to materialize.

“They don’t pay their taxes, so they’ve got a lot of money available to bribe and corrupt,” Juffa told Mongabay. He said he learned about the extent of the corruption while working in PNG’s customs service, where he rose through the ranks to become commissioner before resigning in 2011. He won a seat in parliament as Oro province’s governor in 2012, calling to “take back PNG,” and was reelected in 2017.

“You’ve got the primary guardians who you can say are the political leaders, and then you’ve got the secondary guardians who you can say are the public service,” Juffa said. “Both of them happy to compromise. They’re not standing guard at the gates, they’ve opened the gates and they’re letting these insidious creatures in.”

Juffa said this political corruption has forced him to use the court system to chase out three of the five timber companies operating in Oro province. Rather than finding support in parliament for policies that would protect the forests, he said some parliamentarians work for the loggers themselves. “The government systems have been so compromised and so perverted and corrupted that they work against me and against what we’re trying to do, which is right by our people and by the environment,” he said.

“That’s the same case in many parts of the developing nation landscape. If you go to a developing nation, you’ll find that government machinery have been hired. They’ve become mercenaries themselves, and they are paid for by giant cartels, companies, transnational organizations who utilize these government services for their own benefit, and it’s usually to the detriment of the interests of the people of that nation and the future of that nation.”

The island of New Guinea, which PNG shares with Indonesia, is home to the world’s third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest, and despite accounting for less than 1% of the world’s landmass, holds 7% of global biodiversity. In 2014, PNG became the world’s largest tropical timber exporter, shipping out 3.8 million cubic meters (134 million cubic feet) of timber. A 2008 study showed that 24% of the country’s forests had been destroyed or degraded by logging between 1972 and 2002.

Due to the nation’s land tenure system, 97% of PNG’s land is customarily owned. This means all community members must agree to any proposed leases or sales, and official land titles are rare. Since being elected in 2019, Prime Minister James Marape has emphasized the need for land reform and developing customary land. But for legitimate operators, procuring a logging license in PNG remains a long, laborious process involving 34 steps that can take up to four years.

However, the introduction in 1996 of special agricultural business leases (SABLs) has long given logging companies loopholes to work through.

SABLs were proposed as a way of speeding up the nation’s development by granting companies setting up plantations or other agricultural businesses quick licenses to use customarily owned land. Instead, loggers used SABLs to bypass the normal license requirements, clearing forests for supposed agricultural projects that then never get developed. Since their introduction in 1996, more than 5 million hectares (12 million acres) of virgin forest have been logged thanks to SABLs, or 11% of the nation’s land.

“SABLs are seen as one of the biggest land grabs that has ever happened in the history of this country,” said PNG activist Eddie Paine.

By proposing plantations and agricultural projects, logging companies can swiftly secure SABLs and, as a result, access to huge areas of PNG’s forests. “These logging companies, mostly of Malaysian origin, currently have licenses of SABL,” Paine said. “Under the pretext of agriculture, they felled pristine forest and went away with the logs.”

“Timber cartels have raped and plundered the Malaysian rainforest, and now they’re in Papua New Guinea,” Juffa told Mongabay. “These are the same characters, the same organizations. They’re just using a tried and true formula that works.”

Paine and other activists started a campaign to raise attention to the problem of SABLs in 2003, but he said powerful interests stopped the campaign from achieving real change. “Politicians were heavily involved in most of these projects. That’s why, despite the numerous concerns raised by affected landowners themselves, by NGOs, by academics, nothing was ever done.”

The government, however, did call for an inquiry into SABLs in 2011. Three commissioners led the inquiry, which cost 15 million kina (about $6.8 million at the 2011 exchange rate) and investigated 72 leases. Two of the three commissioners presented their report, recommending that most of these SABLs were illegal and should be canceled, and the lands given back to the landowners.

However, almost a decade later — and despite then-Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s 2014 pledge to cancel SABLs used for timber extraction — those licenses remain active. “While the licenses are yet to be canceled,” Paine said, “logs are still being felled and shipped out by these loggers.”

