Acre, Brazil Exemplifies The Massive Mass That Forest Carbon Offset Programs Have Become
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In 2014, FIFA bought a batch of credits to help fulfill a sustainability pledge it made before the World Cup in Brazil. The offsets came from a project launched in 2009, after Almir Narayamoga Suruí, a leader among the Paiter-Suruí tribe in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, struck up conversations with Google and carbon market consultants.
The project aimed to cut deforestation in highly logged areas along the territory’s borders, and it received funding from USAID. But some members of the tribe, disillusioned by the amount of money going to international groups for logistics management, colluded with loggers and anti-REDD activists to sabotage the project. The project sold 250,000 credits as the tribal leader documented destruction. “Every day, 300 trucks leave our territory filled with wood,” he wrote in a public letter in 2016. The project was suspended last year, after the loggers destroyed more trees than all the credits sold.
Then, there was the project launched in 2008 to help Cambodian monks protect the forest where they lived. The project attracted powerful allies, including funding from the Clinton Foundation and support from the Cambodian government. Meanwhile, the forest was being overrun — by violent border disputes between the Cambodian and Thai militaries, by logging sanctioned by the same government that supported the project, and by an influx of refugees and former Khmer Rouge soldiers who settled in the forest to farm. The project’s hurdles should have been obvious; the area was riddled with land mines. The project was designed to protect 13 forested sites covering a total of 246 square miles. It’s sold 48,000 credits and remains on the market, even though military bases and villages were built within the protected areas, according to Timothy Frewer, an Australian researcher who spent months on the ground. After an environmental group cited Frewer’s findings in a 2017 report, the airline Virgin Atlantic said it would stop buying offsets from the project.
ProPublica enlisted Descartes Labs, a satellite imagery analysis firm, to review radar data for the 13 sites to determine how much forest remained. Project documents said these areas were 88% covered in forest, on average, in 2008. Our commissioned analysis found that as of 2017, they were only 46% forest. One of the protected areas, Angdoung Bor, started out as 90% forest; it is now 0%. ProPublica contacted Verra, a nonprofit that set the quality assurance standards for the credits generated. A spokeswoman said the organization couldn’t comment until it had done its own research. The consultants who are supposed to provide regular on-the-ground updates to Verra haven’t issued a report in more than five years. Verra said the credits sold have already been used to offset pollution. Leslie Durschinger, CEO of project developer Terra Global Capital, said in an email that the lack of carbon market buyers and donors have left the project “without the financial support it needs to succeed.”
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https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/
