The Burning Season starts Tonight
There is a special parliamentary screening of the cinematic release of the film The Burning Season at Parliament House in Sydney tonight. The film’s narrator, Hugh Jackman, will be there apparently. I’ll be there too, happy to share what I know about the technicalities of REDD projects and filmmakers Cathy Henkel and Trish Lake will be there to formally respond to questions in a session after the film.
The Burning Season is a documentary about Dorjee Sun, a young entrepreneur who believes there’s money to be made from saving rainforests in Indonesia and making a real impact on climate change. Armed with a laptop and a backpack, he sets out across the globe to find investors in his scheme. Meanwhile another burning season gets underway. A small-scale farmer wrestles with the dilemma of clearing his land. In Borneo, a wildlife carer battles overcrowding and despair as more orangutans are rescued from the fires. This is the story of a young man not afraid to single-handedly confront the biggest challenge of our time. His determination to succeed and his award-winning achievement will uplift and entertain audiences and inspire hope in our future.
Paying people for the environmental services provided by their forests is probably going to be the single biggest change to money flows around the world we’ve seen in a long time. For many years money has flowed to those people lucky enough to be born on top of oil, or gas, or gold; and tough enough to be able to take advantage of that good fortune. It’s not always flowed fairly and the needs of the people have often taken a back seat to the wants of fat-cats, middle-men and officials.
One of the huge challenges for REDD projects is making sure, with the benefit of hindsight, we design financial distribution systems that ensure the people get the money they deserve. The journey Dorjee Sun and others are on is a long, complicated and often treacherous one. There are many forces who’d love nothing more than to see REDD projects fall at the first hurdle. But if the world is to address dangerous climate change, and put its best foot forwards with respect to global poverty, saving the world’s forests, and teaching people that there are other, better, more sustainable ways to extract revenues from their forests. Deforestation represents over 17% of the world’s excess greenhouse gas emissions. Forest people are some of the poorest, and most likely to be affected early by climate change. Common sense and natural justice come together here with economic pragmatism. REDD projects will succeed, despite a vocal lobby of nay-sayers. — DS