Logging has a devastating effect on the local population, many of whom depend on the forests for their survival. As in Malaysia, heavy logging has polluted PNG’s river systems, impacted local wildlife, and even decimated local cultural sites; Paine told Mongabay that loggers have dug up sacred tribal cemeteries.

Logging companies have also been accused of using physical violence to suppress protests by local landowners. In a documentary produced by investigative outlet Sarawak Report, local activists showed investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown shipping containers that were allegedly used by logging companies to lock up local protesters — even women and children.

Peter Bosip, founder of public interest law firm CELCOR, corroborated these stories: “When leaders try to mobilize their communities to set up a blockade at the entrance to the customary forest site, the company normally engage the PNG police to come on the site, and then the police arrest those community leaders and even harass them, and even intimidate them by locking them up in shipping containers.

“The logging companies use that tactic to suppress the genuine landowners from expressing their rights,” he added.

“The state police is being funded by the loggers,” Paine said. “We also believe that certain political parties are being funded by these loggers.”

Juffa said he has little hope for the much-heralded deal announced at COP26 that calls for an end to deforestation by 2030, citing the illegal nature of most logging activity in his province.

“Why wait until 2030? Why not just get rid of them now because they’re criminals anyway, they’re already raping and plundering. They’re there illegally. They’re trespassing on traditional land. They’re using state forces, including the police and government agencies, to basically bulldoze their will and win over the people who are land owners,” he said.

Despite being a key component in loggers’ abilities to illegally extract timber from vulnerable nations and liquidate it in cash, most climate finance solutions offered at COP26 did not address the problem of existing corruption.

Juffa said he wants the international community to provide aid to help his country fight illegal logging. Today, such climate finance most often comes in the form of carbon credit schemes, where rich nations or corporations pay for the conservation of a forest to offset their own emissions. PNG joined the Australian government’s Indo-Pacific Carbon Offsets Scheme in November, which aims to create an efficient and accessible carbon market.

“Carbon credit schemes have huge potential, but they have to be carefully managed by each country,” Juffa told Mongabay. “For Papua New Guinea, a country with vast forest resources which are virtually owned by tribes and clans, traditional landowners, we would need very stringent screening mechanisms and a multi-agency system by which entities, organizations, individuals coming into the country supposedly involved as investors, agents, traders, whatever, in this space have to be meticulously screened. And we will also need proper laws to ensure that forest resource owners, the custodians, get the full benefit of any such effort.”

In November, Mongabay exposed a carbon credit scheme in Malaysia’s Sabah in which rights to carbon and other “natural capital” from 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest were granted for 100 years to a small Australian company with no experience in the carbon credit market. The deal has been criticized for lacking public participation and meaningful consultation with Indigenous landowners.

Juffa said similar agents are targeting the PNG carbon market: “Right now we have carbon cowboys coming into the country, totally excluding people and misleading the governments at various levels, and taking advantage of the fact that Papua New Guinea does not have such stringent mechanisms in place — yet — and actually wreaking a lot of havoc out there.” Juffa declined to name these “carbon cowboys.”

He said he has reached out to “genuine organizations” to position PNG in the green economy; Oro province signed an agreement against the backdrop of COP26 this month with CIFOR-ICRAF, a sustainable land management organization. Under the memorandum of understanding, the NGO has offered advice for positioning PNG on the carbon credit market, but Juffa said no deal has yet been made.

“We have vast forested areas and we would like to have our people, who are the custodians and stewards of these forest areas, to be able to use some of the land that they have available, which has already been used, that needs rehabilitation or needs effort to develop sustainable agricultural activities, so that they can sustain themselves by generating an income for themselves while taking care of these forests,” he said.

Both Bosip and Paine, however, say they’re wary of such schemes being launched in PNG. Bosip said they don’t address the real problem driving climate change, which is the emissions of rich nations: “The demand for resource and the increase in global warming and climate change is attributed to consumption in the developed world. They have to stop this.

