Wereld Natuur Fonds in de ban van misantropisch extremisme

Het Wereld Natuur Fonds – eens een sympathieke organisatie ter bescherming van bedreigde diersoorten met de knuffelpandabeer als logo – is de laatste tijd in opspraak geraakt wegens een paar schandalen.

Goede bedoelingen blijken geen garantie voor het scheppen van een betere wereld. En op het conceptuele vlak raakt de organisatie bovendien hoe langer hoe meer in de ban van misantropisch extremisme.

Onder de titel, 'How climate change has got Worldwide Fund for Nature bamboozled', rapporteerde Christopher Booker in de Britse 'Telegraph' het volgende over de schandalen: 

WWF has travelled too far from its original aim, to protect endangered species.
 
What a strange body the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) has become these days. It is the largest, richest and most influential environmental lobbying organisation in the world. Originally set up in 1961 by Julian Huxley, Prince Philip, Prince Bernhard and others, for the admirable purpose of campaigning to save species endangered by human activity, it has morphed in the last 20 years into something very different, more akin to a multinational corporation.

The WWF empire now derives a very hefty chunk of its income from partnerships with governments, or the EU, or actual multinationals, such as Coca-Cola and Sky, which like to use its iconic panda logo (originally designed by the naturalist Peter Scott) to give an “eco-caring” gloss to their commercial activities. The chief reason why it has so greatly increased its wealth and influence is that it has joined other lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, in pushing to the top of its agenda that most fashionable and lucrative of environmental causes, the “battle to halt climate change”.
 
But this has led WWF into some rather odd little tangles, such as those which have recently emerged over its activities in Tanzania. Much of its work there is carried out under a UN climate change policy known as REDD+ (“reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation”), which is part of the UN’s £17??billion Fast Start programme. Britain, giving £1.5? billion, is that programme’s second largest contributor after Japan.
 
Last November, Prince Charles, as president of WWF UK, flew to Tanzania to hand out “Living Planet” awards to five “community leaders” involved in WWF projects around the delta of the Rufiji River, which holds the world’s largest mangrove forest. Part of their intention has been to halt further damage to the forest by local farmers, who have been clearing it to grow rice and coconuts. This is because the mangroves store unusual amounts of “carbon” (CO2), viewed as the major contributor to global warming. Shortly before the Prince’s arrival, it was revealed that thousands of villagers had been evicted from the forest, their huts in the paddy fields torched and their coconut palms felled. This was carried out by the Tanzanian government’s Forestry and Beekeeping Division, with which WWF has been working. But Stephen Makiri, the head of WWF Tanzania, was quick to insist that WWF had never advocated expelling communities from the delta, and that “the evictions were carried out by government agencies”.

Verder bleek dat medewerkers van die overheidsinstanties voor meer dan een £1?millioen declaratiefraude hadden gepleegd. Daar waren waarschijnlijk ook Britse hulpgelden mee gemoeid. Ondanks aandringen van Booker hebben noch de Britse ontwikkelingshulporganisatie, noch het WNF volledig opening van zaken gegeven wat betreft de resultaten van een onderzoek van Ernst & Young naar de betrokken malversaties. Het zal duidelijk zijn dat de goede naam van de organisatie op het spel staat.

It is hardly surprising that WWF is so anxious to defend its good name, since so much of its income (£55?million a year in Britain alone) depends not just on the five million members it claims worldwide but on the support it gets from governments. Nowhere is this web of top-level influence more striking than in the role WWF now plays in the workings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the body whose reports, supposedly based only on “gold standard” science, have been the chief driver behind worldwide concern over global warming for 20 years.
 
When a series of scandals blew up two years ago over the more alarmist claims made by the IPCC in its 2007 assessment report, the two which attracted most headlines were shown to have been based, not on peer-reviewed science, but on campaigning material put out by WWF. ...

Exhaustive analysis, led by the Canadian author Donna Laframboise, then revealed that nearly a third of the 18,531 sources cited by the report had no more scientific provenance than press clippings, student theses and claims by activist groups – among which none was more prominent than WWF. But worse was to come. In her recent book on the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, Laframboise shows how, from 2004 on, WWF deliberately set out to recruit contributors to the IPCC’s next report to its Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel.
 
The result was that WWF “climate witnesses” contributed to two thirds of the 2007 report’s 44 chapters, including every one of the 20 chapters in the section on the impacts of climate change. A third of all the chapters in the report had WWF witnesses as co-ordinating lead authors, ultimately responsible for their contents. As Laframboise summed up, her analysis confirmed that, far from the report being the work of dispassionate scientists, “the IPCC has been infiltrated wholly and entirely compromised”.
 
Many of these WWF panel members are now at work on the IPCC’s new report, due out next year. ...

