Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse than Nothing--An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth

May 23, 2019

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by Lisa Song, with additional reporting by Paula Moura (Pro Publica) ... If the carbon in these trees could be quantified, then Acre could sell credits to polluters emitting clouds of CO₂. Whatever they release theoretically would be offset, or canceled out, by the rainforest.

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The state (California) is the second-largest carbon polluter in America, and its oil and gas industry emits about 50 million metric tons of CO₂ a year. What if Chevron or Shell or Phillips 66 could offset some of their damage by paying Brazil not to cut down trees?

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But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

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He (Timothy Searchinger) echoed an idea I heard again and again from proponents of this concept: Even hundreds of attempts across the world had not given forest preservation offsets a meaningful chance to work. Many projects sold credits on a voluntary market, to corporations seeking green public relations or well-meaning consumers. That didn’t allow them to generate enough money to succeed. If California and other giants joined the market, that could finally inject real resources into the effort.

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Everyone is looking to Acre as the prime testing ground.

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I traveled to Acre to see how its program was working. I found swaths of cow pasture where locals once tapped rubber from trees; there’s no way to make a living from sustainable alternatives, they told me, so the trees have to go. Government workers spoke of conservation, but political leaders have cut funding for it and plan to expand agribusiness. Several Acre officials readily acknowledged that their priority is getting foreign aid to protect forests; the validity of the offsets is an afterthought.

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If the world were graded on the historic reliability of carbon offsets, the result would be a solid F.

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Almost all of the (Kyoto Protocol-related) projects failed to meet a standard required for any true carbon offset called additionality. What it means is that the environmental gains are only real if the solar farms or windmills would never have been built without the credits.

The programs largely avoided credits for forest preservation, in which a polluter pays a landowner to reduce deforestation. The science was too complicated. How are we to know which trees were saved because of such projects, and which would have survived without them?

The uncertainty didn’t stop delegates at the United Nations from entertaining the idea during climate talks starting in 2007.

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In 2015, a French research center examined 120 projects and found that 37% overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks.

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Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years. So forest offsets only work if the trees remain intact for a century.

In that sense, offsets are like the world’s most forgiving credit card: The buyer gets all the benefit upfront, while it takes a century for the full debt to be repaid.

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If the Amazon loses enough trees, it will reach a tipping point, transforming from lush ecosystem into a semiarid savanna. The implications would be global. And rich nations aren’t generous enough to fund the preservation of tropical forests without getting something in return.

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Everyone agrees forests are a vital buffer against climate change. The question is whether their preservation should be linked to offsets that allow others to keep polluting.

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I met with Fluvio Mascarenhas, an analyst at a Brazilian federal agency that oversees the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, a conservation area with more than 11,000 residents. He warned against looking too closely at the quality of the credits being sold. “You are going to create a non-incentive to preserve,” he said.

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To collect fines, there’s no mail service, no credit card invoice. Mascarenhas’ team spends weeks trekking through the forest, sleeping in hammocks and confronting loggers in person. Some can pay the fine, which amounts to about $2,400. Many are too poor.

Mascarenhas told me about an attempt to create a cacao industry in the reserve so that locals could live sustainably. His agency spent two years researching how to do it. But they didn’t get the funding for the second half of the project, to create a market. Those who cultivated the beans have nowhere to sell them, he said. “The animals are the only ones eating the cacao.” They’re applying for additional funding to implement it.

The government is trying to get people to value forest products like Brazil nuts and rubber, but the market isn’t following. “The world is telling us we have to conserve,” he said, “but nobody’s showing us how.”

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My visit to ACRE suggested that even the best REDD (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation) program in the world was running into practical, political and scientific obstacles that couldn’t be fixed with funding alone — another warning sign on top of the reports concluding earlier programs hadn’t worked.

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Amy Duchelle, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research, co-edited a book published last year that said REDD “has not yet delivered the expected overall impact of reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions” and tropical deforestation hasn’t slowed.

She repeated these facts in an interview, emphasizing that these initiatives had been useful in other ways, helping countries improve their ability to monitor deforestation and understand its causes, and secure land rights for indigenous communities. She even found “moderately encouraging” scientific results out of some projects.

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At a contentious, six-hour public hearing last fall, the California Air Resources Board considered whether to adopt the Tropical Forest Standard, which would open the door for California and other governments to link with Acre or similar programs.

Officials from Brazil testified in support of the standard while global human rights groups urged the opposite. Indigenous and environmental activists spoke for both sides, and two competing letters, each signed by more than 100 scientists and researchers, argued for and against the proposal.

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The standard requires programs to exceed protections in existing policies and to show a drastic reduction in deforestation. It requires that trees stay standing for 100 years. But its guidance on leakage is just four sentences long, and it doesn’t make countries report degradation, potentially leaving out a huge chunk of the emissions.

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The best we can hope for is a program that helps the climate in some unmeasurable way, she (Barbara Haya, a University of California, Berkeley, research fellow) said. “That’s what offsets are. And I think that’s the best of what offsets can be.” READ MORE

Forest carbon offsets not working as planned, a damning ProPublica piece reveals (Our Daily Planet)