“Customary landowners, those living off the forest, must not be involuntarily moved to a site where there is a disconnect between their cultural way of living: moved to a new place and then probably living on food that is actually processed that they will buy from the store, with the money that they earn through the carbon trade,” Bosip said. “Proper research needs to be done to ascertain the extent to which the social impact that this carbon trade will have on the local people before they can proceed into a carbon trade deal.”

“Big countries are polluting the air and requiring smaller countries like Papua New Guinea to be the breath and lungs for the whole world,” Paine said. “It basically encourages bigger countries and bigger corporations to continue polluting while paying smaller countries like Papua New Guinea and other to save the world.

“It restricts the people from going into their own forest or doing anything on their land. It restricts yourself from practicing your culture or whatever you do within the forest. You’re foregoing most of your cultural livelihood for the foreign cash economy.

“I see it as a form of land grab.”

Juffa said he understands their concerns: “They have a point because such efforts have happened in the past where organizations that have come into the country claiming to do good have gone about doing the exact opposite.

“They’re afraid of that because of the damage already having been done by the current carbon cowboys that are operating in the country.”

• Members of the Mah Meri Indigenous community in Malaysia are fighting an attempt to evict them to make way for the expansion of a beach resort.

• The notice, served by the Selangor state government, says the land in question belongs to the government, and has threatened legal action if the Mah Meri settlement is not cleared.

• In a countersuit, the Mah Meri say the land should have been legally recognized as Indigenous territory long before this dispute developed.

An Indigenous community in Peninsular Malaysia is fighting an eviction notice that could see it displaced to make way for a “world-class eco-city.” The Mah Meri families residing in the coastal town of Bagan Lagang, in Selangor state, were given 30 days to clear the area, at their own cost, or face legal action.

Their fight to stay on the lands they have foraged for more than 500 years shines a light on the ongoing struggles between Malaysia’s Indigenous peoples, known collectively as the Orang Asli, and logging companies, property developers, and even their own state governments.

After building 30 houses over the past 20 years, the families, five of whom are permanent residents, received an eviction notice on April 20, 2021, stating they had committed an offense by building structures on government land.

The notice, served by Sepang Land Office and Permodalan Negeri Selangor Bhd. (PNSB), the investment arm of the Selangor government, warned the residents they “could be fined up to RM500,000 [$118,000] or serve a five-year jail term, or both, if found guilty of the offence.”

“You are required to empty the land and return occupation peacefully to PNSB within 30 days of this notice, and all costs will be borne by you, and you are not allowed to seek any form of compensation,” the notice said.

This notice was sent just nine days after PNSB transferred a 99-year lease for 41.12 hectares (101.62 acres) of land in Mukim Sepang, where Bagan Lagang is located, to the private company Mangrove Lifestyle Sdn. Bhd., which is developing an extension to the Sepang GoldCoast resort.

Activists have been quick to take up the tribe’s case, pointing out both their right to ancestral lands and the fallacy of deliberately displacing Indigenous people to make way for luxury “eco-centric” tourism projects. The Center for Orang Asli Concerns, an NGO, is helping the Mah Meri take their case to court.

“All these places which have a big potential for ecotourism and tourist resorts like this, it is because many Orang Asli are still living in these places and have kept the land that way,” Colin Nicholas, director of the COAC, told Mongabay. “People’s idea of going back to nature is going back to nature in luxury, and the industry caters for them. This mentality of tourism has to change.”

The Mah Meri are one of Malaysia’s 18 recognized Indigenous ethnic groups, and arrived in the 15th century on the shores of Bukit Bangkong, where they have mostly remained. There are now 4,200 Mah Meri in Malaysia, living along Selangor’s west coast from Sungai Pelek up to Pulau Carey.

The website for the planned development, Sepang GoldCoast, says the objective of the project is “sustainability and value creation,” with PNSB telling news site The Malaysian Insight in May: “The plan is to develop the place into a tourist destination.”

