Sorry, TotalEnergies, but something is very wrong with your Amazon offsets project
The Cordillera Azul carbon project in Peru is beset with human rights controversies and methodological problems
Carbon offsetting has become, no doubt about it, a veritable “Weapon of Mass Distraction.” If you’re casting around for an emblematic example of just how contentious some projects can be, look no further than the Cordillera Azul National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. This is particularly worth paying attention to because not only is it an “avoided deforestation” project - the most popular of all offsets initiatives, as well as the most critiqued - in a remote part of one of the world’s most extensively-forested countries, but also because two of our planet’s top 20 historic polluters - TotalEnergies and Shell - have been buying substantial numbers of carbon credits from it.
Total recently got around to responding to concerns expressed by indigenous Kichwa in Peru who, since October last year, have been writing to the company about the Cordillera Azul project. Their response was beyond pathetic, even by corporate standards. Not only was it months late and written in English rather than Spanish, and not only did it include a whole heap of information that the Kichwa are obviously already well aware of, but Total failed to address the substantive issues that the Kichwa have been alleging about both the Cordillera Azul park and offsets project systematically violating their rights. If that wasn’t enough, the company even seemed to blame the Kichwa for hampering their attempt to conduct an internal assessment of the project.
There is no way that anyone at Total - or Shell, or indeed any other company - should be able to claim with a straight face that somehow their emissions are being offset by what is going on in and around the Cordillera Azul, or that the park and project don’t constitute something of a human rights fiasco. Here, in chronological order, is a quick rundown of some of what has been made public about this slickly-marketed-but-scandalous project over the last two years:
1 In May 2021, two months after Total’s subsidiary TotalEnergies Nature Based Solutions signed a contract to buy credits from the project, journalists from SourceMaterial in the UK raised concerns about the methodology and pointed out that the project area had effectively been protected seven years before the project even started when the Cordillera Azul park was established. In other words, if Peru was already legally obliged to protect the area, how can you claim the project is stopping forest from being cut down that otherwise would be cut down if the project didn’t exist? To put that another way, how can you be sure that the supposedly avoided emissions are genuinely “additional” - a common problem bugging any “avoided deforestation” project? Similar methodological concerns were raised by Greenpeace’s journalism unit Unearthed, a SourceMaterial research partner, in October that same year.
2 In July 2021 it was announced that a Kichwa federation, the Consejo Étnico de los Pueblos Kichwa de la Amazonia (CEPKA), and a community, Puerto Franco, had sued Peru’s Environment Ministry and other state agencies the previous year over the latter’s failure to title their land, some of which has allegedly been included in the park and therefore the project area. The Kichwa won that lawsuit in an historic ruling issued in April this year, but it was swiftly - and almost certainly irregularly - thrown out on obscure procedural grounds. The Kichwa continue to accuse the park and project of blocking their land title claims and to demand their fair share of the benefits generated by both, holding protests, issuing furious public statements and, most recently in June, writing to Total.
3 In December 2021 I wrote an article for Substack highlighting the human rights concerns surrounding the project - not just the Kichwa’s land title struggle, but the fact that part of the park and therefore the project area is reportedly inhabited by indigenous people in “isolation” who live so remotely that they have no regular contact with anyone else - not even the Kichwa. Those people weren’t consulted about either the park or project, as was their right under international law, but nor should they have been, given their decision to live in “isolation”, as is their right too. Ergo, no project of any kind should include their territories.
4 In May 2022 I wrote another article for Substack focusing this time on the project’s methodology and suggesting that it is “fundamentally flawed”, going into some detail about the park’s establishment, questioning the “additionality” claims, and taking on the frequently-made claim that if it wasn’t for the funds generated by the offsets the Peruvian state couldn’t afford to protect the park. Believe that and you’ll believe anything.
5 In October 2022 Friends of the Earth-Netherlands (FOEN) published a report titled How Shell is Using Nature-Based Solutions to Continue its Fossil Fuel Agenda, which featured Cordillera Azul as the first of three case studies “from which Shell has purchased most of its carbon credits to date.” FOEN rubbished the project’s methodology, calling the “additionality" claims “demonstrably implausible” and acknowledging the Kichwa’s claims to parts of the park as well as the existence of “uncontacted” people in the region. “The carbon credits sold by the project are highly unlikely to represent avoided emissions that otherwise would have occurred,” the report concluded.
6 The following month, CEPKA, two other Kichwa federations and the UK-headquartered human rights organisation Forest Peoples Programme published a report, Conservation Without Indigenous Peoples, alleging that at least 29 indigenous communities’ land falls within the park, as well as providing evidence that certain communities’ attempts to obtain collective title to that land has been blocked by the park’s existence. The park is “enormously important” partly because of the “environmental services it provides,” the park’s director wrote to the head of one community, clearly referring to the offsets project.
7 In December 2022 the Associated Press (AP) published the first of three articles about the Cordillera Azul park and offsets project, following a visit to numerous Kichwa communities the previous October. The main findings: that many Kichwa say that they weren’t consulted about either the park or project, that they’ve used some of the land now in the park for decades, that they’ve since lost “unfettered access” to it, and that they’ve received no financial compensation despite the many millions being generated by the project and the fact that for decades it has been them stewarding that land.
8 In March 2023 AP published its second article focusing this time on the project’s methodology, arguing that the potential benefits were exaggerated from the start - another common problem with “avoided deforestation” projects sometimes dubbed “over-crediting” - and that the amount of tree cover loss in the park has, ironically, more than doubled since the project began. “Experts say the Cordillera Azul project was flawed from the beginning,” AP reported, before noting that Shell has committed to conducting “an additional review before further purchases.”
9 In April 2023 the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination wrote to Peru’s government about the Cordillera Azul, focusing on the human rights concerns. The most salient points: parts of the park include indigenous territories, adequate consultation wasn’t done before it was established, access has been restricted, food security threatened, people intimidated, and land-titling has been “slow.” About the offsets project in particular: no consultation was done either, it is being run non-transparently, and the Kichwa haven’t been involved in any way.
10 Late last month NGO Rainforest Foundation UK published a report titled Credits where they are not due: A Critical Analysis of the Major REDD+ Schemes, which featured Cordillera Azul as the first of four case studies. It described it as one of the “largest and most controversial REDD+ projects” and highlighted the by-now-familiar issues: the failure to consult with or obtain the consent of “various Indigenous communities living in and around the park” and the obviously suspect methodology, including “an implausibly high baseline” and “leakage” - another common problem with “avoided deforestation” projects - which “could in fact be close to 100 percent.”
Are Total and Shell really going to carry on associating themselves with this project? Let’s see what happens.