Case studies of the CDM's landfill and incinerator projects, which increase greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution while displacing waste pickers' livelihoods.

Cancun, Mexico. December 2, 2010. The Global Alliance of Wastepickers and Allies, through its representatives from Latin America, South Africa, and India, is in Cancun to speak out against Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects that fund waste incinerators and landfills, causing the displacement of recyclers and their undeniable and historic contribution to greenhouse gas mitigation.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has to be transformational not only in how it raises resources and what it funds but also in the way it engages with and accounts to communities globally.

As part of a global coalition including grassroots recyclers and allied groups, GAIA is campaigning to stop the flow of carbon credits to incinerators and landfills.

The Clean Development Mechanism’s flagship waste management project in India is turning into a multi-faceted disaster, revealing flaws in both the carbon credit mechanism as well as the corporate-driven, technology-focused approached to climate change mitigation.

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding for incineration and landfills currently represents a lost opportunity to reduce pollution and help improve the welfare and standards of living of some of the poorest people in the world. Additionally, this funding incentivizes the destruction of valuable resources that would otherwise have been recovered with significant climate benefits. The following are a few examples of waste projects that have been approved or are being considered for CDM approval, and where there is growing community and waste worker opposition to the project.

Rising Tide North America and Carbon Trade Watch release 2nd edition of Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: False Solutions to Climate Change, a 28-page booklet providing a close-to-comprehensive overview of false solutions to climate change.

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you’ve heard about cap and trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

Toolkit to CDM – by CDM Watch Guide that provides an explanation of how the CDM and its tools for public participation work.

Carbon trading lies at the centre of global climate policy and is projected to become one of the world’s largest commodities markets, yet it has a disastrous track record since its adoption as part of the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon Trading: how it works and why it fails outlines the limitations of an approach to tackling climate change which redefines the problem to fit the assumptions of neoliberal economics. It demonstrates that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the world’s largest carbon market, has consistently failed to ´cap´ emissions, while the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) routinely favours environmentally ineffective and socially unjust projects. This is illustrated with case studies of CDM projects in Brazil, Indonesia, India and Thailand.

Durban, December 5, 2011 – Waste pickers attending COP17 today called for a Green Climate Fund with direct community access and an end to CDM “waste-to-energy” projects. Representatives from three continents highlighted the fact that waste pickers are the most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the waste sector.

This weekend was abuzz with talks of a looming Durban Mandate that would be crystallised as one of the outcomes of the Climate talks. It was for precisely this reason that more than ten thousand people took to the streets of Durban to demonstrate civil society’s determination for a common goal: climate justice.

Like the economic crisis that sparked the Occupy movement, climate change is about inequality.

Delhi protesters demand cancellation of the Okhla incinerator and a stop to CDM credits for incinerators, which strip waste pickers of their livelihoods and increase pollution.

Asia is seeing a rise in incinerator proposals with China leading the number of projects applying for funding under the Clean Development Mechanism. Proponents peddle projects as climate-friendly and sources of renewable energy, which environmental groups in China contest.

30 September 2011, Quezon City, Philippines. Citizens’ groups across the globe are pressing governments to direct scarce financial resources to support community-led, job-generating and climate-friendly solutions to waste and toxic pollution, not to polluting incinerators and landfills.

Reducing, reusing, and recycling municipal waste is one of the easiest and most effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It also provides gainful employment to millions of people in the developing world, mostly in the informal sector (“wastepickers”). Yet rather than supporting these efforts, climate funds such as the Clean Development Mechanism are subsidizing incinerators and landfill gas systems, which compete directly with recycling and increase emissions, unemployment, and public costs. A new, non-market, climate finance mechanism is needed to support the formalization and expansion of the informal recycling sector.