Opponents of the resort’s expansion say it will hurt the very people who have helped generate tourist interest in the town: the Mah Meri of Pulau Carey, who have drawn international interest in their traditional wooden carvings and masks. In 2011, the Selangor state government invested in a Mah Meri cultural village to showcase the traditions, arts and rituals of this “unique culture.”

This official recognition by the state government of the Mah Meri as an Aboriginal people is key to the court case. The affidavit filed on behalf of the Mah Meri argues that the land in question should have been legally recognized as Orang Asli territory long before this dispute came to light. The document holds the state land department, state government and federal government responsible for land’s current status, saying they “breached their constitutional, statutory, fiduciary and/or international law obligations and duties by failing to gazette the Native Customary Land as aboriginal reserve.”

Much of the coastal and inland areas are the traditional lands of the Mah Meri people, who have been gradually displaced by resorts and oil palm plantations over the past 40 years. Most of the mainland’s 2,000 Mah Meri people now reside in Kampung Bukit Bangkong, an inland village with 1,062 residents. However, the affidavit says the beachfront has remained their main foraging and hunting areas since the 1970s, where the tribe built huts and shelters for use while looking for crabs, mussels, fish and other food from the mangroves and mudflats. The villagers would travel between these beach settlements and Kampung Bukit Bangkong. Historically, Bagan Lagang was the main beach settlement before the tribe developed more locations along the coast.

The court affidavit continues that “at these beach settlements, the Mah Meri people had full access to the mangroves, beaches, mudflats and coastal waters which they used to source their livelihood needs. However, with the opening of Avani Sepang Goldcoast Resort in 2014, the Mah Meri people were restricted from entering or foraging in certain parts of the coastal area.”

The Avani resort was the first phase of Selangor’s GoldCoast Development, billed as “the longest coastal paradise in Asia at 22km [14 miles]” on the land the tribe lived and foraged on. PNSB served the eviction notice in April to develop the adjacent land as an extension of this resort. The proposed D’Festival, the project’s second phase, will be a mixed development for “resort living, business and entertainment,” with 437 condominium units and 48 retail units available.

Initially, the tribe accepted the eviction notice because it was unaware of its customary rights, and merely pleaded for more time to clear the land. However, after meeting with lawyer Siti Kasim, the Mah Meri decided to ignore the notice and fight the eviction in court. A helpful precedent has been set by the landmark Sagong Tasi case, in which the Selangor government unsuccessfully attempted to evict the Teuan people, claiming their land belonged to the state despite its status having never been ruled on in court. Justice Gopal Sri Ram ruled in the Court of Appeals that the state “cannot make the Orang Asli victims of your own negligence.”

“The state government will try to do anything and everything, whatever they like, without the Orang Asli knowing, but the courts have time and again confirmed these ancestral land rights,” Siti Kasim told Mongabay. “Legally, it’s not about the fact that they’ve had settlements for 20 years. It’s about the fact that they have been occupying and using the land for 500.”

The Orang Asli’s fight to reclaim their native customary lands is crucial for the maintenance and protection of Malaysia’s wilderness, most of which has already been lost to logging, plantations and property development. Eighty percent of forests in Malaysian Borneo have been directly lost to logging, and only 11.6% of Malaysia’s remaining forests are classed as “pristine.”

“Other people have destroyed the beautiful parts of Malaysia’s land,” Nicholas said. “What remains is only there because the Orang Asli manage the land that way.”

• A company owned by members of Pahang state’s royal family plans to mine iron ore in a forest reserve that is home to 15 threatened species, including tigers, elephants, tapirs, sun bears and leopards.

• The area, which was until June 2019 listed as a permanent forest reserve, is part of a wildlife corridor connecting key forest complexes in Peninsular Malaysia’s Central Forest Spine.

• The planned iron mine, which came to light after the project’s environmental impact assessment was made public, is one of a spate of extractive projects recently found to be linked to Malaysian royalty.

An environmental report has revealed the Malaysian royal family is requesting permission from the Department of Environment for a new iron ore mine in the middle of one of the few remaining habitats of 15 threatened animals, including the critically endangered Malayan tiger.

