‘Honestly, there’s no problem, this carbon offsets project has been certified!’
Damning new report on leading carbon market registry released by researchers at US university
Journalists asking uncomfortable questions become accustomed to receiving the same kinds of responses over and over again. If, say, you ask an oil company about the way it has been dumping toxic waste waters into rivers and streams over the years, you might be relayed some drivel about “complying with national laws and regulations” - sometimes true, sometimes not. Or if you ask a mining company about allegations of human rights abuses, you could well be informed that it is “working closely with communities in the region”, even though that is either patently untrue or is a kind of double-speak for the firm buying off one or two local leaders who only really represent themselves or a tiny minority.
For tough inquiries about carbon offsets projects, there is another common category of response: “It has been certified or registered by So-and-So”, as if that is proof that somehow the concerns you or someone else is raising about a particular project must be largely meritless, and therefore don’t require any real, substantive consideration. It’s as if they’re saying: “Honestly, there’s no problem, this carbon offsets project has been certified!”
Usually, at least in my experience, that So-and-So is Verra, a US-based non-profit company apparently running the largest and most prestigious voluntary carbon market registry in the world. For example, when I went to the multinational airline company easyJet for a formal response about buying carbon credits from a deeply problematic offsets project in the Madre de Dios region in the south-east Peruvian Amazon, it leaned heavily on Verra.
“If Verra were to identify that project is not meeting all the standard’s requirements, the issuance of carbon credits would be frozen until the issues are resolved and the project would need to be re-audited and re-validated,” an easyJet spokesperson told me. “Similarly, if we became aware that these standards were not being met for any project, we wouldn’t hesitate to address that with Verra and review our project participation on that basis.” And then: “The Madre de Dios project meets these standards and continues to be rigorously audited by Verra on criteria including the safeguarding of the rights of indigenous communities and it has continually met these standards since it was launched.”
It was similar when I asked an apparently pioneering “green crypto firm” trading carbon credits, called Moss, operating out of Brazil, about that very same project in Peru. Their response mentioned Verra by name no less than nine times. In fact, Moss said on more than one occasion that it would be “more appropriate” to direct any queries about the project to Verra and others rather than Moss itself, and that “the project follows the peer reviewed Verra VCS protocol.”
Right, but what does that mean in practice? That the methodology is reliable, that the extent of forest supposedly being protected is more or less correct, and/or that the amount of CO2 purportedly being sequestered rather than released into the atmosphere is accurate too? That the number of credits being issued is not inflated? That the rights of indigenous peoples and other local communities are being respected?
Absolutely not - at least, not in my experience with certain offset projects in Peru, not in the experience of many other people, and not now according to a 14-person “interdisciplinary team of political and natural ecologists and ecosystem modelers” from the Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US who released a bruising report last week titled “Quality Assessment of REDD+ Carbon Credit Projects.” “We assess the effectiveness of REDD+ carbon crediting programs at reducing deforestation, generating high-quality carbon credits, and protecting forest communities,” the report states. “We focus on the four crediting methodologies that have generated almost all REDD+ carbon credits to date, all under Verra, the largest voluntary carbon market registry.”
The conclusions? Utterly damning. Verra’s methodologies are too flexible and not adequately enforced anyway, the report finds, with over-crediting of credits rampant and supposed efforts to ensure local people aren’t harmed described as often more of a “check-box activity” rather than anything serious.
“We found that current REDD+ methodologies generate credits that represent a small fraction of their claimed climate benefit,” the report states. “Estimates of emissions reductions were exaggerated across all quantification factors we reviewed when compared to the published literature and our independent quantitative assessment. . . Our exploration of the underlying reasons REDD+ crediting projects deviate so dramatically from good practice in carbon accounting and safeguards found that Verra offers project developers significant flexibility in performing emissions reduction estimates and applying safeguards. Developers have used that flexibility to make methodological choices that lead to high estimates of project benefits, instead of conservative estimates as required. Project auditors, who are hired by the project developers and so have incentives to be lenient in order to be hired again, did not adequately enforce compliance with Verra’s standards, including conservativeness in emissions reduction estimates.”
The Guardian described the Berkeley research as “looking into rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra, which operates the world’s leading carbon standard”, and concluding that “the system is not fit for purpose. It generates highly inflated environmental impacts and some projects fail to provide safeguards for vulnerable forest communities, according to the report, making them unsuitable for companies to use for carbon offsetting claims as they are not equivalent to fossil fuel emissions.”
The message from the report is stark: not only should companies not rely on - or hide behind - offsets projects given the Verra seal of approval, but carbon markets in general, offsets and credits etc are no serious way to protect the world’s forests, and therefore it’s time to focus on other approaches. The Berkeley researchers name six: “curb the demand-side drivers of deforestation” like consumption of meat and animal feed, support indigenous and other local communities, channel funds to civil society organizations and programs that genuinely mitigate climate change, provide debt relief to certain countries, ensure climate finance is more fairly shared, and, of course, last but not least, “reduce fossil fuel emissions at their source.”
Some of that might sound obvious, but it desperately needs emphasising, particularly in this context. “Weapon of Mass Distraction” as offsetting is, the fact remains that the global voluntary carbon market boomed in recent years by leaping from an average of a few US$100 million in annual sales between 2005 and 2020 to US$2 billion in 2021. In the near future, it is predicted to boom again into the 10s or even 100s of billions .