Just how far WWF has travelled from the noble purposes for which it was set up was perfectly symbolised by the way it chose as its chief marketing tool the slogan “Adopt a polar bear”. If this organisation still had concern for endangered species closest to its heart, it would know that the idea that polar bears are dying out due to global warming is no more than sentimental propaganda. But then that is the main business that WWF now seems to be in – very much at the expense of the rest of us and, of course, those communities in the Rufiji delta.

Lees verder hier.

In 'The Register' schenkt Lewis Page aandacht aan het misantropisch extremisme waaronder deze organisatie in toenemende mate gebukt gaat. 

Onder de titel, 'Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!', schrijft hij:

Windfarms for all, but without using steel or concrete
 
Analysis Extremist green campaigning group WWF - endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency - has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.

Most astonishingly of all, the green hardliners demand that the enormous numbers of wind farms, tidal barriers and solar powerplants required under their plans should somehow be built while at the same time severely rationing supplies of concrete, steel, copper and glass.

The WWF presents these demands in its just-issued Living Planet Report for 2012. It's a remarkable document, not least for the fact that it is formally endorsed for the first time by the European Space Agency (ESA) - an organisation which would cease to exist in any meaningful form if the document's recommendations were to be carried out.
 
The report is also unusual in that it seeks to set policy on economics and energy, but doesn't anywhere give any figures expressed in units of energy (watt-hours, joules etc) or currency (dollars, euros or what have you). Instead the WWF activists prefer to base their argument on various indices invented either by themselves or by other international non- or quasi-governmental organisations.

For instance one key figure used in the report is the Living Planet Index, invented by the WWF, which apparently shows "trends in the overall state of global biodiversity".

It does this by examining the number of individuals (or sometimes pairs) in various local populations of 2,688 selected species - of vertebrates only. Every two years WWF changes what species and populations are included, in large numbers: and anyone would acknowledge that a limited, localised picture of a couple of thousand vertebrate-only species is an utterly minuscule, extremely selective pinpoint on the picture of all the Earth's life.

Nonetheless WWF think that their LPI number offers conclusive proof that "biodiversity has decreased globally".

The report [ ] assumes that global resources in general are limited, which is easily achieved by measuring them in terms of "biocapacity" expressed in hectares of Earth surface, and further stipulating that no resources can come from beyond Earth (which seems an odd idea for a major space agency to endorse, but there). WWF goes on to assign numbers showing how much of these hectare-resources everyone is using, their "ecological footprint".

In these terms, the only people on Earth who are living within their means are those in the poorest nations - their "footprint" exactly matches the "biocapacity" in their countries (doubtless a coincidence) offering a picture of the sort of life all human beings could aspire to in a WWF-run world. Middle-income nations use more "biocapacity" than they actually have, and high-income ones - all the ones where you as a Register reader are most likely to live - use nearly twice as many eco-resources as they produce.

The WWF eco-nomists also argue that human beings actually don't - or anyway, shouldn't - want to get richer, as people getting rich means economic growth and that (regardless of what all world governments and almost all economists think, especially right now) is a Bad Thing as it leads to consumer demand which leads to resources and energy being used.

"We need to measure success beyond GDP," says WWF, an argument they've made before. In particular the organisation argues that "human development" or the still-flakier metric "inequality adjusted human development" is a far better one than GDP per capita. (One may note that under the normal HDI (Human Development Index) it is better to live in Ireland, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea, Slovenia, Spain, Italy or the Czech Republic than in the UK.) ...

Conclusie:

That means you, Reg reader: you are to accept a massively lower standard of living, in order to reduce your "footprint" to match your nation's "biocapacity". Then you'll have to take another cut, because your nation - being rich - has more "biocapacity" than a poor country does (despite their claim that planetary resources are finite, WWF acknowledges that new "biocapacity" can be created in the form of cropland, forests etc), but this should be shared with the poorer lands under "equitable resource governance".

That means less heating when it's cold - no cooling at all, probably, when it's hot. It means sharply limited hot water: so dirtier clothes, dirtier bedding and a dirtier you - which will be nice as you will also have to live in a smaller home and travel almost exclusively on crowded buses or trains along with similar smelly fellow eco-citizens. Food will be scarcer and realistically much less nutritious (milk for kids will be a luxury, let alone meat, fruit, coffee, that sort of stuff. Get ready to eat a lot of turnips, if you're a Brit.)

Lees verder hier.

We zien dus een geleidelijke verschuiving van de prioriteiten op de agenda van de wereldwijde onheilsindustrie. Klimaatverandering verliest terrein, maar biodiversiteit is in opkomst. Maar hoe dan ook, in het licht van de wet van het behoud van de menselijke ellende, blijft er genoeg werk aan de winkel voor deze koene redders van onze planeet.

Voor mijn eerdere DDS-bijdragen, zie:

http://www.dagelijksestandaard.nl/author/hans-labohm/track