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Campaigners are calling on European ministers -- attending the Durban Climate Change conference (28 Nov - 09 Dec 2011) - to follow the lead of the United Nations after it suspended a controversial carbon credits scheme that encouraged developing countries to build coal power projects.

The UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is designed to encourage global financial markets to invest in low carbon projects and has created a trading market worth USD$144 billion.

Now pictures have now emerged showing how open cast mining at the Sasan thermal power plant in Madhya Pradesh in India, funded through carbon credits, has forced some of the world's poorest from their homes and left communities destroyed.

The UN suspended coal projects from the carbon offset scheme because the rules used to calculate emission reductions had resulted in the creation of "artificial carbon credits". It will now look at new methods of monitoring and verifying the effects of carbon credits.

Investors in the Clean Development Mechanism are frustrated by the repeated changes to the rules governing which projects qualify for carbon credits, and increasingly disillusioned with the low price of carbon determined through the mechanism.