The proposed project involves the deforestation and excavation of 60.75 hectares (150 acres) in the Som Forest Reserve, part of the Central Forest Spine linking four of Peninsular Malaysia’s key forest complexes. Alongside the Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris jacksoni), of which fewer than 200 remain in the wild, the Som Forest is home to the Malayan tapir (Acrocodia indica), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) and two different species of leopard.

According to the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the proposed iron mine, the project poses a direct risk to these species, all of which are fully protected under Malaysia’s 2010 Wildlife Conservation Act. The Department of Environment did not respond to a request for comment regarding the enforcement of this law.

The planned mine would destroy an area the size of 113 football fields that comprises these protected species’ habitat. Beyond the “irreversible” loss of habitat, the EIA report highlights that these animals will be at increased risk of human-animal conflict due to them being pushed toward nearby plantations and residential areas. The report also warns of the potential for disrupting a key wildlife corridor, and the “rampant” poaching of animals in and around the project area.

In addition, the proposed site is just 500 meters (546 yards) from a salt lick that is regularly visited by a big herd of elephants along with tapirs and sun bears. Salt licks are a key resource for animals to increase their mineral intake, and also protected from any man-made disturbance under the 2010 Wildlife Conservation Act. The report states the mine will not only permanently alter the animals’ routes to the salt lick, but also risk the “total loss of functionality” of this critical resource.

Despite stating that nothing can be done to stop both the loss of habitat and negative impacts on flora and fauna — including a total of 188 fully protected species found in the proposed site — the report concludes that, with mitigation measures, the project can be implemented with acceptable environmental risks and impact.

The consultancy firm that produced the EIA report, Garuda Samudera, did not respond to a request for comment.

News of the Som Forest proposal was first reported by independent news site Malaysiakini on June 21, just weeks after the state government approved mining operations beside Lake Tasik Chini, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, despite the lake and its surrounding area being gazetted as a state park and permanent forest reserve. The royal heads of state had recently made a public pledge to rehabilitate the lake which has suffered under decades of nearby excavation operations. However, journalists discovered the company leading the project, Golden Prosperous Resources Sdn. Bhd., was appointed by Hanishah Ventures Sdn. Bhd., a private company owned by two members of the royal family of Pahang state, one of whom is the aunt of Malaysia’s current king.

However, it is the king’s sister, Tengku Nong Fatimah Sultan Ahmad Shah, who is running the Som Forest project. She owns the site’s mining lease and 70% of Sutera Manja Sdn. Bhd., through which she also chose to appoint Golden Prosperous Resources to mine for iron ore. The remaining 30% of Sutera Manja is owned by three other members of the Pahang royal family. Fatimah is also the point of contact for the Hanishah Ventures mining project at Lake Tasik Chini, although company documents for Hanishah Ventures do not list her as a shareholder.

The Som Forest project site was designated as a permanent forest reserve until June 2019, when it was degazetted to state land by the state government, downgrading its legal protection. Although animals, forests and Indigenous groups are protected under numerous laws in Malaysia, glaring loopholes exist; in this case, all it takes to degazette a piece of protected land is publicizing its change of status in the government gazette.

While such decisions remain in the hands of the state government, the Pahang royals have long enjoyed links with politicians. The former king, Fatimah’s father, accepted handouts of $2 million from former prime minister Najib Razak during the notorious 1MDB corruption scandal. Indeed, despite a family wealth that allows them to build billion-dollar palaces, the Pahang royals continually seek opportunities to expand upon it: of the 11 mining leases currently granted in the state, three belong to individual members of the royal family.

Journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown, who exposed the 1MDB scandal, told Mongabay: “The royal families of Malaysia operate openly in business and use their social and political influence to leverage major shareholdings in contracts generated especially within their home states and usually involving resource extraction. They effectively control the non-transparent decision making in their states to their own enormous financial advantage.”

While the value of any excavated iron ore will line private pockets, it is Malaysia’s most vulnerable who will pay the price. This mine doesn’t just pose a risk to wildlife: it will affect the entire ecosystem, including poor rural villagers.

