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