Carbon offsetting via rainforest protection is widely criticized. With “phantom credits” and “carbon pirates,” shouldn’t companies and consumers just avoid all such investments? ‘No, but they need to do it right,’ says indigenous representatives as well as local experts in the Amazon.

“Would you like a carbon offset with that?” The question pops up ever more frequently in our commercial lives. Whether we are offered “net-zero beef” or “carbon-neutral flights,” the offer is to alleviate our troubled conscience from buying a new product, into satisfaction for letting the purchase contribute to solving the climate crisis. Oftentimes offsets are spent to “avoid deforestation” in the Global South. The issue is, of course, extremely urgent. For example, warnings mount that the Amazon rainforest – which holds over ten percent of all species on the planet, and about ten years’ worth of current carbon emissions in its biomass – could be on the brink of a disastrous tipping point that would turn it into a species poor and carbon spewing savanna.

Offsets meet criticism from NGO’s and researchers

Critics argue, however, that there are no such thing as carbon “offsets.” Airplanes and beef will inevitably add excess carbon to the atmosphere, and no payment can undo it. Activist Greta Thunberg calls the system “a dangerous climate lie.” Similarly, the World Rainforest Movement calls offsets “rotten at the core,” and “built on neocolonialism” whose “primary function is to buy another decade or two of unrestrained corporate profiteering from fossil carbon extraction and industrial agriculture while increasing outside control over community territories.”

To make things worse, a report in the scientific journal Science found that 94 percent of studied offsets from certifier Verra were found to be false or inflated. It was quite a blow, as Verra controls the backend verification process of two thirds of the annual $2 billion and rapidly growing “voluntary carbon market.” When the results of the Science article were widely reported, it prompted the resignation of Verra’s founder and CEO and a deep crisis of legitimacy for the whole system.

Nuances lost in heat of debate?

But where did all the money go? Is it all just “hot air” – as The New Yorker magazine recently called offsets in a dense 14-page article?

It seems clear that a lot of money is spent on middlemen with pennies left for people on the ground. And then, there is wide agreement that many of even the best carbon offsets are extremely hard – if not impossible – to prove. To scientifically validate that a plot of forest has “avoided deforestation,” there must be verifiable proof that those particular trees would, without action, have been cut down. Reality is usually much messier and more unpredictable.

On the other hand, some of the money that does get all the way to the forest provides genuine benefits – even if the immediate “carbon offset value” is zero.

Indigenous people forgotten – again

Some months ago, eight networks of indigenous peoples from over 40 countries signed an open letter in support of the United Nations program REDD+ (see fact box). The groups argue that recent critical research and reporting bears some merit but has been done without taking any indigenous perspectives into account. By so doing, scientists and journalists have simply doubled down on the main problem of the whole system, which now needs to be addressed: The lack of any involvement from people living in the forest.

The groups claim that REDD+ projects are one of the only ways in which their peoples can support themselves and protect their environments. They are worried that the effect of the criticism will simply be that money will stop flowing, and that their lives will be made impossible.

Living forests need living communities

In northern Brazil, Augusto Postigo has been working for the influential NGO Instituto Socioambiental for decades. The organization works to transform the economy of the Amazon to protect both forests and the people in them. He agrees that money is needed to create change:

“To protect the forests, we need to keep people living there, and people need money to survive.”

Augusto Postigo oversees the implementation of a system created by the country’s most famous human rights and forest activist, rubber tapper Chico Mendez, who in the 1980s argued that thriving forests and forestpeople’s survival were intimately linked. Mendez, like many activists in Brazil, was murdered by cattle farmers, but his system of “extractive reserves” lives to this day. In these intact forests, indigenous and tradi-tional groups are allowed to harvest whatever they can find. It has been shown that these areas are comparable to strictly protected areas in terms of protection – while at the same time being effective carbon sinks.

However, to be able to even bring the products to markets, the price of these goods must be subsidized by up to seven times their market value. Also, for the forest to keep being inhabited and protected from illegal logging, young people need to see financial and life benefits from staying in the forest and keep their traditional knowledge.

“Money from carbon programs make lives in the forest sensible,” explains Augusto Postigo.

 

A new lingo – or a genuine shift?

Some offset companies are now shifting their marketing. The world’s leading supplier of consumer offsets, South Pole, had made a small fortune selling offsets to some of the world’s largest companies. Until, that is, it faced serious criticism about exaggerating deforestation threats against a forest in Zimbabwe. In lieu of this, South Pole now seeks to limit its usage of marketing lingo like “carbon neutral” and is instead selling the insignia “This Company Funds Climate Action.”

Maybe “funding climate action,” combined with transparency, knowledge, and inclusion instead of carbon neutral-hype is a more honest and fruitful way of collecting money for what must be saved. And at the same time, combined with genuine, far-reaching efforts to lower companies’ and consumers’ overall emissions.

 

 

Photos: Marcus Haraldsson