The EIA notes that silt and sedimentation in the nearby Kerak and Pahang rivers could increase during site clearing and mining, posing a risk to villages downstream that depend on aquaculture. Residents are also at risk of losing their homes and lives due to the possible increase in the frequency of flash floods, which often accompany deforestation.

• Pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina). Image by Mark Louis Benedict via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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The mining project is due to last two years, but the damage will persist long after. The EIA recommends necessary land rehabilitation to combat continued environmental disturbance after the project has wrapped up. While some of the rehabilitation can be carried out alongside the mining itself, the EIA clearly states that revegetation of the land will likely require continued waste treatment and regular fertilizer inputs due to the high toxicity of mine waste. However, in the proposed project timeline, there is no indication of a plan to continue this rehabilitation after the mine shuts.

Golden Prosperous Resources did not respond to questions from Mongabay.

The project is awaiting approval from the Department of Environment and, thanks to its royal backers, can expect little in the way of public resistance; portraying the royals in a negative light is enough to land a citizen in jail in Malaysia. These gag laws make it very difficult for politicians, activists and citizens to protest projects bearing the royal stamp of approval. In early June, for example, Malaysia’s Muda youth movement slammed officials for allowing the continued exploitation of Tasik Chini — but did not berate the royal family for its role in the exploitation.

“The richer they have become the more influential it has made them so that people are now fearful to speak in terms that are not groveling let alone critical because of what might happen to them,” Rewcastle Brown said. “In particular there is a willingness on the part of the police and judiciary to abuse old-fashioned sedition laws to arrest and prosecute people just for speaking critically about such practices.”

Projects like these are extremely common in Malaysia. Despite the Som Forest being a gazetted as a forest reserve, the EIA report reveals there are many other mines, plantations and logging projects neighboring the site, which is secondary forest itself, having been logged just decades ago. Indeed, just 23 days after submitting this proposal, Golden Prosperous Resources submitted another to log 124.38 hectares (307.35 acres) of the Bukit Ibam Forest Reserve. Details of this EIA are not yet available to the public.

A fund created to compensate natives for the forcible logging of their lands has spent less than 1% on the stated beneficiaries, but instead poured millions into investments through asset management companies controlled by Governor Taib Mahmud.

These are the findings of research conducted by Sarawak Report into official audits available online. Campaigners for native rights now want to know where the present sum of over a hundred million ringgit controlled by the trust has ended up and when it will be spent on its proper purpose?

The Forest Concession Area Trust Fund (LKWKKH) was created in 1985 by then chief minister Taib Mahmud in a bid to pacify native communities who were protesting the destruction of their homelands by promising them economic development. In a crushing move against Sarawak’s indigenous people and democracy, the same ordinance also threatened them with police and military action if they continued to protest the logging. 

Plainly designed to counter global concerns about forest destruction and human rights violations caused by the scores of controversial timber concessions being awarded at that time, the ordinance pledged a remit of ‘Rehabilitation and Development’.

Passed by the state parliament, it allowed for a new tax to be collected by the Forest Department from the timber companies to be spent on restoring the affected areas and bringing development benefits to the people who lived there. The money would be held and distributed by the trust fund.

Naturally, the man who pushed through this Ordinance which resulted in numerous brutal encounters against native people by the armed forces, namely the chief minister cum finance minister cum land development minister (who issued the concessions) Taib Mahmud, also appointed himself to be the chairman of the fund.

Yet, four decades later, a series of audits have revealed that less than 1% of what now totals some RM130 million has so far gone towards these reforestation and development pledges. Indeed, over several of those years less than 0.5% of the fund’s money was spent on the communities it was allegedly created to help, whilst 91% was ploughed into unspecified investments.

Perhaps few will be surprised to learn that the lion’s share of those investments were directed by the chairman of the fund, Taib Mahmud, through his own family-owned management companies.

Till this day no breakdown has been provided as to which enterprises benefited from the largesse or whether the performance of the fund justified those investments.

