Beyond Carbon Credits

on the 26th of april

2012 churwati was murdered

he was cambodia’s most prominent

environmental activist

at the time he was also a man who i had

known

for 10 years in the battle to save

cambodia’s forests

when warty was murdered he was traveling

on remote tracks of the cardamom

mountains in southwest cambodia

and he was trying to expose illegal

logging

woody was murdered because he had become

a thorn in the side of the cambodian

regime

and this is because the illegal logging

that he was

looking at is conducted by top

government officials

for illicit profits

this might be hard to believe for a

relatively small forested country that

seems to have embraced green growth

but there is a dark side to the green in

cambodia

there was never a proper trial into the

murder of churro tea

and indeed the military policeman who

shot on that day was

also shot moments later so this left

nobody to be held guilty and no one to

stand trial

there was an international outcry

especially from human rights groups

but the story about chitwati’s murder

that is less told is that it occurred

inside a conservation

area financed by international donors

and not far from a hydropowered dam

which is celebrated for its production

of clean energy indeed this hydropower

dam is apparently so clean and green

that it has been able to sell

carbon credits on the international

market

somehow the carbon certifier in this

case failed to realize that

the dam had triggered an illegal logging

racket deep in the forest

and the problem is that there are three

such dams in the cardamom mountains

landscape

all of them sell carbon credits and all

of them have attracted illegal logging

in the three years leading up to wati’s

death

over half a billion dollars of luxury

timber was removed from this forested

landscape

so this brings me to a key point of my

talk today which is that carbon credits

are not necessarily

clean and green

i argue that we need to look inside

carbon credits to understand how they’re

made

and i think there’s a moral argument for

doing this especially when it comes

to carbon credits that come from complex

forested landscapes

so who here has bought a cabin credit

i would say most of us have for me it

would have been the last time i took a

domestic flight

i would have chosen to offset the flight

it’s just it’s just so easy you click

the button

and it’s remarkably cheap but i think we

all know that it shouldn’t be

so cheap and easy so that’s why we need

to decommodify

and understand how carbon credits get

made

basically carbon credits are all about

some kind of measured behavior change

the united nations framework convention

on climate change has long endorsed the

idea of making carbon credits

and trading carbon credits this gave us

the so-called

compliance market for carbon credits

but alongside this has developed the

voluntary market and that’s the market

that enables you to buy

offsets on your flights and this

voluntary market has really

boomed in recent years last year it

transacted the greatest volume of

credits

ever and this is about corporations

pledging to go carbon neutral

so in the carbon market there are two

mechanisms in general

that enable us to generate carbon

credits

the first one is called the clean

development mechanism and this is about

changing technology

clean development mechanism was the one

that the hydropower dams i was talking

about earlier

used to generate their carbon credits

the other main mechanism in the carbon

market relates to land use change and

it’s called

red plus and that stands for reducing

emissions

from deforestation and forest

degradation the idea of red plus is that

you

change land use patterns

and you keep carbon sequestered in

forests and land

the value of red plus carbon credits

increased by 30

last year so these are really hot

property

and it’s there’s something desirable

about credits that come from the

conservation of

tropical forests in developing countries

but even if we understand all of these

things about the carbon market we still

don’t

quite understand how it becomes a

commodity

to make the tradable commodity what you

need to do

is measure the behavior change and this

requires

certification verification and

validation

of the carbon emissions that are avoided

using international carbon standards so

that all sounds really technical

ah it’s just commodification but social

scientists who study processes of

commodification

tell us that this is actually a social

and a political process

and the key thing about commodification

is that it disguises the conditions

of production so for example imagine you

go to the supermarket to buy an

apple an apple it’s just a pile of

apples they all seem the same they’re

generic

somehow we are subtly asked not to know

where the apple came from

not to know where it grew or who grew it

that’s the market commodity that’s the

magic at work here

and i think the same goes for carbon

credit

so that’s why we need to decommodify

carbon credits and to do that i’m going

to take you back to cambodia

so probably most of you know that

cambodia suffered a long and tragic

civil war

at the end of last century and for this

reason at the turn of the century it had

very high forest cover

sixty percent of the country’s surface

area was covered in forest

and you can see that in green on this

map

this high forest cover attracted the

international conservation movement

and together they worked with the

