I write this while waiting for my tablet to die. Tomorrow, I’ll return to air-conditioning, stable WiFi and refrigeration, but here in Long Moh, deep in the remote Upper Baram region of Sarawak, there has been no electricity for two weeks. The fans sit useless and mocking in the corners, and a sudden downpour is the only relief that cuts through the muggy heat. Communities here are among the least responsible for climate change, yet they’re already living with its sharpest edges. Each year in Malaysia, we now hear stories of children suffering permanent brain damage or death during heat waves because they simply played in the sun. In a place without air-conditioning, 1° Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit) of global warming is not a statistic — it is a threat to life. And now, through carbon offsetting projects, these same communities are being asked to save the world from a crisis they did not create — often with little say, and even less reward. I have traveled here with local NGOs SAVE Rivers and Sahabat Alam Malaysia, which are leading community workshops on carbon credit and offset projects. Rumors abound that this region — one of Sarawak’s last remaining strongholds of intact tropical forest — has been earmarked for a carbon project courtesy of a timber company with a decades-long track record of trying to chop it all down. Species like the rhinoceros hornbill (Buceros rhinoceros) benefit from forest conservation in Baram, too. Image courtesy of Mark Louis Benedict via Flickr.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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