Meanwhile, numerous reports issued by Malaysia’s Auditor General’s office since 2010 (and available online) have shockingly repeated a stark admonishment to the board of LKWKKH over its failure to spend the money on the communities and purposes that it is legally bound to support. For example, the Audit Office wrote in 2011:

” In the opinion of the Audit, the Forest Concession Area Fund Board needs to reconsider the Fund’s investment policy as well as implement more programs for the purpose for which the Fund was established.”

And again in 2014:

In the opinion of the Audit, the objective of the establishment of the Area Trust Fund Forest Concessions have not yet been reached for the benefit of such beneficiaries specified under the Forest Concession Area Fund (Rehabilitation) Ordinance And Development) 1985 where in a period of 5 years i.e. as of 31 December 2014 only 50% of the grant amounting to RM7.43 million was used while only a total of 0.5% to 4.7% of the total funds are used for beneficiaries as specified under the Area Fund Ordinance Forest Concessions (Rehabilitation And Development) 1985.
[Audit of 2014]

This warning was repeated in similar words right up until latest available report accessed by Sarawak Report, issued in 2018. Year after year it appears that Malaysia’s Auditor Generals have been ignored.

Tell Us Where ALL The Money Went

Lawyer and Baram PKR Chief, Roland Engen, called a press conference last week to raise awareness of the misappropriated funds. He is demanding to know where the millions of ringgit have disappeared.

The opposition lawyer has spent years on the ground with displaced communities who are not even aware of the existence of the fund supposedly set up to finance their own development. He says they have not seen a penny of proceeds from the fund in four decades:

“We understand that the people of Baram are the supposed beneficiaries of this fund. But we have received feedback that they do not know about the existence of this fund and even claim that they never knew or were aware of the matter.

“The fund was set up to upgrade, improve and provide infrastructure, public facilities and social and community facilities in Baram, so we want to ask where the funds have been spent since the establishment of LKWKK if it has been used,” 

Making a Mockery

In a cruel acknowledgement of the fund’s true purpose, says Engan, ‘mock cheques’ or vouchers have even been handed round some of the communities representing promises of support that never in fact arrived. Such is the stingy greed of Sarawak’s present Governor and ex-chief minister.

Engan has a photograph of a voucher for a minuscule offer of 2,340 roofing pieces to one Long Laman longhouse signed off by the fund – even that paltry ‘development offer’ has not been honoured:

So Where Did It Go?

Sarawak Report has investigated available data on the ‘trust fund’ that has failed to deliver on its promises.

One major destination for the cash, according to the official audit reports, was yet another ‘compensation fund’ allegedly set up for local people, none other than the scandalous ‘trust’ ASSAR which has been exposed by Sarawak Report for having squandered RM500 million and for having seen a reduction in the actual value of its ringgit shares to just RM0.17.

Most of the rest of the LKWKKH money was channelled into unspecified investments by two management companies controlled by none other than the Chairman of the Trust, Taib Mahmud. The audit from 2010 explains that at that point in time the Taib family company CMS Trust Management Berhad was managing just under 60% of the available funds.

CMS Trust Management was bought over that same year by another company in which the  then chief minister and his family also held and continue to hold  a controlling interest, namely Kenanga Investors Bhd. Therefore, subsequent auditor reports record the significant holding:

The rest of the investment was directed into the private Australian university Curtin’s campus in Kuching. Few forest folk have benefitted from that private educational facility say indigenous campaigners.

Despite the failure to produce full and proper accounts as to where these millions have actually been spent therefore, we can see from these public audits that thanks to decisions made by Taib himself as chairman of this fund, his own private family ventures heavily benefited from money that was raised to support the thousands of native peoples who were displaced by decades of exploitative logging.

Taib’s policies destroyed both their past and their future by robbing them not only of their heritage, but of their right to protest, and then of their right to money promised for their economic, social and educational development. 

It is time for the full picture to be revealed. Where is the money? Where is the accountability and when will the Taib family pay it back with interest over forty years?