cambodian government to create many

protected areas

now over 40 percent of cambodia’s

surface area is protected in some way

officially but there has been

deforestation and you can see the

deforestation in red

on this map it’s been driven mainly by

agricultural expansion

and for the period of analysis on this

map which is between the year 2000

and 2012 cambodia clocked the third

highest deforestation rate in the world

at a national level so it’s this

combination of

high forest cover and high deforestation

rates that make cambodia an ideal

candidate for producing red

credits which is about

forest interventions so to implement red

plus in cambodia what you do

is typically it involves an

international organization

usually a non-government organization

partnering with the cambodian government

to manage protected areas to do it

better and the argument is that with

extra funding and extra technical advice

forest encroachment can be reduced

deforestation can be halted

and you get carbon credits as a result

it sounds great but in practice i think

you know that i’m going to say that

protected area management in cambodia is

very complicated

and i know this because i’ve worked for

years on the ground in cambodia on

forest conservation

and this has included some work on

cambodia’s most

high-profile red plus project in the

northeast of the country

called seymour so the samar project sold

its carbon credits

in 2016 to the disney foundation

this is walt disney the philanthropic

arm they bought 2.6 million us dollars

of carbon credits

and for all intents and purposes this is

a pretty successful red plus project

certainly the online marketing looks

very good

but there are three things about this

red plus project that make me feel

uncomfortable about the credits that are

being generated here

and what i’m going to tell you these

three things could be said of any red

plus project in cambodia

and indeed the region and in similar

settings

okay so the first thing is that as i

said

in order to implement red plus in

cambodia you have to partner with the

government

and project implementation involves

extending government power

and control over natural resources

into the protected area system

in cambodia authoritarian power has been

on the rise and so this means that the

carbon credits that are coming from this

context

are not made under democratic conditions

and this rise of unchecked government

power also brings risks

especially the risk of corrupt land

deals

so this photo is an example of such a

land deal

resulting in deforestation

it’s a foreign company that’s come in

acquired land illegally from a protected

area

and created a rubber plantation it’s in

the buffer zone of the seymour

red plus project so the second thing

that makes me uncomfortable about the

red credits

being transacted here is that they’ve

been very weak on indigenous

rights this image shows an indigenous

elder

of benong ethnicity demarcating his

territory

he’s worried about encroachment he’s

worried about dispossession and this is

because they

indigenous people in cambodia very

rarely have formal

land rights and so his demarcation of

the territories in the hope of gaining

formal communal title for land

except that being inside the carbon

project

when the red plus technicalities came

along it turned out that they couldn’t

compute

complex land tenure arrangements so land

that was subject to indigenous claims or

plural uses

had to be excised from the red plus

project

so this might sound like just a

technicality but it’s actually

a symbolic act which effectively

alienates indigenous people from

forested land

and the indigenous people here are the

traditional custodians of this forest

land

so red plus needs to do better than that

okay

the third and final thing that makes me

uncomfortable about these carbon credits

is the illegal logging inside protected

areas as i said

it’s rife in cambodia most of the time

the logging is conducted by really

powerful government officials

and so for lowly park rangers you either

accept bribes

or you look the other way when this

illegal logging is happening

or if you do want to enforce the law you

often risk violent retribution

and this is what happened in 2018 these

three park rangers were murdered by an

illegal logging gang

in the same red plus project and one of

them was a young

indigenous man so these three things

that i’ve just said

about red plus carbon credits unchecked

government power

the erosion of indigenous rights and

violence against environmental

defenders caused me to question carbon

credits

in general and at this point you’re

probably all saying

why is this woman being so critical we

have a climate crisis to solve

what is this going to do to help so

apart from decommodifying

carbon credits i guess the main message

that i want to convey to you

is that apparently easy technical fixes

for solving the climate crisis are

really going to be easy and simple

and as i’ve shown in the case of red

plus credits this involves the

simplification of really complex

landscapes

that have deep human and ecological

dimensions

it also involves avoiding inconvenient

truths

such as the erosion of indigenous rights

so rather than focusing on the

transactions of

tons of co2 equivalent we need to

think more about moral and ecological

issues and we need to recognize that

solving the climate crisis

is much more about social and

environmental justice than it is about

tons of carbon

thank you very much

you