POZNAN, Poland - December 12 - The Global Forest Coalition, a worldwide coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples' Organizations, expressed strong concerns about the outcomes of the Poznan UN Climate Talks today. The 14th Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change failed to explicitly reject carbon markets as a possible funding option for forest conservation, despite an almost unanimous rejection of such markets by Indigenous Peoples' Organizations (1), Southern NGOs (2), the international youth movement (3), women's groups (4a) & (4b),  peasant movements (5) and social movements in general (6).
 
Marcial Arias, one of the Indigenous focal points of the Global Forest Coalition stated: "We are outraged that due to the opposition of just four industrialized countries, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, the Poznan conference failed to recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples as enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This implies that the final outcomes of the current climate talks are likely to lead to serious violations of the human rights of these Peoples, especially forest-dependent Indigenous Peoples."
 
Dr. Miguel Lovera, chairperson of the Global Forest Coalition adds: "By failing to distinguish forests from tree plantations, the outcome of the current negotiations could lead to massive financial support for the expansion of large-scale monoculture tree plantations. In Brazil and other countries, governments are already planning to "compensate" deforestation with hundreds of thousands of hectares of such plantations, which have proven to have a devastating impact on biodiversity and local communities."