The IUCN shouldn't be 'offsetting' via a project mired in indigenous rights scandal
Global conservation organisation buys carbon credits from a highly controversial project in the remote Amazon
Early last month, in an apparent attempt to offset some of the carbon emissions generated by holding the World Conservation Congress (WCC) in Marseille, France in September 2021, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) bought over 1,000 carbon credits from an offsets project in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon. That decision - not publicised by the IUCN, but reported by REDD-Monitor - almost defies belief. As I previously wrote via Substack, the “Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ project”, to use just one of the names it goes by, includes a significant chunk of forest that for 20 years the regional indigenous federation FENAMAD has been struggling to have included in an off-limits reserve for indigenous peoples living in “isolation.” Why should the land rights of the “Mashco-Piro” and others be blocked so people around the world can carry on polluting?
Worse, as I also highlighted, that Madre de Dios carbon project doubles up as two logging concessions totalling almost a quarter of a million acres and is co-run by the two companies owning those concessions, along with a Uruguayan entity named Greenoxx. In other words, no one is chopping down more forest in that part of the world than some of the very same people who are crying how threatened it is, claiming to protect it, and even making money from supposedly doing so.
One other issue I didn’t address in that article, partly because I wanted to emphasise the indigenous rights concerns and the large-scale logging, partly because other journalists had already done so some months earlier, is just how flawed the project is methodologically. As SourceMaterial and Greenpeace’s Unearthed team pointed out in May last year, it is based on the premise that deforestation rates in another part of Madre de Dios would occur in the project area if the project didn’t exist, yet that reference region makes for an utterly inappropriate comparison because it is “much more heavily populated” than the project area and because the Inter-Oceanica Highway, for years reported to be a major deforestation “driver”, runs right through it.
In lengthy responses directed at Greenpeace and The Guardian, which had coordinated with those other researchers and published its own article on the subject but which didn’t name the Madre de Dios project specifically, Verra, a US-based organisation which has certified the project, argued that they didn’t understand the methodology and that their investigations were “fatally flawed.”
“Patterns [of deforestation] in the historical period of the reference area,” Verra stated, in an attempt to explain its general methodology, “would be expected to play out in the project area, were it not for the project activities.”
This seemed like such an outlandish claim in the context of the Madre de Dios project that several months later, in August, I sought clarification from Verra. Were they really standing by the methodology and thereby insisting that deforestation rates recorded in the reference region in the recent past would be similar in the project area if it wasn't for the project?
“Yes, that is correct,” a Verra spokesperson confirmed via email. “The reference area and the project area share distinct characteristics based on which deforestation can be expected to occur at the same rate in the project area as it did in the reference area.”
But that is so improbable as to be farcical, or even fantastical, as anyone familiar with Madre de Dios would almost certainly tell you. The project area and reference region might be comparatively close, at least in Amazonian terms, but they are very different. Among other things, one features a major thoroughfare that connects Madre de Dios with the rest of Peru, neighbouring Brazil and ultimately the Atlantic Coast on the other side of the continent - hence the name “Inter-Oceanica” - while in the other the roads are mostly or only small-scale access routes facilitating the logging. One includes a large town, Iberia, while the other features no such similarly-sized settlement, is barely populated, and borders the reserve for indigenous peoples in “isolation” who sometimes live in or migrate through it. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the logging concessions and carbon project the most likely scenario is that a large part of the project area would be included in that reserve, as FENAMAD continues to demand.
Given all this - the indigenous rights controversy, the large-scale logging, the fundamental methodological flaw - it would be bad enough for anyone to buy credits from this project, but it seems particularly egregious for the IUCN to have done so, especially for that Congress in Marseille. I say that because that event arguably constituted something of a milestone in the conservation movement’s relationship with the world’s indigenous peoples, in terms of how the latter were able to participate, the sheer numbers who did so, the issues proposed and discussed, and some of the formal resolutions and recommendations that emerged.
For example, as The Guardian reported, indigenous peoples participated in Marseille as “full voting members in their own right” for the “first time in [the IUCN’s] seven-decade history.” Among the most striking resolutions was one intended to contribute to the development of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, in which the IUCN effectively joined the chorus for the highly controversial call for 30% of the planet to be protected by 2030 - but only on the condition that indigenous peoples’ rights are fully recognised and respected. Similarly, another resolution called for 80% of the Amazon in particular to be protected - but again only on the condition that indigenous rights are fully recognised and respected.
“Indigenous peoples have been heard at World Conservation Congress,” was how the IUCN itself, in a co-authored statement, described the event afterwards. ““Recognition” was the word invoked time and again by indigenous leaders during the first ever World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature at IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille,” that statement continued.
How grossly ironic, then, that carbon emissions for a Congress making such encouraging noises about indigenous rights should be supposedly offset by a project that is effectively or even explicitly blocking the recognition of such rights. When I raised this with the IUCN, I was told that together with France’s Ministry for Ecological Transformation they had chosen the Madre de Dios project back in November 2019, and that that choice had been based on the certifications it had received from “reputed offset standard providers”, including the Verified Carbon Standard and The Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards, “which verify the carbon impacts and community impacts of a project, respectively.”
“Since the projects were chosen we have learned of reports of indigenous peoples’ concerns regarding the Madre de Dios project, one of the 4 projects selected,” the IUCN tells me. “We do take the concerns raised in your [Substack] article extremely seriously and are looking into them. IUCN will be reviewing the way that offsets are chosen in future.”